Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » Awards

University of Michigan Wins Solar Car Challenge Again

curiouscat — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:40:14 +0000

U-M wins North American Solar Challenge for the fifth time

The University of Michigan’s Solar Car Team won the North American Solar Challenge, crossing the finish line in Alberta, Canada on Tuesday after more than 50 hours of racing over nine days.
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The car averaged around 45 mph and led from the first day, besting 15 university teams that raced the 2,400-mile course from Plano, Texas to Calgary. Continuum finished about 10 hours before the second place team.
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The North American Solar Challenge normally takes place every other year in the same year as the world race, but in 2007 its previous sponsor backed out. The race’s future was in question until Toyota took over the sponsorship.

Werner Heisenberg

curiouscat — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:34:58 +0000

Read a very nice biography from Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics for Werner Heisenberg, the founder of quantum mechanics, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle:

Heisenberg set himself the task of finding the new quantum mechanics upon returning to Göttingen from Copenhagen in April 1925. Inspired by Bohr and his assistant, H.A. Kramers, in Copenhagen, Pauli in Hamburg, and Born in Göttingen, Heisenberg’s intensive struggle over the following months to achieve his goal has been well documented by historians. Since the electron orbits in atoms could not be observed, Heisenberg tried to develop a quantum mechanics without them.

He relied instead on what can be observed, namely the light emitted and absorbed by the atoms. By July 1925 Heisenberg had an answer, but the mathematics was so unfamiliar that he was not sure if it made any sense. Heisenberg handed a paper on the derivation to his mentor, Max Born, before leaving on a month-long lecture trip to Holland and England and a camping trip to Scandinavia with his youth-movement group. After puzzling over the derivation, Born finally recognized that the unfamiliar mathematics was related to the mathematics of arrays of numbers known as “matrices.” Born sent Heisenberg’s paper off for publication. It was the breakthrough to quantum mechanics.

Learning How Viruses Evade the Immune System

curiouscat — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:15:11 +0000

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.”

This technique allowed her to research an interesting group of microRNAs originating in viruses. The presence of microRNAs in viruses raised the intriguing possibility that upon viral infection of a host cell, the virus may use microRNAs as weapons in its battle against the host, inhibiting the production of important host proteins.

Indeed, Elefant’s algorithm predicted that an immune system protein, essential for the immune system’s response against viruses, is inhibited by a viral microRNA. This prediction was confirmed in collaboration with the laboratory of Prof. Ofer Mandelboim of the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine, who demonstrated experimentally that the microRNA aids the virus in evading the immune system. This study showed for the first time that a viral microRNA inhibits the activity of a gene of the human immune system, placing microRNAs as important players in the battle between viruses and humans.

The discovery holds promising therapeutic implications. It opens a new direction for anti-viral therapy aimed at inhibiting the viral microRNA, and it introduces a possible means to suppress the immune system in autoimmune diseases and transplantations by developing synthetic microRNAs that will mimic the action of natural microRNAs.

The Barenholz Prize is named for its donor, Yehezkel Barenholz, the Dr. Daniel G. Miller Professor of Cancer Research at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School.

Full press release: New Route for Combating Viruses

Photo: Kaye Award winner Naama Elefant, the computer screen shows a DNA sequence in the background (Credit: Hebrew University / Sasson Tiram).

Shaw Laureates 2008

curiouscat — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:50:36 +0000

The Shaw Prize awards $1 million in each of 3 areas: Astronomy; Life Science and Medicine; and Mathematical Sciences. The award was established in 2002 by Run Run Shaw who was born in China and made his money in the movie industry. The prize is administered in Hong Kong and awards those “who have achieved significant breakthrough in academic and scientific research or application and whose work has resulted in a positive and profound impact on mankind.” The 2008 Shaw Laureates have been selected.

Astronomy
Professor Reinhard Genzel, Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, in recognition of his outstanding contribution in demonstrating that the Milky Way contains a supermassive black hole at its centre.

In 1969, Donald Lynden-Bell and Martin Rees suggested that the Milky Way might contain a supermassive black hole. But evidence for such an object was lacking at the time because the centre of the Milky Way is obscured by interstellar dust, and was detected only as a relatively faint radio source. Reinhard Genzel obtained compelling evidence for this conjecture by developing state-of-the-art astronomical instruments and carrying out a persistent programme of observing our Galactic Centre for many years, which ultimately led to the discovery of a black hole with a mass a few million times that of the Sun, in the centre of the Milky Way.

Supermassive black holes are now recognized to account for the luminous sources seen at the nuclei of galaxies and to play a fundamental role in the formation of galaxies.

Mathematical Sciences
Vladimir Arnold, together with Andrei Kolmogorov and Jurgen Moser, made fundamental contributions to the study of stability in dynamical systems, exemplified by the motion of the planets round the sun. This work laid the foundation for all subsequent developments right up to the present time.

Arnold also produced extremely fruitful ideas, relating classical mechanics to questions of topology. This includes the famous Arnold Conjecture which was only recently solved.

In classical hydrodynamics the basic equations of an ideal fluid were derived by Euler in 1757 and major steps towards understanding them were taken by Helmholtz in 1858, and Kelvin in 1869. The next significant breakthrough was made by Arnold a century later and this has provided the basis for more recent work.

Ludwig Faddeev has made many important contributions to quantum physics. Together with Boris Popov he showed the right way to quantize the famous non-Abelian theory which underlies all contemporary work on sub-atomic physics. This led in particular to the work of ′t Hooft and Veltman which was recognized by the Nobel Prize for Physics of 1999.

Faddeev also developed (jointly with Valentin Pavlov) the quantum version of the beautiful theory of integrable systems in two dimensions which has important applications in solid state physics as well as in recent models of string theory.

In another application of the scattering theory of differential operators, Faddeev discovered a surprising link with number theory and the famous Riemann Hypothesis.

Life Science and Medicine
During the development of vertebrates, including humans, the fertilized egg develops into the embryo, and the cells in the embryo then proceed to differentiate to form somatic cells of different tissues and organs. The fertilized egg is considered totipotent, as it can develop into a whole organism, while the cells in the embryo are pluripotent because they are capable of differentiating into somatic cells that make up all the organs. Half a century ago, it was found by John Gurdon that this developmental clock can be reversed, and that differentiated somatic cells in a frog model could regain their pluripotency or totipotency. Attempts were later made to show that mammalian cells – and human cells in particular – could also be reprogrammed back to a pluripotent state, both to advance our understanding of developmental mechanisms and because of the belief that great therapeutic benefits would flow from such knowledge. The breakthroughs came in the last 15 years. The landmark contributions by the scientists that are honoured with the Shaw Prize have thereby ushered in a new era in stem cell research, with huge potential benefits to mankind.

Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell worked together in the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh for many years, using sheep as the model, in order to understand the early physiology of the egg and how laboratory manipulations can improve our knowledge of the development from egg to birth. In 1995, they produced a pair of lambs called Megan and Morag from embryonic cells. They also performed nuclear transfer experiments in which nuclei from embryonic, fetal and adult cells of the sheep were transplanted into fertilized eggs derived from ewes.

One of the live-born lambs, Dolly, was derived from the transplantation of the nucleus of an adult mammary cell. Thus, Dolly was the first example of the reprogramming of the adult cell back to totipotency in a mammal. They further created a sheep called Polly in which they showed that it was possible to incorporate a human gene into the donor’s DNA before cloning, thus indicating that it is possible to use animals to produce human proteins for the benefit of mankind. Since then, the work of Wilmut and Campbell has been duplicated in many other animal species and has provided approaches to produce useful therapeutic products with cloned animals and to improve agricultural practices.

Shinya Yamanaka born 1962 in Osaka, Japan, is currently a Professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Science, the Kyoto University.

Nobel Laureate Initiates Symposia for Student Scientists

curiouscat — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:44:40 +0000

The video shows a portion of Oliver Smithies’ Nobel acceptance lecture. See the rest of the speech, and more info, on the Nobel Prize site.

As an undergraduate student at Oxford University in the 1940s, Oliver Smithies attended a series of lectures by Linus Pauling, one of the most influential chemists of the 20th century. It was a powerful experience, one that sparked the young scientist’s ambitions and helped launch his own eminent career.

“It was tremendously inspiring,” says Smithies, one of three scientists who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2007. “People were sitting in the aisles to listen to him.”

Now Smithies, who was a genetics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1960-88, is taking it upon himself to expose a new generation of undergraduates to this sort of experience. Using the prize money that came with his Nobel Prize, Smithies is funding symposia at all four universities he has been affiliated with throughout his scientific career: Oxford, the University of Toronto, UW-Madison and the University of North Carolina, where he is currently the Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Each university will receive about $130,000 to get things started.

“He wants the symposium to be a day when we bring the very best in biology to campus to interact with the students,” says geneticist Fred Blattner, who is in charge of organizing the symposium at UW-Madison and who collaborated with Smithies when their careers paths overlapped in Wisconsin.

The first of two speakers at the UW-Madison’s inaugural Oliver Smithies Symposium will be Leroy Hood, director of the Institute for Systems Biology, located in Seattle. Hood is a pioneer of high-throughput technologies and was instrumental in developing the technology used to sequence the human genome. More recently, Hood has focused his efforts on systems biology, the field of science in which researchers create computer models to describe complex biological processes, such as the development of cancer in the body. He is also at the forefront of efforts to use computer models to help doctors tailor drugs and dosages to an individual’s genetic makeup.

“Having Lee Hood come to campus is exactly the type of experience Oliver and I are trying to bring to students through the Smithies Symposium,” explains Blattner. “We want to have the visionary spirits putting forward their unique approaches to science: sharing, listening and inspiring.”

Smithies himself will give the second talk that day. In part, his lecture will cover his Nobel Award-winning contributions to gene targeting, the widely used technology that allows researchers alter the genomes of mice - by adding or subtracting specific genes - to make mammalian models of human disease. Already, more than 500 disease models have been created this way, giving scientists a safe way to study and search for treatments to Alzheimer’s, heart disease, various cancers and many other human conditions. Much of Smithies’s groundbreaking work in this area was performed while he was at UW-Madison.

“When these distinguished scientists give their talks, I’d like to hear them talk about more than just the marvelous things they are doing now at the pinnacle of their careers, but about when they were young and how they [persevered] to make a big discovery or invention,” says Smithies. “That’s more relevant to students at the early stage of their careers.

“I’d like to tell the students what it was like at the beginning of my career. For instance, as far as I know, nobody ever referred to my [doctoral] thesis. Nobody ever used the method I developed.” Those are comforting words indeed for young scientists delving into the intricacies and minutiae of basic research.

High School Student Isolates Microbe that Eats Plastic

curiouscat — Sat, 24 May 2008 14:20:04 +0000

WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags

Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.
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First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.
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The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide — each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd.

“This is a huge, huge step forward . . . We’re using nature to solve a man-made problem.” Burd would like to take his project further and see it be used. He plans to study science at university, but in the meantime he’s busy with things such as student council, sports and music.

Presidential Award for Top Science and Math Teachers

curiouscat — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:11:53 +0000

Top Science and Math Teachers Receive Presidential Award

For the 2007 awards, 99 middle school and high school math and science teachers are receiving this recognition. In the citation from the president, winners are commended “for embodying excellence in teaching, for devotion to the learning needs of the students, and for upholding the high standards that exemplify American education at its finest.”

Each winner receives a $10,000 award from NSF, as well as a trip for two to Washington, D.C., for a week of celebratory events and professional development activities.

Among the activities during that week are a day with scientists and science educators at NSF; meetings with members of Congress and federal agency leadership; and a reception and dinner at the U.S. Department of State featuring guest speaker Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, a NASA Astronaut-Mission Specialist.

Team America Rocketry Challenge

curiouscat — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:15:01 +0000

On May 17th, in The Plains, Virginia, the Team America Rocketry Challenge finals will be held. After a full day of launches, held at the Great Meadows facility, the winners will be crowned and $60,000 in scholarships will be divided up among the top finishers.

False Teeth For Cats

curiouscat — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:22:54 +0000

False Teeth For Cats! What Next?

A team of eight British college students, calling themselves Fangs A Lot, have created the first false tooth for a cat and set up a business, Animal Solutions, to market false teeth for cats, dogs, and other animals. The group and its prototype false cat tooth have made it to the finals of the Ideas Igloo Roadshow, an invention contest for college students sponsored by Britain’s Make Your Mark Campaign and Microsoft, UK.

False teeth for cats may sound ridiculous, but they could be a solution to a serious problem for cats. Cats have notoriously bad dental problems. Cat owners seldom brush their cats’ teeth or scrape the surfaces of the teeth to remove plaque. By the time a cat is 3 or 4 years old, she may already have periodontal disease that can lead to tooth loss. Tooth loss may also come about as a result of tooth breakage, particularly in the canine teeth.

Link provided via our post suggestion page.

‘Refrigerator’ Without Electricity

curiouscat — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:24:56 +0000

2000 Rolex award to Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria for the Pot in Pot Cooling System:

Ingenious technique that requires no external energy supply to preserve fruit, vegetables and other perishables in hot, arid climates. The pot-in-pot cooling system, a kind of “desert refrigerator”, helps subsistence farmers by reducing food spoilage and waste and thus increasing their income and limiting the health hazards of decaying foods. Abba says he developed the pot-in-pot “to help the rural poor in a cost-effective, participatory and sustainable way”.

The pot-in-pot consists of two earthenware pots of different diameters, one placed inside the other. The space between the two pots is filled with wet sand that is kept constantly moist, thereby keeping both pots damp. Fruit, vegetables and other items such as soft drinks are put in the smaller inner pot, which is covered with a damp cloth. The phenomenon that occurs is based on a simple principle of physics: the water contained in the sand between the two pots evaporates towards the outer surface of the larger pot where the drier outside air is circulating. By virtue of the laws of thermodynamics, the evaporation process automatically causes a drop in temperature of several degrees, cooling the inner container, destroying harmful micro-organisms and preserving the perishable foods inside.

He also received the 2001 Shell Award for Sustainable Development. Great stuff:

Born in 1964 into a family of pot makers and raised in the rural north, Mohammed Bah Abba was familiar from an early age with the various practical and symbolic uses of traditional clay pots, and learned as a child the rudiments of pottery. Subsequently studying biology, chemistry and geology at school, he unravelled the technical puzzle that led him years later to develop the “pot-in-pot preservation/cooling system”.