Posted on October 11, 2009  Comments (2)

Photo showing the helicopter test track by Brad

Dr. George E.P. Box wrote a great paper on Teaching Engineers Experimental Design With a Paper Helicopter that can be used to learn principles of experimental design, including – conditions for validity of experimentation, randomization, blocking, the use of factorial and fractional factorial designs and the management of experimentation.

I ran across an interesting blog post on a class learning these principles today – Brad’s Hella-Copter:

Related: 101 Ways to Design an Experiment, or Some Ideas About Teaching Design of Experiments by William G. Hunter (my father) – posts on design of experiments – George Box on quality improvement – Designed Experiments – Autonomous Helicopters Teach Themselves to Fly – Statistics for Experimenters

Posted on October 9, 2009  Comments (3)

Birds show off their dance moves

Related: Friday Fun: Bird Using Bait to Fish – Crows, Brainy Birds – Friday Cat Fun #10: Cat and Crow Friends
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Posted on October 8, 2009  Comments (1)

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics honors three scientists, who have had important roles in shaping modern information technology, with one half to Charles Kuen Kao and with Willard Sterling Boyle and George Elwood Smith sharing the other half. Kao’s discoveries have paved the way for optical fiber technology, which today is used for almost all telephony and data communication. Boyle and Smith have invented a digital image sensor – CCD, or charge-coupled device – which today has become an electronic eye in almost all areas of photography. The Nobel prize site includes great information on the science behind the research that has been honored:

Related: How telephone echoes lead to digital cameras – 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics – 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics – posts on Nobel laureates

Posted on October 7, 2009  Comments (0)

Cross section of a cell by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. A ribosome is about 25 nanometters (a millionth of a millimeter) in size. A cell contains tens of thousands of ribosomes.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life’s core processes: the ribosome’s translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life.

The blueprints become transformed into living matter through the work of ribosomes. Based upon the information in DNA, ribosomes make proteins: oxygen-transporting haemoglobin, antibodies of the immune system, hormones such as insulin, the collagen of the skin, or enzymes that break down sugar. There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body and they all have different forms and functions. They build and control life at the chemical level.

Related: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 – 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry – 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry – posts on chemistry – basic research posts

Details from the Nobel Prize site (which continues to do a great job providing scientific information to the public openly).
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Posted on October 5, 2009  Comments (1)

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists who have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes – the telomeres – and in an enzyme that forms them – telomerase.

The long, thread-like DNA molecules that carry our genes are packed into chromosomes, the telomeres being the caps on their ends. Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak discovered that a unique DNA sequence in the telomeres protects the chromosomes from degradation. Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn identified telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomere DNA. These discoveries explained how the ends of the chromosomes are protected by the telomeres and that they are built by telomerase.

If the telomeres are shortened, cells age. Conversely, if telomerase activity is high, telomere length is maintained, and cellular senescence is delayed. This is the case in cancer cells, which can be considered to have eternal life. Certain inherited diseases, in contrast, are characterized by a defective telomerase, resulting in damaged cells. The award of the Nobel Prize recognizes the discovery of a fundamental mechanism in the cell, a discovery that has stimulated the development of new therapeutic strategies.

Scientists began to investigate what roles the telomere might play in the cell. Szostak’s group identified yeast cells with mutations that led to a gradual shortening of the telomeres. Such cells grew poorly and eventually stopped dividing. Blackburn and her co-workers made mutations in the RNA of the telomerase and observed similar effects in Tetrahymena. In both cases, this led to premature cellular ageing – senescence. In contrast, functional telomeres instead prevent chromosomal damage and delay cellular senescence. Later on, Greider’s group showed that the senescence of human cells is also delayed by telomerase. Research in this area has been intense and it is now known that the DNA sequence in the telomere attracts proteins that form a protective cap around the fragile ends of the DNA strands.

Many scientists speculated that telomere shortening could be the reason for ageing, not only in the individual cells but also in the organism as a whole. But the ageing process has turned out to be complex and it is now thought to depend on several different factors, the telomere being one of them. Research in this area remains intense.

The 3 awardees are citizens of the USA; two were born elsewhere.
Read more about their research at the Nobel Prize web site.

Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn–one of Time magazine’s 100 “Most Influential People in the World” in 2007–made headlines in 2004 when she was dismissed from the President’s Council on Bioethics after objecting to the council’s call for a moratorium on stem cell research and protesting the suppression of relevant scientific evidence in its final report.

Related: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008 – 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Webcast of Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn speaking at Google:
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Posted on October 2, 2009  Comments (4)

Put It to the Test is one of the songs on the great new Album and animated DVD from They Might Be Giants: Here Comes Science.

A fun song on fundamentals of experimenting to the scientific method.

Related: Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants – posts on experimenting – MythBuster: 3 Ways to Fix USA Science Education – Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids – Correlation is Not Causation