Curious Cat Science and Egineering blog full tag cloud

2007 National Medal of and Technology and Innovation
Paul Baran for the invention and development of the fundamental architecture for packet-switched communication networks, which provided a paradigm shift from the circuit-switched communication networks of the past, and later was used to build the ARPANET and the Internet.
Armand V. Feigenbaum for his leadership in the development of the economic relationship of quality costs, productivity improvement, and profitability, and for his pioneering application of economics, general systems theory and technology, statistical methods, and management principles that define The Total Quality Management approach for achieving performance excellence and global competitiveness. See the Curious Cat Management Improvement portal.
Adam Heller for his fundamental contributions to electrochemistry and bioelectric chemistry, and the subsequent application of those fundamentals in the development of technological products that improved the quality of life across the globe, most notably in the area of human health and well-being.
Carlton Grant Willson for the creation of novel lithographic imaging materials and techniques that have enabled the manufacturing of smaller, faster, and more efficient microelectronic components that have improved the competitiveness of U.S. microelectronics industry.
(more…)

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
Bill Nye the Science Guy Makes Green “Stuff Happen”
How so?
We’re seriously depleting the world’s anchovy population and leaving the penguins and South American seabirds with nothing to eat. These birds are dangerously close to starving because the anchovy and sardine populations have been decimated.
What can we do?
Strange as it may seem, you could eat more anchovies. This would raise the price of the fish and make anchovy fish feed more costly and less desirable to pig farmers. Also eat organic bacon from pigs raised on 100% agricultural feed. If you’re looking for the true organic meat products, make sure it’s grass-fed only.
Related: Pigs Instead of Pesticides - Interview of Steve Wozniak - The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer - Interview with Donald Knuth
Fermilab offers some drawing of scientists by seventh graders before and after a visit to Fermilab. Wonderful visuals.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
![]() |
![]() |
| I think of a scientist as very dedicated to his work. He is kind of crazy, talking always quickly. He constantly is getting new ideas. He is always asking questions and can be annoying. He listens to others’ ideas and questions them. | I know scientists are just normal people with a not so normal job. . . . Scientists lead a normal life outside of being a scientist. They are interested in dancing, pottery, jogging and even racquetball. Being a scientist is just another job which can be much more exciting. |
| by Amy | |
This is one of the more extreme ones but there are lots of other great comparisons. Very reminiscent of: Children’s view of Scientists in England.
Related: Scientists and Students - Kids in the Lab: Getting High-Schoolers Hooked on Science - Curious Cat Science and Engineering Search - Saving Fermilab - Matter to Anti-Matter 3 Trillion Times a Second
Science Tuesday: Back into the hornets nest is a thoughtful follow-up post on the decision of a scientist to vaccinate his child.
This is one of the examples of what is so good about blogs. Great content that probably would not be available but through a blog.
Related: Scientists Reconsider Autism - Autism, Science and Politics - posts on vaccination
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.
…
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

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:
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.
Related: 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics - photo, 1927 - Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science by David Lindley - 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics - posts on physics

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.”
(more…)

The Lemelson-MIT Prize awards $500,000 to mid-career inventors dedicated to improving our world through technological invention and innovation. Joseph M. DeSimone received the 2008 award.
Among DeSimone’s notable inventions is an environmentally friendly manufacturing process that relies on supercritical carbon dioxide instead of water and bio-persistent surfactants (detergents) for the creation of fluoropolymers or high-performance plastics, such as Teflon®. More recently, he worked on a team to design a polymer-based, fully bioabsorbable, drug-eluting stent, which helps keep a blocked blood vessel open after a balloon-angioplasty and is absorbed by the body within 18 months.
DeSimone’s newest invention is PRINT® (Particle Replication in Non-wetting Templates) technology, used to manufacture nanocarriers in medicine. At present, DeSimone’s Lab is vested in a variety of projects that also extend beyond medicine, including potential applications for more efficient solar cells and morphable robots. In 2004, DeSimone co-founded Liquidia Technologies with a team of researchers from UNC to make the technology available in the market. Liquidia is using the PRINT technology to develop precisely engineered nanocarriers for highly targeted delivery of biological and small molecule therapeutics to treat cancer and other diseases. DeSimone’s proposed applications for cancer treatment with the PRINT platform was instrumental in UNC landing a grant of $24 million from the National Cancer Institute to establish the Carolina Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence.
“You can do all the innovating you want in the laboratory, but if you can’t get it out of the university walls you do no one any good,” said DeSimone. He instills an entrepreneurial spirit in his students that focuses on the importance of commercializing technology and scientific inventions. One of DeSimone’s greatest accomplishments is his mentorship of more than 45 postdoctoral research associates, 52 Ph.D. candidates, six M.S. theses and 21 undergraduate researchers. Furthermore, he speaks to groups of high school students about the inventive process and encourages them to learn and explore areas that are less familiar to them to broaden their exposure to other disciplines.
A prolific inventor, DeSimone holds more than 115 issued patents with more than 70 new patent applications pending, and he has published more than 240 peer-reviewed scientific articles.
Related: Inspiring a New Generation of Inventors - $500,000 for Innovation in Engineering Education - Collegiate Inventors Competition - posts on inventors
Lack of electricity is a serious problem for vaccines and medicines that need to be cooled. It is hard to imagine that this is a problem, living in the USA, but this is still a problem today. As readers of this blog notice I really like appropriate technology solutions that provide real quality of life enhancements for hundreds of millions of people (which undoubtedly is influence by my father).
Related: Cooling with Clay Pots, Sand and Water - appropriate technology posts - Water and Electricity for All - Inspirational Engineer - Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) posts (great webcasts)
A Revolution That Began With a Kick by Amy Shipley:
Swimmers, coaches and scientists say it is impossible to pinpoint one explanation. They cite many contributing factors, ranging from professional training groups that have sprouted across the United States to greater access to underwater cameras and other advanced technology.
But some say the most significant breakthrough has been a revival of a swimming maneuver developed more than 70 years ago by one of the physicists who worked on the atomic bomb.
Though utilized for decades, the underwater dolphin kick had not been fully exploited by the swimming mainstream until Olympic megastar Michael Phelps and a few other stars began polishing it — and crushing other swimmers with it — in recent years.
Very interesting and another example of how good ideas are often ignored for a long time.
Schrader said Wilson, an alternate on the 1932 Olympic water polo team who studied fish propulsion at a Chicago aquarium, claimed to have shown the kick to Johnny Weissmuller, a training mate at the Illinois Athletic Club. “Weissmuller reproduced it perfectly, but was not impressed by it,” said Schrader in a phone interview, recalling a conversation with Wilson.
…
One of the first swimmers to turn heads with the underwater dolphin kick was David Berkoff, a Harvard graduate who became known for the “Berkoff Blastoff.” In 1988, Berkoff set several world records in the 100 backstroke by dolphin-kicking for 35 meters underwater at the start of the race.
Which goes to show you that you can gain advantages just by using the information that is available - your own innovation is not the only way to get ahead. Just doing a better job of adapting what others learn to your challenges can be very rewarding.
Related: Randomization in Sports - Baseball Pitch Designed in the Lab - Science of the High Jump
With the salmonella scare that has plagued tomatoes, Acheson has faced perhaps his biggest test—at least as far as outbreaks of illness go—since he assumed the newly created “food safety czar” post at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about a year ago.
That position was born amid a growing concern that the FDA couldn’t get a grip on food safety, as tales of food-borne illnesses multiplied. Now comes salmonella-laden tomatoes that have sickened at least 277 people nationwide, hospitalizing 43.
…
The FDA concluded that the tainted tomatoes most likely came from Mexico or a certain part of Florida. The agency managed to narrow down the possible origins of the tainted tomatoes largely by a process of elimination. Based on the timing of their growing seasons and tomato harvests, many states or countries could not be the source of the tomatoes that caused illnesses, so they were deemed safe sources.
Restaurants and food retailers say they are now sourcing tomatoes from places deemed safe by the FDA. The outbreak has been a particularly tough one to crack because it has been so widespread. Illness has shown up in people who frequented a variety of restaurants, and who bought tomatoes at myriad grocery stores.
Related: Science Fair Project on Bacterial Growth on Packaged Salads - Losing Consumers’ Trust in Food Safety - Virus Found to be One Likely Factor in Bee Colony Colapse Disorder - FDA May Make Decision That Will Speed Antibiotic Drug Resistance
|
|
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.
(more…)
Put a Little Science in Your Life By Brian Greene
These are the standard - and enormously important - reasons many would give in explaining why science matters.
But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable - a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations - for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth - not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.
Excellent article by the author of The Elegant Universe.
Related: String Theory is Not Dead - E = mc² - science books - Café Scientifique Directory
WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags
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.
…
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.
Related: Bacteria Survive On All Antibiotic Diet - Microbes May Use Chemicals to Compete for Food - Siemens Westinghouse Competition Winners 2005

The National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program aims to ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and to reinforce its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in the relevant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees.
This year NSF awarded 913 fellowships: which come with a stipend of $30,000 and $10,500 cost of education allowance. On the ASEE Science and Engineering Fellowship blog, that I manage in my full time job with the American Society for Engineering Education (the Curious Cat Science and Engineering blog is my own and not related to ASEE), we highlight awardees including: Sarah Lukes mechanical engineering graduate working on her PhD at Montana State University; Ben Safdi, engineering physics and applied mathematics dual major at Colorado University - Boulder; Henry Deyoung, computer science major at Carnegie Mellon University, Jennifer Robinson, computer science major at North Carolina State; Lydia Thé, biology major at Swarthmore; and Julia Kamenetzky, physics major at Cornell College.
Fellows from previous years include: Sergey Brin, H. David Politzer and Eric Maskin.
Related: Proposal to Triple NSF GFRP Awards and the Size of the Awards by 33% - Increasing American Fellowship Support for Scientists and Engineers - Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Directory
Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2008 powered by WordPress
USA High School Alumni