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Curious Cat Science and Egineering blog full tag cloud
NSF Launches Third Generation of Engineering Research Centers with Awards Totaling $92.5 Million. Each of the 5 sites will receive will use $18.5 million over five-years. Each center has international university partners and partners in industry.
The NSF Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC), based at Iowa State University, seeks to transform the existing petrochemical-based chemical industry to one based on renewable materials.
The NSF Engineering Research Center for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) Systems, based at North Carolina State University, will conduct research to transform the nation’s power grid into an efficient network that integrates alternative energy generation and new storage methods with existing power sources.
The NSF ERC for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN), based at the University of Arizona, will conduct research to create transformative technologies for optical access networks that offer dramatically improved performance and expanded capabilities.
The NSF ERC for Revolutionizing Metallic Biomaterials, based at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, aims to transform current medial and surgical treatments by creating “smart” implants for craniofacial, dental, orthopedic and cardiovascular interventions.
The NSF Smart Lighting ERC, based at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, aims to create new solid-state lighting technologies to enable rapid biological imaging, novel modes of communication, efficient displays and safer transportation.
Photo: Alex Huang will lead direct the research of ways to integrate renewable energy sources into the nation’s power grid at North Carolina State University.
Related: $75 Million for 5 New Engineering Research Centers - NSF Awards $50 Million for Collaborative Plant Biology Project - Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers - posts related to the United States National Science Foundation
$400 million endowment for the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Many countries would love to create a world class center of biomedical research. And several are trying. Boston sure seems to be staking a claim that it will be one of those centers of excellence. The economic benefits of that to Boston will be huge.
Related: Harvard Plans Life Sciences Campus - $1 Billion for Life Sciences in Massachusetts - China’s Gene Therapy Investment - $600 Million for Basic Biomedical Research from HHMI - Edinburgh University $115 Million Stem Cell Center
MacArthur Fellows receive $500,000 is support over 5 years with no strings attached. Unfortunately for me, I was passed over again. However, 25 people have been selected including
Kirsten Bomblies, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tubingen, Germany. Plant Evolutionary Geneticist opening avenues into the mysteries of how new species originate through her explorations of incompatible hybrids as a mechanism for speciation in shared ecological niches.
Marin Soljacic, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Optical Physicist demonstrating both theoretically and experimentally that power can be transmitted wirelessly, potentially leading to a range of electrical devices that can operate without batteries or wall connections.
Rachel Wilson, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. Experimental Neurobiologist integrating electrophysiology, neuropharmacology, molecular genetics, and anatomy to measure the activity of neurons in the diminutive brain of the fruit fly.
Andrea Ghez, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California. Astrophysicist using novel, ground-based telescopic techniques to identify thousands of new star systems and illuminate the role of super-massive black holes in the evolution of galaxies.
Photos, from the MacArthur Foundation web site left to right Kirsten Bomblies, Marin Soljacic, Rachel Wilson and Andrea Ghez.
Related: 2006 MacArthur Fellows - Wireless Power - 2008 Draper Prize for Engineering - 2005-6 National Science and Technology Medals
The Motorola Foundation today announced the recipients of its 2008 Innovation Generation grants, which provide $4 million to 92 K-12 education programs across the country.
Eileen Sweeney, director of the Motorola Foundation: “Building a diverse pipeline of critical thinkers, skilled scientists and engineers is a by-product of our efforts that not only will benefit Motorola and our industry, but it also will support a sustainable workforce and bolster the country’s competitive advantage in the global, knowledge-based economy.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Strengthening Education: Meeting the Challenge of a Changing World, jobs requiring science, engineering or technical training will increase 24 percent between 2004 and 2014 to 6.3 million. The disparity between the growing demand for critical thinkers and the country’s ability to adequately prepare students to fill these jobs has been widening for decades. The lack of skilled graduates in these fields poses a significant threat to sustained U.S. competitiveness in the global, knowledge-intensive economy.
Examples of this year’s grant recipients include:
* American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) – The AISES National American Indian Science and Engineering Fair and Expo inspires American Indian and Alaska Native students from all 50 states to pursue their interest in science and engineering through in-person and virtual presentations of research, access to role models and mentors, and hands-on demonstrations of scientific and engineering innovations across industries.
* Edheads in Columbus, Ohio – A highly interactive website for middle school girls interested in engineering design will be used nationally by schools and after-school programs.
* Rochester Institute of Technology – TechGirlz weeklong camp for girls who are deaf and hard-of-hearing and entering seventh, eighth or ninth grades fosters their long-term interest in STEM and enhances their awareness of the opportunities available to them in these disciplines in higher education.
* University of Central Florida – My Sports Pulse engages Florida middle school and high school students in a youth mobile learning initiative that imparts science and technology concepts through interactive sports games and tests.
Related: High School Students in USA, China and India - The Importance of Science Education - Education Resources for Science and Engineering -USA Teens 29th in Science - k-12 Science Education Podcast
Those advances came, in large measure, from the United States. The coming decades may be different.
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A third of the scientists working at the LHC hail from outside the 20 states that control CERN. America has contributed 1,000 or so researchers, the largest single contingent from any non-CERN nation.
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The U.S. contribution amounts to $500 million—barely 5 percent of the bill. The big bucks have come from the Europeans. Germany is picking up 20 percent of the tab, the British are contributing 17 percent, and the French are giving 14 percent.
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The most worrying prospect is that scientists from other countries, who used to flock to the United States to be where the action is, are now heading to Europe instead.
This is a point I have made before. The economic benefits of investing in science are real. The economic benefits of having science and engineering centers of excellence in your country are real. That doesn’t mean you automatically gain economic benefit but it is a huge advantage and opportunity if you act intelligently to make it pay off.
Related: Invest in Science for a Strong Economy - Diplomacy and Science Research - Asia: Rising Stars of Science and Engineering - Brain Drain Benefits to the USA Less Than They Could Be - posts on funding science exploration - posts on basic research - At the Heart of All Matter
MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives
MIT is providing seed funding to faculty to encourage global research. The seed funds cover a variety of expenses, including exploratory field research, workshop materials and instrument costs. Each proposal is eligible for up to $20,000 in funding. Research and collaboration can take place anywhere in the world on any topic. For all projects, up to $10,000 in additional funding is available for undergraduate and graduate student participation.
MISTI country programs also offer five country-specific seed funds for collaborative research involving France, India, Italy, Japan or Spain.
This is a good use of their huge endowment. So is the Open Courseware initiative. As is their elimination of tuition for those with families earning less than $75,000. Good for MIT.
Related: Global Engineering Education Study - MIT Faculty Study Recommends Significant Undergraduate Education Changes - Funding Medical Research
Google is investing huge sums in renewable energy with the aim of cheaper than coal renewable energy. Google.org (the philanthropic arm of Google) announced $10.25 million in investments in a breakthrough energy technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS).
EGS expands the potential of geothermal energy by orders of magnitude. The traditional geothermal approach relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam and hot water. The EGS process, by comparison, replicates these conditions by fracturing hot rock, circulating water through the system, and using the resulting steam to produce electricity in a conventional turbine.
A recent MIT report on EGS estimates that just 2% of the heat below the continental United States between 3 and 10 kilometers, depths within the range of current drilling technology, is more than 2,500 times the country’s total annual energy use.
“EGS could be the ‘killer app’ of the energy world. It has the potential to deliver vast quantities of power 24/7 and be captured nearly anywhere on the planet. And it would be a perfect complement to intermittent sources like solar and wind,” said Dan Reicher, Director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org.
Google’s Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative focuses on solar thermal power, advanced wind, EGS and other potential breakthrough technologies. Google has set a goal to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity, enough to power a city the size of San Francisco, in years, not decades.
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A nice post from ScienceWoman: The PI lacks the experience with the proposed methodology…
I suspect that this is a criticism that I’m going to see a few more times before tenure. And I suspect that it’s a criticism that’s not uniquely being leveled at me.
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In this case, this criticism isn’t the reason the proposal wasn’t funded. But it’s the one reviewer critique that I can’t surmount on the resubmission. It’s like that itch I can’t scratch. So I guess the resubmitted proposal is just going to have to be so kick-ass in all other respects that there’s no way they can deny me these funds. Better get to work.
Related: Funding for Science and Engineering Researchers - HMMI Nurtures Nation’s Best Early Career Scientists - $1 Million Each for 20 Science Educators - posts on funding in science - Advice on Successfully Applying for Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships
US Navy plants a new seed of future engineers
“Even though engineering was not one of my first options, now I will consider it. After attending this program I realized that I was able to do this,” Long Island resident Savory said.
Worried about the steep decline in U.S. science and engineering graduates, U.S. institutions such as the Navy and the NAVSEA — the command in charge of building, buying and maintaining the Navy’s ships- are promoting technology camps and competitions around the country. They’re doing it through partnerships with a growing number of associations such as the nonprofit Seat Pleasant, Md.-based Patriots Technology Training Center.
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The students built underwater robots and held a competition on July 3 at Prince George’s Sports and Learning Complex.
Thurman Jones, president of the Patriots Technology Training Center, said that the number of participants grows every year. To support this summer’s edition -as well as other programs organized by the Patriots Center — the U.S. Navy and the NAVSEA provided more than $100,000 worth of in cash, technical equipment and volunteers, according to Jones.
Related: Eco-Vehicle Student Competition - Fun k-12 Science and Engineering Learning - Science Camps Prep Girls - Science Opportunities for Students - Expanding Your Horizons in Science and Mathematics
I posted on the threat of extinction for bananas. Dan Koeppel has written an excellent book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. He also has a great Banana blog with serious and fun posts:
Urgent threat to Africa’s Bananas:
The urgency of this cannot be overstated. Uganda and the nations surrounding it absolutely depend on bananas as a staple foodstuff. Millions rely on bananas for survival. And the spread of BXW into Kenya is yet another indicator that this deadly disease is on the march. As with Panama Disease - the wilting fungus that threatens our banana, the Cavendish - BXW (a bacterial malady) is incurable. The difference between the two is that BXW moves faster and threatens, right now, food supplies in nations with fragile governments.
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First, banana diversity. In order to mitigate the spread of disease, the number of kinds of bananas being grown needs to be increased.
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Second, genetic engineering: It is time for the general public to recognize that working at the DNA level is not always a corporate trojan horse into destroying local agriculture and contaminating the environment. This isn’t all about Monsanto. While consumers in the suburbs and Whole Foods stores protest against all GMO foods - while barely knowing what GMO is - they bluntly prevent out legitimate public research that might stop hunger. Time learn that everything has nuance, the disease that are killing the bananas: they work in just two modes: off - and on.
The photos is from a fun post: Baboon Prefers Bananas over Kittens. Thank Goodness.
Related: Plumpynut a Food Savior - The Avocado - posts on food - Wheat Rust Research - Arctic Seed Vault
Ohio University gets record setting gift
The Russes’ generosity has made them the largest donors in the university’s history. Another engineering family — C. Paul and Beth K. Stocker — are next on the list with contributions totaling $31.9 million. The proceeds will support engineering education and research at Ohio University.
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The Russes believe in putting support where it would have significant impact. In addition to supporting Russ College students, faculty and facilities, they established the Russ Prize to recognize how engineering improves the human condition. One of the top three engineering prizes in the world, the Russ Prize is awarded bi-annually in conjunction with the National Academy of Engineering.
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The planning will take cues from the college’s strategic research areas: avionics; biomedical engineering, energy and the environment; and smart civil infrastructure. Planners expect that, in addition to supporting research, funds from the estate will support scholarships and leadership incentives for engineering students.
Related: Innovative Science and Engineering Higher Education - S&P 500 CEOs, Again Engineering Graduates Lead - posts on engineering education - $25 Million for Marquette College of Engineering - Harvard Elevates Engineering Profile - $20 Million for Georgia Tech School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This is another awesome combination of technology, distributed problem solving, science education…
Essentially the game works by allowing the person to make some decisions then the computer runs through some processes to determine the result of those decisions. It seems the human insight of what might work provides an advantage to computers trying to calculate solutions on their own. Then the results are compared to the other individuals working on the same protein folding problem and the efforts are ranked.
This level of interaction is very cool. SETI@home, Rosetta@home and the like are useful tools to tap the computing resources of millions on the internet. But the use of human expertise really makes fold.it special. And you can’t help but learn by playing. In addition, if you are successful you can gain some scientific credit for your participation in new discoveries.
Related: Expert Foldit Protein Folder, JSnyder - Researchers Launch Online Protein Folding Game - New Approach Builds Better Proteins Inside a Computer - Phun Physics - Protein Knots
The site includes some excellent educational material on proteins and related material. What is a protein:
Petri dish for economic growth
As I have mentioned many times the centers of scientific excellence are important for economic success. Massachusetts has some great advantages with MIT, Harvard, many biotech companies… but still must continue to focus on staying a center of excellence.
Related: Harvard Plans Life Sciences Campus - China’s Gene Therapy Investment - $600 Million for Basic Biomedical Research - Singapore woos top scientists with new labs - Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership
Drugmakers are counting on these deals to solve a persistent problem: underperforming product pipelines. Merck, Pfizer, and others have been losing sales of one blockbuster drug after another as patents expire and competitors charge in with generics. Big drug companies have fought back by spending more on research, yet the number of new medicines approved each year is falling. In the last week of April alone, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration rejected two of Merck’s experimental drugs, prompting the company to lay off 1,200 salespeople.
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Past deals between industry and academia have been hampered by patent disputes and tussles over publication rights, as companies tried to thwart academics who want to share their discoveries with colleagues around the world. So now the companies have devised policies allowing their Ivory Tower partners to patent and publish their discoveries, even as they draw the professors more deeply into corporate affairs.
Funding university activities this way can lead to conflicts and problems but realistically huge amounts of funding are entangled with possible conflicts of interest. The biggest concern I is that universities will bow to the almighty dollar instead of their missions. And inadequate oversight can damage their credibility (not one failure, most likely, but if a pattern emerges). For example: Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay (”The Harvard group’s consulting arrangements with drug makers were already controversial because of the researchers’ advocacy of unapproved uses of psychiatric medicines in children.”). Then find out the companies were paying them well, the professors failed to disclose that and the advocacy is rightfully questioned.
Related: From Ghost Writing to Ghost Management in Medical Journals - Funding Medical Research - Medical Study Integrity (or Lack Thereof) - Marketing Drugs
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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.
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Fermilab was once the premiere particle physics research lab. It is still a very important research lab. But, I have said before, other countries are the ones making the larger efforts lately to invest in science and technology centers of excellence that the US was making in the 1960’s and 1970’s: Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership, Investing in Technology Excellence, etc..
I have also said that the past success of the US has left it in a still very strong position. For example, the anonymous donor that saved Fermilab with a $5 million donation likely benefited from the successful investments in science centers of excellence in the past (few countries - maybe 30, can rely on large donations from wealthy individuals, to sustain centers of excellence and I don’t think any approach what the USA has now - Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Standford, MIT…).
Excellent post on the the saving of Fermilab, To the person who saved Fermilab: Thank You.:
To some, the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN may seem to reduce the importance of Fermilab’s capabilities, but this is not at all the case. Although the LHC may take the title for the overall size and energy levels of a particle accelerator, Fermilab remains a uniquely capable particle physics research institution. Though less powerful, the Tevatron is able to operate for longer periods of time than the LHC and will likely require less downtime for maintenance, allowing for greater access and numerous types of research activities.
Related: CERN Pressure Test Failure - posts on funding science research - Matter to Anti-Matter 3 Trillion Times a Second - Google Investing Huge Sums in Renewable Energy - Gates Foundation and Rotary Pledge $200 Million to Fight Polio - Washington Waste - Washington Paying Out Money it Doesn’t Have - Proposal to Triple NSF GFRP Awards and the Size of the Awards by 33%
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