An Artificial Nerve Networks

Posted on January 31, 2009  Comments (0)

When neurons – brain nerve cells – are grown in culture, they don’t form complex ‘thinking’ networks. Moses, Feinerman and Rotem wondered whether the physical structure of the nerve network could be designed to be more brain-like. To simplify things, they grew a model nerve network in one dimension only – by getting the neurons to grow along a groove etched in a glass plate. The scientists found they could stimulate these nerve cells using a magnetic field (as opposed to other systems of lab-grown neurons that only react to electricity).

Experimenting further with the linear set-up, the group found that varying the width of the neuron stripe affected how well it would send signals. Nerve cells in the brain are connected to great numbers of other cells through their axons (long, thin extensions), and they must receive a minimum number of incoming signals before they fire one off in response. The researchers identified a threshold thickness, one that allowed the development of around 100 axons. Below this number, the chance of a response was iffy, while just a few over this number greatly raised the chance a signal would be passed on.

The scientists then took two thin stripes of around 100 axons each and created a logic gate similar to one in an electronic computer. Both of these ‘wires’ were connected to a small number of nerve cells. When the cells received a signal along just one of the ‘wires,’ the outcome was uncertain; but a signal sent along both ‘wires’ simultaneously was assured of a response. This type of structure is known as an AND gate. The next structure the team created was slightly more complex: Triangles fashioned from the neuron stripes were lined up in a row, point to rib, in a way that forced the axons to develop and send signals in one direction only. Several of these segmented shapes were then attached together in a loop to create a closed circuit. The regular relay of nerve signals around the circuit turned it into a sort of biological clock or pacemaker.

Moses: ‘We have been able to enforce simplicity on an inherently complicated system. Now we can ask, ‘What do nerve cells grown in culture require in order to be able to carry out complex calculations?’ As we find answers, we get closer to understanding the conditions needed for creating a synthetic, many-neuron ‘thinking’ apparatus.’

Full press release

Related: Rat Brain Cells, in a Dish, Flying a Plane – The Brain is Wired to Mull Over Decisions – Nanofibers Knit Severed Neurons Together

Promoting Bio-Literacy

Posted on January 30, 2009  Comments (0)

Wisconsin State Herbarium tries to ‘counteract bio-illiteracy’

“In a past century people could go outside and name the flowers or trees,” said Ken Cameron, the herbarium’s director. “Now you take a kid outside and the most they can say is, ‘It’s a tree.’ If we can get students in and get them excited, then I think we’ve helped to counteract bio-illiteracy.”
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Herbaria are becoming more of a rarity. And the UW-Madison has the third largest collection of any public university in the country, behind the universities of California and Michigan. At many universities, botany has been absorbed into large biology departments, and collections put into storage. That has not happened at UW-Madison.

“The combination of having a botany department and a big herbarium is getting pretty rare,” said David Baum, botany department chairman. “And more and more herbaria are closing or making the decision to move off campus into storage, which has a real negative effect on research.”

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Herbarium, founded in 1849 (the year the University was founded), is a museum collection of dried, labeled plants of state, national and international importance, which is used extensively for taxonomic and ecological research, as well as for teaching and public service. It contains the world’s largest collection of Wisconsin plants, about one-third of its 1,000,000 specimens having been collected within the state. Most of the world’s floras are well represented, and the holdings from certain areas, such as the Upper Midwest, eastern North America and western Mexico, are widely recognized as resources of global significance.

Related: Plants can Signal Microbial Friends for Help – posts on plants – Rainforests – The Avocado

Friday Cat Fun #12: Cat and Puppies

Posted on January 30, 2009  Comments (2)

Cat, Neo, is surrounded by puppy agent smiths.

Related: Bunny and Kittens – Leopard Bests Crocodile – fun with cats – Friday Dog Fun

Teen Goalie Designs Camouflage Pads

Posted on January 29, 2009  Comments (4)

Teen goalie designs pads to trick shots

Leahy sketched out new leg pads that blend into the goal netting behind him. He wanted pads, a trapper, and a blocker that are white with a raised double-stitched design, just like the goal. He applied for a design patent and had them custom-made by a Canada-based pad maker.

“When the shooter comes down and only has a split second to shoot the puck, they’re looking for net,” said Leahy, a senior from Hampton, N.H., who grew up in Byfield. “If you put the net on the pad, they’ll shoot at the pad instead of the goal.”
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Exactly what will happen to the pads after this season is unclear. Leahy said he would like to play hockey in college, probably at the club level, and wants to market the idea. “It would definitely be cool to get it out there and get other guys in the future wearing it,” he said.

Related: The Glove – Engineering Coolness – Engineering Basketball Flop – Science of the High Jump

MRI That Can See Bacteria, Virus and Proteins

Posted on January 28, 2009  Comments (2)

IBM team boosts MRI resolution

The researchers demonstrated this imaging at a resolution 100 million times finer than current MRI. The advance could lead to important medical applications and is powerful enough to see bacteria, viruses and proteins, say the researchers.

The researchers said it offered the ability to study complex 3D structures at the “nano” scale. The step forward was made possible by a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM), which relies on detecting very small magnetic forces.

In addition to its high resolution, MRFM has the further advantage that it is chemically specific, can “see” below surfaces and, unlike electron microscopy, does not destroy delicate biological materials.

Now, the IBM-led team has dramatically boosted the sensitivity of MRFM and combined it with an advanced 3D image reconstruction technique. This allowed them to demonstrate, for the first time, MRI on biological objects at the nanometre scale.

That is very cool.

Related: IBM Research Creates Microscope With 100 Million Times Finer Resolution Than Current MRI – Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy (from Stanford) – Nanotechnology Breakthroughs for Computer Chips – Self-assembling Nanotechnology in Chip Manufacturing – Nanoparticles to Aid Brain Imaging

Bug of the Week: Leaf-footed Bug

Posted on January 27, 2009  Comments (2)

Photo of leaf-footed bugPhoto of leaf-footed bug by Roberta

The Growing With Science Blog by Roberta, an entomologist, is full of interesting posts on bugs and more. For example – Bug of the Week: Leaf-footed Bug

We were doing a bit of yard work when we came across this leaf-footed bug. These insects get their name from the leaf-like flanges on their hind legs.Note the light-colored zig-zag marking across the middle of its back.

Leaf-footed bugs have sucking mouthparts and sometimes feed of fruit such as cactus fruit, oranges or peaches. Although we do have citrus, I think this one is a visitor from our neighbors’ yard. Our neighbors have a pomegranate bush. Pomegranates are one of the leaf-footed bugs’ favorite foods.

Like many of their relatives, these true bugs can give off an odor when handled.

:) I was adding in some related links and the first one, I was adding, Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly, Roberta had commented on to let me know it was a Great Spreadwing Damselfly. It is a small web.

Related: 2 Mysterious Species in the UK – Cool Looking Florescent Green Beetle: Six-spotted Tiger Beetle – Big Spider

Tardigrades

Posted on January 27, 2009  Comments (5)

Tardigrades (commonly known as water bears) have eight legs and are their own phylum on the tree of life. Some can survive temperatures close to absolute zero, temperatures as high as 151 °C (303 °F), 1,000 times more radiation than any other animal, nearly a decade without water, and even the vacuum of space.

Related: Tardigrades, UNC Chapel Hill – Tardigrades In Space (TARDIS) – What is an Extremophile? – Evolution, Methane, Jobs, Food and More

Science Commons: Making Scientific Research Re-useful

Posted on January 26, 2009  Comments (1)

Science Commons is a project of Creative Commons. Like other organizations trying to support the advancement of science with open access they deserve to be supported (PLoS and arXiv.org are other great organizations supporting science).

Science Commons has three interlocking initiatives designed to accelerate the research cycle – the continuous production and reuse of knowledge that is at the heart of the scientific method. Together, they form the building blocks of a new collaborative infrastructure to make scientific discovery easier by design.

Making scientific research re-useful, help people and organizations open and mark their research and data for reuse. Learn more.

Enabling one-click access to research materials, streamline the materials-transfer process so researchers can easily replicate, verify and extend research. Learn more.

Integrating fragmented information sources, help researchers find, analyze and use data from disparate sources by marking and integrating the information with a common, computer-readable language. Learn more.

NeuroCommons, is their proof-of-concept project within the field of neuroscience. The NeuroCommons is a beta open source knowledge management system for biomedical research that anyone can use, and anyone can build on.

Related: Open Source: The Scientific Model Applied to Programming – Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science – Encyclopedia of Life – Science 2.0 – Biology

How to Develop Products like Toyota

Posted on January 25, 2009  Comments (3)

How to Develop Products like Toyota

Sobek also says Toyota tends to stay as flexible as possible until relatively late in the development stage. He cites as an example Toyota’s practice of leaving manufacturing tolerances to be set by die makers rather than by design engineers creating the prints. Die makers make die dimensions as close as practical to those in the CAD database, but have the flexibility to modify them so body parts fit together well. Manufacturing engineers then set tolerances around manufacturing capabilities.
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“Test first, then design. First run simulations and understand where the boundaries of solutions lie. Once you understand the alternate spaces between competing choices, you narrow the options in what are called integrating events.”

Integrating events are an opportunity to eliminate weak opportunities. It is only after these events are complete that detailed design commences. “The point is that you don’t get to detailed design until everything works,” says Kennedy. “That is the reason Toyota focuses so intently up front on understanding trade-offs.”

This is very similar to agile software development practices. Though due to different processes, software versus car manufacture the two process are not identical.

Though Toyota is adept at developing products, it may be a mistake to adopt its practices wholesale, no matter how good they are. “Much of the lean community tries to crow-bar Toyota’s approach into their own very different business model,”

This is always true. Copying what others do does not work. You can learn from others by understanding the benefits of their process and then adapting the ideas to your organization.

Toyota has several tools that help its engineers organize the tasks at hand. One of the most well known is called the A3 document, named for the size of the paper its information is written on. An A3 holds a distillation of project goals and customer wants. During development, it can serve as a crib sheet for engineers as they set priorities and make trade-offs. “A3s enforce the plan-do-check- act methods of quality,” explains Kennedy. “The A3 becomes the basis for Toyota’s entire review process.”

On my management improvement blog I discuss the Toyota Production System often, you can follow those posts if you are interested.

Related: Toyota Engineering Development Process – Toyota Winglet, Personal Transportation – 12 stocks for 10 years – Toyota Robots

Fast Fitness Forecast is False, it Takes Time

Posted on January 24, 2009  Comments (4)

Fitness Isn’t an Overnight Sensation

“To make a change in how you look, you are talking about a significant period of training,” Dr. Kraemer said. “In our studies it takes six months to a year.” And, he added, that is with regular strength-training workouts, using the appropriate weights and with a carefully designed individualized program. “That is what the reality is,” he said.

And genetic differences among individuals mean some people respond much better to exercise than others
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Now, said Mr. Antane, who runs with a group in Princeton on Thursday nights, “everything changed — my outlook on life, who I hung out with, how I felt about myself.”

Our bodies evolved under conditions with much more exercise than we currently get if we sit in an office all day. And we had less food. It is no surprise with more food and less exercise that we gain weight. And given that the benefit of fat was to help us survive when we had little food out bodies don’t change overnight. If they did then our ancestors would have had much more difficulty surviving – the whole point was to provide a resource to tap in bad times. If that resource dissipated quickly it would not have helped much.

Related: Active Amish Avoid Obesity – Big Fat Lie – Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. – Reducing Risk of Diabetes Through Exercise – posts on exercise

Student Invents Solar-Powered Fridge

Posted on January 23, 2009  Comments (14)

solar powered refrigerator illustration

Student Invents Solar-Powered Fridge for Developing Countries

21-year-old student/inventor/entrepreneur Emily Cummins has designed a brilliant portable solar-powered refrigerator that works based upon the principle of evaporation. Employing a combination of conduction and convection, the refrigerator requires no electricity and can be made from commonly available materials like cardboard, sand, and recycled metal.
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Simply place perishable foods or temperature-sensitive medications in the solar refrigerator’s interior metal chamber and seal it. In-between the inner and outer chamber, organic material like sand, wool or soil is then saturated with water. As the sun warms the organic material, water evaporates, reducing the temperature of the inner chamber to a cool, 6 ºC [43 ºF] for days at a time!

After winning £5,000 from York Merchant Adventurers for her idea, Emily delayed going to college for a year to take her refrigerator to Africa for further development.
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At 16 Emily won a regional Young Engineer for Britain Award for creating a toothpaste squeezer for people with arthritis, and the next year went on to win a Sustainable Design Award for a water-carrier made from wood and rubber tubing. In 2007 Emily was named the British Female Innovator of the Year, and last year was short-listed for Cosmopolitan’s 2008 Ultimate Women of the Year Competition.

Update: some readers seem confused by what related means below. Those links show previous post to related items and include previous similar designs to keep things cool, including “Refrigerator Without Electricity” which is a clay pot design by Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria for the Pot in Pot Cooling System that received the 2000 Rolex award.

Related: Refrigerator Without Electricity – Compressor-free Refrigerator – posts on appropriate engineering – UK Young Engineers Competitions – Winter Air Refrigeration – The Glove, Engineering Coolness

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