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Students attend Powhatan’s first-ever engineering camp
The group even enjoyed a presentation from a NASA engineer, who spoke of his experience working on the Mars rover.
These engineering camps help kids enjoy their naturally inquisitive minds - which unfortunately they don’t get to do often enough.
Related: Toy and Entertainment Engineering Camp - Science Camps Prep Girls - Turtle Camps in Malaysia - Engineering Activities: for 9-12 Year Olds
18 year old self-taught electronics ‘genius’ invents mobile phone-based vehicle anti-theft system
The system, that Mbetsa created by combining technology from projects that he has completed in the past, uses a combination of voice, DTMF and SMS text messages over cell-based phone service to carry codes and messages that allow control of some of a vehicles’ electrical systems including the ignition to manage vehicle activation and disabling remotely in real time.
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Mbetsa is now looking for funding to commercially develop his proof of concept and bring it to the market
Another cool example of engineering in action.
Related: Inspirational Engineer - Africa Turning to China and India for Engineering and Science Education - Car Powered Using Compressed Air - Engineering Entrepreneurs
An Appetite For Science by Corinne A. Marasco
Related: The Man Who Unboiled an Egg - Bacterial Evolution in Yogurt - Plumpynut, Food Savior - Science and Engineering Search
Malaysian Shrew Survives on Beer
“Fine,” you say, “except that’s a light beer!” But cut the shrew some slack — it doesn’t eat anything else. Let’s see you subsist on nothing but beer, light or not, and stay sober.
That’s the shrews’ most amazing quality: they don’t get drunk. On any given night, said researchers in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one-third of the shrews have a blood-alcohol level that would leave us under the bar — but there’s no evidence of intoxication.
Related: Nectar-Feeding Bats - Turtle Camps in Malaysia - posts on animals - Mutualism - Inter-species Cooperation
externs.com is another curiouscat.com web site that lists internship opportunities. I am surprised that virtual internships and externships have not grown much more popular in the last 5 years. Scientists and Engineers for America do have such a virtual internship:
Members of the first Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) virtual intern class can be located anywhere in the world and will work remotely on specific SEA projects. Intern will research the positions elected officials and candidates for office take on science policy issues.
The internship is for between 10 to 20 hours per week and can be done anywhere, as long as you have a computer, internet connection, and telephone. The dates of the internship are flexible accepted on a rolling basis.
Also see the externs.com science internships and engineering internships. If you have an internship you would like included, please add it (there is not cost for the site, listing or using).
Related: Summer Jobs for Smart Young Minds - Preparing Computer Science Students for Jobs - Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships - Scientists and Engineers in Congress
Science and the City is (among other things) an excellent podcast series from the New York Academy of Science. The latest podcast discusses the science barge project we posted about earlier. They discuss looking at commercially viable urban farms (on rooftops in NYC) and the establishing educational gardens at schools.
See the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Podcast Directory for some great resources for podcasts. Don’t miss the naked scientists from the BBC.
Related: Middle School Engineers - Fun primary school Science and Engineering - Education Resources for Science and Engineering
The Webometrics Ranking of University Web Sites provides some interesting data. I don’t remember reading this last year, but they state on the site now: “The original aim of the Ranking was to promote Web publication, not to rank institutions. Supporting Open Access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material are our primary targets.” I support those goals, I am not totally convinced this is the most effective measure to do that but it provides one way of ranking web presence of universities. I am not that convinced this does a good job of ranking the web presences of universities but I think it is of some interest so I decided to post on the results.
Related: 2007 Webometrics University Ranking - Best Research University Rankings (2007) - Country H-index Rank for Science Publications - Understanding the Evolution of Human Beings by Country
| Country | % top 200 | % top 500 | % World Population | Jiao Tong top 101 |
| USA | 53 | 37.8 | 4.6 | 54 |
| Germany | 7.5 | 9.4 | 1.3 | 6 |
| United Kingdom | 5.5 | 7.2 | 0.9 | 11 |
| Canada | 8.5 | 5 | 0.5 | 4 |
| Australia | 3 | 2.8 | 0.3 | 2 |
| Italy | 0.5 | 2.8 | 0.9 | 1 |
| Japan | 1.5 | 2.4 | 2 | 6 |
| France | 0.5 | 2.4 | 0.9 | 4 |
| Netherlands | 4 | 2.2 | 0.3 | 2 |
| Sweden | 3 | 2 | 0.1 | 4 |
| Switzerland | 2 | 1.6 | 0.1 | 3 |
| Taiwan | 0.5 | 1.6 | 0.4 | 0 |
| Finland | 0.5 | 1.4 | 0.1 | 1 |
| China | 0.5 | 1.2 | 20.1 | 0 |
| Portugal | 0 | 1.2 | 0.2 | 0 |
Silent Spring by Lauren Monaghan, Cosmos
But the truth is quite the opposite. The exclusion zone is teeming with wildlife of all shapes and sizes, flourishing unhindered by human interference and seemingly unfazed by the ever-present radiation. Most remarkable, however, is not the life buzzing around the site, but what’s blooming inside the perilous depths of the reactor.
Sitting at the centre of the exclusion zone, the damaged reactor unit is encased in a steel and cement sarcophagus. It’s a deathly tomb that plays host to about 200 tonnes of melted radioactive fuel, and is swarming with radioactive dust.
But it’s also the abode of some very hardy fungi which researchers believe aren’t just tolerating the severe radiation, but actually harnessing its energy to thrive.
“Our findings suggest that [the fungi] can capture the energy from radiation and transform it into other forms of energy that can be used for growth,” said microbiologist Arturo Casadevall from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York, USA.
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Taken together, the researchers think their results do indeed hint that fungi can live off ionising radiation, harnessing its energy through melanin to somehow generate a new form of biologically usable growing power.
If they’re right, then this is powerful stuff, said fungal biologist Dee Carter from the University of Sydney. The results will challenge fundamental assumptions we have about the very nature of fungi, she said.
It also raises the possibility that fungi might be using melanin to secretly harvest visible and ultraviolet light for growth, adds Casadevall. If confirmed, this will further complicate our understanding of these sneaky organisms and their role in ecosystems.
Pretty amazing stuff. It really is great all that nature gives us to study and learn about using science.
Related: Radiation Tolerant Bacteria - Not Too Toxic for Life - Bacterium Living with High Level Radiation - What is an Extremophile?
My cat ran up a $300 water bill:
The amazing cat cam could help investigate such problems too.
Related: Automatic Cat Feeder - Toilet Repairs - Young Engineer
MicroRNA genes are a class of very tiny genes found in a variety of organisms. First discovered in 1993 and at the time considered relatively unimportant, they are now recognized as major players in diverse biological processes.
MicroRNAs are important regulators of protein production. Proteins, the building blocks of the cell, must be produced precisely at the right time and place. MicroRNAs specifically latch on to other genes (their targets) and inhibit the production of the protein products of these genes. Hundreds of microRNAs have already been discovered, but the identity of their target genes remains mostly unknown and presents a great challenge in the field.
Elefant developed a computer algorithm that predicts the targets of microRNAs. Her algorithm, named RepTar, searches the thousands of genes in the human genome and through sequence, structural and physical considerations detects matches to hundreds of microRNAs.
For her work in this field, Naama Elefant, a student of Prof. Hanah Margalit of the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University and an Azrieli fellow, was named one of this year’s winners of the Barenholz Prizes for Creativity and Originality in Applied Computer Science and Computational Biology. This discovery also was declared by the magazine Nature Medicine as ”one of the ten notable advances of the year 2007.”
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The Making of a Olympian by Arianne Cohen
Every night, Doane analyzes his athlete’s response to the day’s training. He’s looking for the best way to expand Potts’s aerobic capacity, power output and lactate threshold, without overtraining. If Doane sees that Potts’s heartbeat has been sluggish—say, beating 140 times per minute while Potts is trying to produce 410 watts—that means his body is struggling to recover from earlier training, so he’ll dial back the intensity of his workouts. If, on the other hand, his heart rate stays in the sweet spot around 165 while he churns through a series of 360- to 400-watt intervals, that means he’s fully recovered and ready to be pushed again. “We’ve created a feedback loop,” Doane says. In other words, Doane subjects Potts to a careful dose of punishment, and Potts’s body tells Doane, through empirical data, what he needs to do next.
Nice article. As it mentions really almost all Olympic athletes today use a great deal of science in their training.
Related: Baseball Pitch Designed in the Lab - Engineering Sports at MIT - Randomization in Sports
Why ‘Licking Your Wounds’ Actually Works
To come to this conclusion, the researchers used epithelial cells that line the inner cheek, and cultured in dishes until the surfaces were completely covered with cells. Then they made an artificial wound in the cell layer in each dish, by scratching a small piece of the cells away.
In one dish, cells were bathed in an isotonic fluid without any additions. In the other dish, cells were bathed in human saliva. After 16 hours the scientists noticed that the saliva treated “wound” was almost completely closed. In the dish with the untreated “wound,” a substantial part of the “wound” was still open. This proved that human saliva contains a factor which accelerates wound closure of oral cells.
Because saliva is a complex liquid with many components, the next step was to identify which component was responsible for wound healing. Using various techniques the researchers split the saliva into its individual components, tested each in their wound model, and finally determined that histatin was responsible.
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Cool video on the uBot-5 from UMass Amherst.
The uBot-5 is dynamically stable, using two wheels in a differential drive configuration for mobility. Dynamically stable robots are well suited to environments designed for humans where both a high center of mass and a small footprint are often required.
via: Pop Culture and Engineering Intersect Toyota has long been interested in personal robot assistants. And the uBot-5, under development at UMass-Amherst, is also looking to meeting that need: Robot developed by computer scientists to assist with elder care: |
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Grupen studied developmental neurology in his quest to create a robot that could do a variety of tasks in different environments. The uBot-5’s arm motors are analogous to the muscles and joints in our own arms, and it can push itself up to a vertical position if it falls over. It has a “spinal cord” and the equivalent of an inner ear to keep it balanced on its Segway-like wheels.
Such robots have a huge market waiting for them if engineers can provide models that can be useful at the right price. The future of such efforts looks very promising.
Related: WALL-E Robots Coming into Massachusetts Homes - Robot Nurse - Toyota iUnit - Another Humanoid Robot
This stuff is cool. Here is the full press release from Penn State, Microbes beneath sea floor genetically distinct
Tiny microbes beneath the sea floor, distinct from life on the Earth’s surface, may account for one-tenth of the Earth’s living biomass, according to an interdisciplinary team of researchers, but many of these minute creatures are living on a geologic timescale.
“Our first study, back in 2006, made some estimates that the cells could double every 100 to 2,000 years,” says Jennifer F. Biddle, PhD. recipient in biochemistry and former postdoctoral fellow in geosciences, Penn State. Biddle is now a postdoctoral associate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The researchers looked at sediment samples from a variety of depths taken off the coast of Peru at Ocean Drilling Site 1229. They report their findings in today’s (July 22) online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The Peruvian Margin is one of the most active surface waters in the world and lots of organic matter is continuously being deposited there,” says Christopher H. House, associate professor of geoscience. “We are interested in how the microbial world differs in the subsea floor from that in the surface waters.”
The researchers used a metagenomic approach to determine the types of microbes residing in the sediment 3 feet, 53 feet, 105 feet and 164 feet beneath the ocean floor. The use of the metagenomics, where bulk samples of sediment are sequences without separation, allows recognition of unknown organism and determination of the composition of the ecosystem.
“The results show that this subsurface environment is the most unique environment yet studied metagenomic approach known today,” says House. “The world does look very different below the sediment surface.” He notes that a small number of buried genetic fragments exist from the water above, but that a large portion of the microbes found are distinct and adapted to their dark and quiet world.
The researchers, who included Biddle; House; Stephan C. Schuster, associate professor; and Jean E. Brenchley, professor, biochemistry and molecular biology, Penn State; and Sorel Fitz-Gibbon, assistant research molecular biologist at the Center for Astrobiology, UCLA, found that a large percentage of the microbes were Archaea, single-celled organisms that look like Bacteria but are different on the metabolic and genetic levels. The percentage of Archaea increases with depth so that at 164 feet below the sea floor, perhaps 90 percent of the microbes are Archaea. The total number of organisms decreases with depth, but there are lots of cells, perhaps as many as 1,600 million cells in each cubic inch.
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Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard P. Feynman is a great explanation of how scientists think: “The science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower”
I did post on this before. Related book: Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character.
Related: Vega Science Lectures: Feynman and More - How flowering plants beat the competition - What Are Flowers For?
MIT physicists shed light on key superconductivity riddle
In their latest work, published online on July 6 in Nature Physics, they suggest that the pseudogap is not a precursor to superconductivity, as has been theorized, but a competing state. If that is true, it could completely change the way physicists look at superconductivity, said Hudson.
“Now, if you want to explain high-temperature superconductivity and you believe the pseudogap is a precursor, you need to explain both. If it turns out that it is a competing state, you can instead focus more on superconductivity,” he said.
Related: Mystery of High-Temperature Superconductivity - Superconducting Surprise - Florida State lures Applied Superconductivity Center from Wisconsin
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