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A pod of bottle-nose dolphins off the coast of Florida have developed a hunting technique unknown in other dolphins. One swims in a circle stirring up mud and then the dolphins wait to catch fish that jump out of the water to escape the contracting circle of muddy water.
Related: Dolphins Using Tools to Hunt – Do Dolphins Sleep? – Dolphin Delivers Deviously for Rewards – Bird Using Bait to Fish – Dolphin Rescues Beached Whales
“After a certain basic point, which translates, more or less, to just a few thousand dollars above the minimum poverty level, increases in material well being don’t see to affect how happy people are.”
The speech includes, the first purpose of incorporation at Sony:
To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart’s content.
Excellent books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1991. People enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction.
Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1997. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists to politicians and business leaders to poets and artists, the author uses his famous “flow” theory to explain the creative process.
Related: Honda Engineering – The Science of Happiness – Curious Cat Management: posts on psychology – Engineers Should Follow Their Hearts – The Purpose of an Organization
This BBC documentary “Clever Monkeys”, narrated by David Attenborough, shows Capuchin monkeys in Brazil using heavy stones to break open aged palm nuts.
Related: Chimps Used Stone Hammers – Bird Using Bait to Fish – Orangutan Attempts to Hunt Fish with Spear – Dolphins Using Tools to Hunt
Video cameras installed in the Sumatran jungle in Indonesia have captured close-up footage of a tiger and two cubs. This is the first time that the World Wildlife Fund has recorded evidence of tiger breeding in central Sumatra in what should be prime tiger habitat.
The Sumatran Tiger is the smallest of all surviving tiger subspecies. Male Sumatran tigers average 204 cm (6 feet, 8 inches) in length from head to tail and weigh about 136 kg (300 lb).
Analysis of DNA is consistent with the hypothesis that the Sumatran Tigers have been isolated after a rise in sea level at the Pleistocene to Holocene border (about 12,000-6,000 years ago) from other tiger populations. The Sumatran Tiger is genetically isolated from all living mainland tigers.
Wouldn’t it be nice to see the photos those tigers could take with the awesome cat cam?
Related: Bukit Tiga Puluh National Park – Using Cameras Monitoring To Aid Conservation Efforts – Rare Saharan Cheetahs Photographed – Jaguars Back in the Southwest USA
Fun video by Richard Wiseman on his top 10 science stunts for Christmas parties.
Related: How a Microwave Heats – Ninja Professors – Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids
The above webcast shows protein synthesis, from a 1971 Stanford University video with Paul Berg (Nobel Laureate – 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and National Medal of Science in 1983). The film does not exactly present the traditional scientist stereotype. It does pretty much present the typical California 1970’s hippie stereotype though.
Related: Friday Fun – CERN Version – Roger Tsien Lecture On Green Florescent Protein
That works in the forest, but it doesn’t work in a desert. Deserts are sandy and when the wind blows, smells scatter.
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It’s already known that ants use celestial clues to establish the general direction home, but how do they know exactly the number of steps to take that will lead them right to the entrance of their nest?
Wolf and Whittlinger trained a bunch of ants to walk across a patch of desert to some food. When the ants began eating, the scientists trapped them and divided them into three groups. They left the first group alone. With the second group, they used superglue to attach pre-cut pig bristles to each of their six legs, essentially putting them on stilts.
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The regular ants walked right to the nest and went inside. The ants on stilts walked right past the nest, stopped and looked around for their home…
I posted about this back in 2006: Ants on Stilts for Science, but the webcast by NPR is worth a new post.
Related: E.O. Wilson: Lord of the Ants – Huge Ant Nest – posts showing the scientific method of learning in action
Volkswagen built this piano stairway in Stockholm, Sweden as part of their fun theory project, which aims to change people’s behavior for the better through fun. That is a great strategy.
Related: Water Pump Merry-go-Round – Fold.it – the Protein Folding Game – Engineers Should Follow Their Hearts – Using Capitalism to Make a Better World – Toyota Robots
Carl Zimmer interviews Dennis Bray in an interesting podcast:
Related: E. Coli Individuality – Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell by Dennis Bray – Programing Bacteria – Micro-robots to ’swim’ Through Veins
William Kamkwamba on the Daily show. I first posted about William’s great work in 2007 – Home Engineering: Windmill for Electricity. What a great example of what can be done by sharing scientific and engineering ideas with those who will make the effort to create workable solutions.
William has written a book on his life: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
Related: Inspirational Engineer – Make the World Better – posts on engineers – posts on Africa
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
Gravity acts in the same way on a feather and hammer. The reason the hammer falls faster on earth is due to air resistance (well and if you try outside – wind could blow the feather too).
At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk, Commander David Scott performed a live demonstration for the television cameras. He held out a geologic hammer and a feather and dropped them at the same time. Because they were essentially in a vacuum, there was no air resistance and the feather fell at the same rate as the hammer, as Galileo had concluded hundreds of years before – all objects released together fall at the same rate regardless of mass. Mission Controller Joe Allen described the demonstration in the “Apollo 15 Preliminary Science Report”:
During the final minutes of the third extravehicular activity, a short demonstration experiment was conducted. A heavy object (a 1.32-kg aluminum geological hammer) and a light object (a 0.03-kg falcon feather) were released simultaneously from approximately the same height (approximately 1.6 m) and were allowed to fall to the surface. Within the accuracy of the simultaneous release, the objects were observed to undergo the same acceleration and strike the lunar surface simultaneously, which was a result predicted by well-established theory, but a result nonetheless reassuring considering both the number of viewers that witnessed the experiment and the fact that the homeward journey was based critically on the validity of the particular theory being tested.
Related: posts on physics – Phun Physics – Learning About the Moon – What Are Flowers For?
Here is another remarkable example of the great benefit engineers provide society.
How a software engineer tried to save his sister and invented a breakthrough medical device
There are billions of dollars spent every year on clinical studies. I was surprised to discover that there were sometimes clinical studies of treatments for which there were no clinical applications. The trials would show successful results but no clinical applications.
I found a 1987 Italian funded set of clinical studies that showed successful treatment of tumors by the application of chemotherapy directly into the tumors. But I could find nothing since then.
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It took us two years to do the engineering. And it has taken the FDA seven years and two months to approve the product for sale. We were able to shorten the FDA process a little by saying that it was similar to other devices that had already been approved.
Great stuff.
Related: Cardiac Cath Lab: Innovation on Site – Surgeon-engineer advances high-tech healing – Home Engineering: Dialysis machine – StoryCorps: Passion for Mechanical Engineering – Engineers Should Follow Their Hearts
The delicate inner structure of a pentacene molecule imaged with an atomic force microscope. For the first time, scientists achieved a resolution that revealed the chemical structure of a molecule. The hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings in the pentacene molecule are clearly resolved. Even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be deduced from the image. (Pixels correspond to actual data points). Image courtesy of IBM Research – Zurich IBM scientists have been able to image the “anatomy” — or chemical structure — inside a molecule with unprecedented resolution. “Though not an exact comparison, if you think about how a doctor uses an x-ray to image bones and organs inside the human body, we are using the atomic force microscope to image the atomic structures that are the backbones of individual molecules,” said IBM Researcher Gerhard Meyer. “Scanning probe techniques offer amazing potential for prototyping complex functional structures and for tailoring and studying their electronic and chemical properties on the atomic scale.”
The AFM uses a sharp metal tip to measure the tiny forces between the tip and the sample, such as a molecule, to create an image. In the present experiments, the molecule investigated was pentacene. Pentacene is an oblong organic molecule consisting of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms measuring 1.4 nanometers in length. The spacing between neighboring carbon atoms is only 0.14 nanometers—roughly 1 million times smaller then the diameter of a grain of sand. In the experimental image, the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings as well as the carbon atoms in the molecule are clearly resolved. Even the positions of the hydrogen atoms of the molecule can be deduced from the image.
Related: MRI That Can See Bacteria, Virus and Proteins – images of the naphthalocyanine molecule in the ‘on’ and the ‘off’ state – What is a Molecule?
Read full press release: IBM Scientists First to Image the “Anatomy” of a Molecule
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Inventor’s Bike Folds Into Its Own Wheel
The 24-year-old, from Battersea, London, said he wanted to create a decent folding bike after the one he was using collapsed. “I couldn’t find a folding bicycle I liked,” he added. “I wanted something that could take a bit of punishment and that you could have fun with. “So I made one myself.”
Mr Hargreaves has been in contact with various manufacturers and hopes to get the bike into production soon.
His bike lock system (see photo) won the Toyota IQ Awards.
Related: New Engineering School for England – Cost Efficient Solar Dish by Students – Engineering a Better World: Bike Corn-Sheller – The Glove – Engineering Coolness
Related: Build Your Own Tabletop Interactive Multi-touch Computer – Lego Autopilot Project – Airconditioner Fan Hack – Automatic Cat Feeder
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