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How Things Work from the University of Virgina explains the scientific reason behind what we experience everyday:
Paper consists mostly of cellulose, a natural polymer (i.e. plastic) built by stringing together thousands of individual sugar molecules into vast chains. Like the sugars from which it’s constructed, cellulose’s molecular pieces cling tightly to one another at room temperature and make it rather stiff and brittle. Moreover, cellulose’s chains are so entangled with one another that it couldn’t pull apart even if its molecular pieces didn’t cling so tightly. These effects are why it’s so hard to reshape cellulose and why wood or paper don’t melt; they burn or decompose instead. In contrast, chicle — the polymer in chewing gum — can be reshaped easily at room temperature.
Elementary Engineers: Engineering concepts should be taught at an early age by Polly Roberts, Richmond.com:
Christine M. Cunningham, vice president of research at the Museum of Science, Boston spoke to more than 200 Virginia elementary school teachers last week at the 10th Annual Children’s Engineering Convention in Glen Allen.
Cunningham said the program helps build and reinforce skills such as problem solving, data analysis, teamwork, creativity and more. Plus, starting the lesson with a book incorporates literacy.
Engineering is Elementary (EiE): Engineering and Technology Lessons For Children
This is another nice resource for teachers including lesson plans such as: Catching the Wind - Designing Windmills. For more resources see our: Science and Engineering Link Directory
I would imagine they will eventually put up some information about this program on the State Department Fulbright website. The list of the regular 2005-6 awardees shows their fields of study.
April’s Science Education Blog includes several interesting posts on student centered learning, including, agents of change at rush henrietta:
Related Posts:
Forbes offers a list of 10 Things That Will Change The Way We Live. Of the items 9 of 10 seem directly related to science and engineering, such as: Fuel Cells, Gene Therapy, WiMAX. The only one that doesn’t seem directly related to science and engineering is $200 a barrel oil. But even there the effect of such an future would largely depend on science and engineering solutions that would be created in such a future.
The National Science Board has release the comprehensive Science and Engineering Indicators 2006. The report contains a great deal of interesting information. Some highlights
The science and engineering workforce in the United States has grown rapidly, both over the last half century and the last decade.
Saturday Morning Science from NASA:
He inserted the wand into a zero-g beaker and pulled it out again. “To my amazement,” he says, “when the 2-inch loop was withdrawn, a thin film of water clung tenaciously to the loop. I’ve never before witnessed such a large-scale film of water.”
See two videos and more information on the experiment on the International Space Station.
An explanation of surface tension
Previous post: Colored Bubbles
Mutant Algae Is Hydrogen Factory by Sam Jaffe, Wired:
The work, led by plant physiologist Tasios Melis, is so far unpublished. But if it proves correct, it would mean a major breakthrough in using algae as an industrial factory, not only for hydrogen, but for a wide range of products, from biodiesel to cosmetics.
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Melis got involved in this research when he and Michael Seibert, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, figured out how to get hydrogen out of green algae by restricting sulfur from their diet. The plant cells flicked a long-dormant genetic switch to produce hydrogen instead of carbon dioxide. But the quantities of hydrogen they produced were nowhere near enough to scale up the process commercially and profitably.
“When we discovered the sulfur switch, we increased hydrogen production by a factor of 100,000,” says Seibert. “But to make it a commercial technology, we still had to increase the efficiency of the process by another factor of 100.
Segway Creator Unveils His Next Act
Water and Electricity may not seem like something to wish for if you are reading this post. However for over 1 billion people that do without both it is.
To solve the problem, he’s invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.
“Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,” says Kamen. “The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don’t care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.”
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Kamen’s goal is to produce machines that cost $1,000 to $2,000 each. That’s a far cry from the $100,000 that each hand-machined prototype cost to build.
Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business — he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.
More products from his company, Deka Research & Development Corp, including: Hydroflex™ Irrigation Pump, IBOT™ Mobility System and Intravascular Stent.
Dean Kamen understands what engineering can do. “Today, almost 200 engineers, technicians, and machinists work in our electronics and software engineering labs, machine shop, and on CAD stations.”
DEKA’s mission, first and foremost, is to foster innovation. It is a company where the questioning of conventional thinking is encouraged and practiced by everyone—engineers and non-engineers alike—because open minds are more likely to arrive at workable solutions. This has been our formula for success since we began, and it will continue to drive our success in the future.
Dean Kamen founded For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST)
A Phony Science Gap? by Robert Samuelson:
It is good to see more people using the data from the Duke study we have mentioned previously: USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates - Filling the Engineering Gap. However, I think he misses a big change. It seems to me that the absolute number of graduates each year is the bigger story than that the United States has not lost the percentage of population rate of science and engineering graduates yet. China significantly exceeds the US and that India is close to the US currently in science and engineering graduates. And the trend is dramatically in favor of those countries.
There has been a Science gap between the United States and the rest of the world. That gap has been between the USA, in the lead, and the rest. That gap has been shrinking for at least 10 years and most likely closer to 20. The rate of the decline in that gap has been increasing and seems likely to continue in that direction.
I wonder what eroding manufacturing base he is referring to? The United States is the world’s largest manufacturer. The United States continues to increase its share of the world manufacturing and increase, incrementally year over year. Yes manufacturing employment has been declining (though manufacturing employment has declined far less in the United States than in China). Granted China has been growing tremendously quickly, but they are still far behind the United States in manufacturing output.
(more…)
‘Natural’ chickens take flight by Elizabeth Weise
Tyson Foods, Gold Kist, Perdue Farms and Foster Farms say they stopped using antibiotics for growth promotion. In addition to ending a practice that Europe banned and McDonald’s ended a month ago, the four companies also have severely limited antibiotic use for routine disease prevention, though antibiotics are still used to treat disease outbreaks.
Are health groups against healthy chickens? No. They worry about the danger of creating resistance to antibiotics. Our past, and current, misuse of antibiotics is leading us to a future where our currently effective antibiotics will not be effective.
Perdue Farms stopped using antibiotics for growth promotion about five years ago. “It became obvious that it was a concern,” says chief veterinarian Bruce Stewart-Brown. Now at any given farm in the system, only one flock in five years receives antibiotics, either to halt a disease outbreak or because birds are threatened with infection, he says.
Positive steps to reducing our overuse of anti-biotics still leave us with much more to improve.
The Computer Science Conundrum: Why the revolution is yet to come:
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bernard Chazelle, professor of computer science at Princeton University, plans to issue a call to arms for his profession, challenging his colleagues to grab society by the lapels and evangelize the importance of studying computer science. According to the most recent data available, the top 36 computer science departments in the United States saw enrollments drop nearly 20 percent between 2000 and 2004.
“The big paradox is that the computer science revolution is just unfolding,” Chazelle said. “Why, then, are students are running away from it; why is there this decline when the field has never been more exciting?”
First, computer science is integral to all of the sciences. Biology, for example, is very quantitatively driven, so a computer science background is imperative.
At Princeton I am part of a pioneering course developed by the eminent geneticist David Botstein and others. The course simultaneously incorporates physics, molecular biology, chemistry, mathematics, and computer science. Mathematics has long been the lingua franca, the Esperanto, of science. But I would argue that science now has two Esperantos: math and computer science. Science magazine recently ran an article listing all of the interesting scientific problems of the 21st century. Not once did the article use the term “computer science”; yet many of the problems listed were fundamentally about computer science.
Second, for those of an entrepreneurial bent, the Internet is paramount; if you don’t understand computer science you are lost. I don’t think it is just coincidence that two of the biggest Internet visionaries — Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Eric Schmidt of Google — are products of the computer science and electrical engineering departments at Princeton.
Third, and (since I am a theorist) most important, are careers in the field of theoretical computer science. Theoretical computer science would exist even if there were no computers. Computer science is not bound by the laws of physics; it is inspired by them but, like mathematics, it is something that is completely invented by man.
What exactly is an algorithm?
An algorithm is not a simple mathematical formula. It is a set of rules that govern a complex operation. You can look at Google as a giant algorithm. Or you can think of an economy or an ecological system as an algorithm in action. Physics, astronomy, and chemistry are all sciences of mathematical formulae. The quantitative sciences of the 21st century such as proteomics and neurobiology, I predict, will place algorithms rather than formulas at their core. In a few decades we will have algorithms that will be considered as fundamental as, say, calculus is today.
For more see the Princeton University press release
Spray-On Solar-Power Cells Are True Breakthrough by Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News:
But that could change with the new material.
“Flexible, roller-processed solar cells have the potential to turn the sun’s power into a clean, green, convenient source of energy,” said John Wolfe, a nanotechnology venture capital investor at Lux Capital in New York City.
In 1999, legendary theoretical physicist Hans Bethe delivered three lectures on quantum theory to his neighbors at the Kendal of Ithaca retirement community (near Cornell University).
Intended for an audience of Professor Bethe’s neighbors at Kendal, the lectures hold appeal for experts and non-experts alike. The presentation makes use of limited mathematics while focusing on the personal and historical perspectives of one of the principal architects of quantum theory whose career in physics spans 75 years.
Colorado Science Teacher of the Year
“The kids make it new,” she said. “I don’t think we give kids enough credit. They can do much more than we ask of them.”
She doesn’t spend a bunch of time on student discipline. The kids want to do what she says because it’s always interesting. Her kids achieve, which leads us back to her being tabbed by the Colorado Association of Science Teachers as the Science Teacher of the Year.
Right now she’s handling a herd of kindergartners every day. They’re trying out all kinds of life with all kinds of different experiments.
It’s pretty basic stuff — predicting/hypothesis, observing and concluding — the elements of science at all levels.
Great stuff. Teaching science should be about building on students natural curiously, not in getting them to sit at their desks politely.
Feel-Bad Education, The Cult of Rigor and the Loss of Joy by Alfie Kohn
Discipline Is The Problem — Not The Solution by Alfie Kohn
Books and articles by Alfie Kohn
Pseudogaps Are Not The Answer: The Continuing Mystery of High-Temperature Superconductivity. Photo: Because superconductivity repels a magnetic field, this permanent magnet levitates above a cuprate high-temperature superconductor. Scientists were surprised to find the same pseudogap energy signature in both high-Tc cuprates and ferromagnetic manganites.
This is one of several great articles in the latest issue of Science @ Berkeley Labs
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