Moving Closer to Robots Swimming Through Bloodsteam
Posted on January 22, 2009 Comments (3)
Pretty cool. Tiny motor allows robots to swim through human body
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Professor Friend said they had shown the motor, which is a quarter of a millimetre wide, had enough power to navigate this type of nanorobot through the bloodstream of a human artery. Tests of their prototype device in a liquid as viscous as blood were also promising. “It swam.”
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The team plans to conduct animal tests of a nanorobot driven by their motor later this year or early next year. But Professor Friend cautioned that many technical hurdles needed to be overcome.
Their miniature motor was connected to an electricity supply and a way would need to be found to power it remotely. The construction of the flagella also needed refinement.
Related: Micro-robots to ‘swim’ Through Veins (post in 2006 on this work) – Bacteria Power Tiny Motor – Biological Molecular Motors – Robo Insect Flight
Tags: Australia,cool,human health,Robots,university research,webcasts
Eliminate Your Phone Bill
Posted on January 22, 2009 Comments (1)
I have written about Innovation Thinking with Clayton Christensen on the Curious Cat Management Blog previously. Here is an example of such innovation. All you need is a broadband internet connection and you can Kiss your phone bill good-bye:
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Replacing your phone service is, of course, just the start for Ooma. In some ways, calling is the Trojan horse to get the box in your house and then figure out other services to sell, like enhanced network security or kid-safe Web surfing.
I ordered mine from Amazon for $203 and have been using it for a little over a month; it has been great. Relatively easy to setup (they had a pretty good customer survey and I recommended they use colored cables – they color cables in the drawings in the users guide but give you 3 white cable to use – they are different types of cables so it isn’t tough to figure out but that would make it a bit easier).
I have been using Vonage for awhile and it is ok, but I don’t see any reason to pay each month when Ooma doesn’t charge a monthly fee (even on the lowest option on Vonage the bill is over $22/month).
I think gadgets are cool, but I will admit most of the time I don’t really want to be bothered to actually use them. But this is easy to you and saves me $20/month, that I like.
Related: Freeware Wi-Fi app turns iPod into a Phone – Home Engineering: Physical Gmail Notifier – Six Keys to Building New Markets by Unleashing Disruptive Innovation – The Innovators Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor –
Mathematicians Top List of Best Occupations
Posted on January 21, 2009 Comments (5)
These lists are basically silly but here is one sites opinion on the best occupations. I don’t really accept the methodology used as providing anything very meaningful about the “best jobs” but at least the spell it out. Best jobs
- Mathematician
- Actuary
- Statistician
- Biologist
- Software Engineer
- Computer Systems Analyst
Their criteria really value being able to sit at a desk and not having to do physical work. High salary and limited stress are also significant factors.
Related: The Economic Benefits of Math – Who Killed the Software Engineer? – Knowledge Is Power – Teaching Math – The IT Job Market in the UK
Making Magnificent Mirrors with Math
Posted on January 20, 2009 Comments (1)
At Drexel, he designs amazing mirrors
Indeed it could. Eight years and numerous calculations later, Hicks is now testing a prototype mirror – for a car, not a bike – and he is in talks with a foreign manufacturer. As with the bike mirror, the rounded surface provides a wide field of view – so wide that it eliminates the dreaded, driver-side “blind spot” – yet the subtle mathematics of his design result in little or no distortion.
He didn’t stop there. The 42-year-old mathematician went on to design half a dozen other reflective surfaces for various applications – a few of them in collaboration with Perline – and they are like nothing you’d ever see on the bathroom wall.
Panoramic mirrors. Mirrors for use with high-tech surveillance cameras. Mirrors with odd, undulating surfaces that are fashioned with a computer-guided milling machine. And one wacky mirror that doesn’t yield a mirror image at all. If you raise one hand while looking into the curved surface, your reflection appears to be raising the opposite hand.
It’s not clear what use that one will have, beyond entertainment – Perline calls it “the vampire mirror” – but with his driver-side prototype, Hicks may be onto something.
Related: Innovation with Math – The Emperor of Math – Time – math related posts
Tags: Math,Products,university business collaboration,university research
Billions for Science in Stimulus Bill
Posted on January 19, 2009 Comments (1)
Science wins big in US economic plan
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House appropriators would pump $3 billion into the National Science Foundation (NSF), $2 billion into the National Institutes of Health (NIH), $1.9 billion into the Department of Energy and $1.5 billion into university research facilities. Much of that money would be directed toward science infrastructure like renovating buildings or laboratories, but the NSF and NIH would receive $2 billion and $1.5 billion respectively that could be used to pay for thousands of basic research grants that have already been approved but for which there was previously not enough money.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. And short term spikes in funding are problematic for numerous reasons. But I have long argued for the value of investing in science and engineering excellence for long term economic benefit. I am worried the government will fail to provide adequate strategic thought to investments.
Today is Martin Luther King Day in the USA: Watch the entire I Have a Dream Speech.
Related: Science and Engineering in Global Economics – Engineering the Future Economy – The Future is Engineering – China and USA Basic Science Research – Tapping America’s Potential
New Family of Antibacterial Agents Discovered
Posted on January 18, 2009 Comments (0)
Bacteria continue to gain resistance to commonly used antibiotics. In this week’s JBC, one potential new antibotic has been found in the tiny freshwater animal Hydra.
The protein identified by Joachim Grötzinger, Thomas Bosch and colleagues at the University of Kiel (Germany), hydramacin-1, is unusual (and also clinically valuable) as it shares virtually no similarity with any other known antibacterial proteins except for two antimicrobials found in another ancient animal, the leech.
Hydramacin proved to be extremely effective though; in a series of laboratory experiments, this protein could kill a wide range of both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, including clinically-isolated drug-resistant strains like Klebsiella oxytoca (a common cause of nosocomial infections). Hydramacin works by sticking to the bacterial surface, promoting the clumping of nearby bacteria, then disrupting the bacterial membrane.
Grötzinger and his team also determined the 3-D shape of hydramacin-1, which revealed that it most closely resembled a superfamily of proteins found in scorpion venom; within this large group, they propose that hydramacin and the two leech proteins are members of a newly designated family called the macins.
Source: American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Related: Entirely New Antibiotic Developed (platensimycin) – Bacteria Race Ahead of Drugs – How Bleach Kills Bacteria – Antibacterial Products May Do More Harm Than Good
Tags: Antibiotics,bacteria,Germany,protein,university research
Evolution, Methane, Jobs, Food and More
Posted on January 17, 2009 Comments (2)
Photo from May 2005 by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars.
Science Friday is a great National Public Radio show. The week was a great show covering Antimicrobial Copper, Top Jobs for Math and Science, Human-Driven Evolution, Methane On Mars, Fish with Mercury and more. This show, in particular did a great job of showing the scientific inquiry process in action.
Very interesting stuff, listen for more details. A part of what happens is those individuals that chose to focus on reproducing early (instead of investing in growing larger, to reproduce later) are those that are favored (they gain advantage) by the conditions of human activity. I am amazed how quickly the scientists says the changes in populations are taking place.
And Methane On Mars is another potentially amazing discovery. While it is far from providing proof of live on Mars it is possibly evidence of life on Mars. Which would then be looked back on as one of the most important scientific discoveries ever. And in any even the podcast is a great overview of scientists in action.
Martian Methane Reveals the Red Planet is not a Dead Planet
The Mars Methane Mystery: Aliens At Last?
Related: Mars Rover Continues Exploration – Copper Doorknobs and Faucets Kill 95% of Superbugs – Viruses and What is Life – posts on evolution – Science and Engineering Link Directory
Friday Cat Fun #11: Ninja Cat Stair Climbing
Posted on January 16, 2009 Comments (4)
Another video of a curious cat experimenting to learn about the road less traveled.
Related: Treadmill Cats – The Wonderful Life of a Cat – Curious Cat and a Toilet – Photos by Your Cat
Successful Emergency Plane Landing in the Hudson River
Posted on January 15, 2009 Comments (3)
Photo of a plane that crash landed in the Hudson River, New York, by jkrums.emergency landing in river by New York City
The United States Coast Guard has reported that they have sent units to the scene of the incident, and that a nearby ferry was giving life jackets to survivors. According to witnesses, the plane landed in the river, making a large splash in the water, at a somewhat gradual angle.
“This looked like a controlled descent,” said Bob Read, who witnessed the incident from his office.
A source told The Wall Street Journal that the plane initially was maneuvering to make an emergency landing at nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, but lost too much altitude and had to ditch in the river.
Unconfirmed reports are citing the pilot as saying that the plane encountered a flock of geese and that some of them went into each of the jet’s engines, leading to a loss of powered flight. Passengers told the press that they heard a loud bang shortly after takeoff.
A Federal Aviation Administration official said that the plane was only airborne for three minutes. For these rare waterlandings, pilots are trained to bring the plane down as they would on land, but with the landing gear still stowed.
How often do birds cause plane crashes?
Related: Why Planes Fly: What They Taught You In School Was Wrong – Engineering the Boarding of Airplanes
Soil Mineral Degrades the Nearly Indestructible Prion
Posted on January 15, 2009 Comments (3)
Warped pathogens that lack both DNA and RNA, prions are believed to cause such fatal brain ailments as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and moose, mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. In addition to being perhaps the weirdest infectious agent know to science, the prion is also the most durable. It resists almost every method of destruction from fire and ionizing radiation to chemical disinfectants and autoclaving, which reduce prion infectivity but fail to completely eliminate it.
Other studies have shown that prions can survive in the soil for at least three years, and that soil is a plausible route of transmission for some animals, says Joel Pedersen, a UW-Madison environmental chemist. “We know that environmental contamination occurs in deer and sheep at least,” he notes.
Prion reservoirs in the soil, Pedersen explains, are likely critical links in the chain of infection because the agent does not appear to depend on vectors — intermediate organisms like mosquitoes or ticks — to spread from animal to animal.
That the birnessite family of minerals possessed the capacity to degrade prions was a surprise, Pedersen says. Manganese oxides like birnessite are commonly used in such things as batteries and are among the most potent oxidants occurring naturally in soils, capable of chemically transforming a substance by adding oxygen atoms and stripping away electrons. The mineral is most abundant in soils that are seasonally waterlogged or poorly drained.
Related: Clues to Prion Infectivity – Scientists Knock-out Prion Gene in Cows – Curious Cat Science and Engineering Search
Tags: Life Science,Madison,prion,university research
Tiny $10 Microscope
Posted on January 14, 2009 Comments (0)
The Caltech device uses a system of tiny fluid channels called microfluidics to direct cells and even microscopic animals over a light-sensing chip. The chip, an off-the-shelf sensor identical to those found in digital cameras, is covered with a thin layer of metal that blocks out most of the pixels. A few hundred tiny apertures punched in the metal along the fluid channel let light in. As the sample flows through the microscope, each aperture captures an image. One version of the microscope uses gravity to control the flow of the sample across the apertures. Another version, which allows for much better control, uses an electrical potential to drive the flow of cells.
Related: Video Goggles – 50 Species of Diatoms – Black and Decker Codeless Lawn Mower Review
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