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Curious Cat Science and Egineering blog full tag cloud
Students attend Powhatan’s first-ever engineering camp
The group even enjoyed a presentation from a NASA engineer, who spoke of his experience working on the Mars rover.
These engineering camps help kids enjoy their naturally inquisitive minds - which unfortunately they don’t get to do often enough.
Related: Toy and Entertainment Engineering Camp - Science Camps Prep Girls - Turtle Camps in Malaysia - Engineering Activities: for 9-12 Year Olds
Geek Pad provides programming, engineering and science students paper with a subtle grid to help organize notes and draw graphs. I don’t exactly see this as revolutionary as the web site claims, but you might find it useful. Plus I like that it was created by a college junior pursuing a B.S. in electronics engineering.
Related: Reusable Paper - Students Create “Disappearing” Nail Polish - Easy File Sync Over the Internet
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.
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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.
Related: Bacteria Survive On All Antibiotic Diet - Microbes May Use Chemicals to Compete for Food - Siemens Westinghouse Competition Winners 2005
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.
Related: Goldwater Science Scholarships - Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology - Student Algae Bio-fuel Project
Area educators attribute the growth to dramatic fundraising by Minnesota technology companies desperate to encourage future engineers and a statewide push to improve science and technology education. “It’s a long-term investment,” said Dr. Stephen Oesterle, senior vice president of medicine and technology for Medtronic, who pushed other companies to donate.
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The competition started in New Hampshire in 1992. Now, it includes more than 1,500 teams from around the world. Founded by entrepreneur Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, FIRST stands for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.”
Photo by By Bruce Bisping, Star Tribune, from left - Mindy Blom, Schanell Gauna, Andrade and teacher Jill Johnson
Related: National Underwater Robotics Challenge - Northwest FIRST Robotics Competition - Robots Wrestling, Students Learning - Rhode Island FIRST - 2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events
2008 Intel Science Talent Search
Fast forward to Intel STS 2008, where the 17-year-old senior from Durham, North Carolina, presented research focused on identifying stage II colon cancer patients at high risk for recurrence and the best therapeutic agents for treating their tumors. Whereas the standard method of characterizing tumors relies on visual information (such as size, degree
of metastasis, and microscopic structure), Shivani developed a “50-gene model” which uses gene expression to link multiple genetic events that characterize various tumor types to more accurately predict the recurrence of colon cancer. Additionally, Shivani’s model can be used to identify drugs that may be most effective in treating each patient.
In 2006 she attended the Davidson Institute, summer program at Davidson College and received the Davidson Fellows Scholarship.
And now I can segue to the Davidson Wildcats victories in the NCAA basketball tournament last weekend (I graduated from Davidson, by the way, and grew up in Madison). Davidson will play the Wisconsin Badgers on Friday. My picks are doing pretty well.
Related: 2006 Intel Science Talent Search - Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2007 - NPR report on 2008
A novel way to treat cancer has won the top honor at the 2007 Collegiate Inventors Competition, an annual program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation. Ian Cheong of Johns Hopkins University was announced as the grand prize winner, receiving a $25,000 prize, during a ceremony last night on the campus of the California Institute of Technology.
This year’s winners also include John Dolan of the University of California, San Francisco in the graduate category for his work on the Dolognawmeter, a device to measure the effectiveness of painkillers, and Corey Centen and Nilesh Patel of McMaster University in the undergraduate category for their work on creating a CPR assist device. The McMaster team and Dolan each received a $15,000 prize from the competition, which is sponsored by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Abbott Fund.
The Collegiate Inventors Competition has recognized and encouraged undergraduate and graduate students on their quest to change the world around them for 17 years. Entries for 2008 are due by 16 May 2008 and must be the original idea and work product of the student/advisor team, and must not have been (1) made available to the public as a commercial product or process or (2) patented or published more than 1 year prior to the date of submission to the competition. The entry submitted must be written in English.
The invention, a reduced-to-practice idea or workable model, must be the work of a student or team of students with his or her university advisor. If it is a machine, it must be operable. If it is a chemical, it must be complete with evidence of successful application of the idea. If it is a new plant, color photographs or slides must be included in the submission. If a new or original ornamental design for an article of manufacture is submitted, the entire design must be included in the application. In addition, the invention should be reproducible.
Related: Inventor TV Shows - Engineering a Better Blood Alcohol Sensor - Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge - Schoofs Prize for Creativity
Ian Cheong, 33, arrived at Johns Hopkins University from his native Singapore prepared to focus on cancer therapy. Drugs used in cancer treatment routinely kill the healthy cells as well as the cancer cells because they are potent but nonspecific. Cheong took on the task of finding a way to make the cancer drugs more specific. He injected bacterial spores into the subject which made their way to oxygen-poor areas within cancerous tumors. Then, Cheong put a cancerfighting drug in lipid particles and injected those liposomes into a subject. The germinated bacterial spores also secrete a protein that makes liposomes fall apart when the drug-containing liposomes are in the proximity of the tumors, and the drug is released only in those specific areas. Cheong, originally educated as a lawyer, received his Ph.D. in cell and molecular medicine from Johns Hopkins and is currently working on postdoctoral research. His advisor, Bert Vogelstein, receives a $15,000 prize.
The idea for this post was submitted through our post suggestion page.
About a year ago I posted that UC-Berkeley Course Videos were available on Google Video. Well now the
Berkeley YouTube site includes even more videos of Berkeley lectures. They include those listed on Google Video that I mentioned last year such as Physics for Future Presidents and Search Engines (by Sergey Brin) and more.
They currently have 201 videos posted. Hopefully they will add many more.
Does anyone else have the annoying delay on pages with YouTube videos? My entire browser locks up for probably 15 seconds on average now for any page that has an embedded YouTube video (not always but very often now). I find this very annoying.
Related: Science and Engineering Webcast Directory - More Great Webcasts: Nanotech and more - Google Technology Talks
$10 million perk aims to help prove engineering is the profession to pursue (link broken)
“As a business leader of a company like Garmin, and as an immigrant, I feel it should be a real concern for this country,” Kao said. “I don’t think it’s good for a country to be a pure service business.” The education initiative is the somewhat private billionaire CEO’s first significant endowment in the Kansas City area. “Compared to Asian countries, the career of engineer is somewhat overlooked” in the United States, Kao said. “Young kids don’t aspire to be engineers.”
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The endowment from the Kao Family Foundation will be used to fund 100 scholarships a year, offering students $5,000 annually. It will be tied in with Garmin’s internship program, offering 75 or more summer jobs that include a furnished apartment and health and dental benefits.
Good. Related: Increasing American Fellowship Support for Scientists and Engineers - Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships - Engineering Internships - $35 million to the USC School of Engineering
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRF) is now accepting applications (through early November). The NSF GRF is the largest and most prestigious graduate fellowship program for the sciences in the USA. Approximately 1,000 fellowships, which cover tuition and pay a $30,500 stipend for 3 years, will be awarded again this year. Previous winners include Sergey Brin, Google co-founder (he list winning in his 3 paragraph bio on Google’s site).
The main site for the NSF GRFP includes the solicitation with details on applying and eligibility etc.. I can’t figure out how you find the application from the main site but here is the link to apply for the fellowship.
Advice is available online for applying for the fellowship: How to Win a Graduate Fellowship, Advice for Applicants to the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the University of Missouri provides a guide for completing an NSF FRF application.
(more…)
Huge amount of University of California Berkely webcasts of course lectures. Subscribe to RSS feeds and listen to podcasts or listen online.
Courses include: General Biology, Solid State Devices and Introductory Physics. Course websites include handouts for the lectures.
A great open access resource.
I can’t believe I have mentioned MIT open courseware before but a search didn’t find anything. MIT’s effort is an excellent resource, many on science and engineering: Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, etc..
MIT also includes the excellent: Visualizing Cultures - a gateway to seeing history through images that once had wide circulation among peoples of different times and places by John Dower (author of National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II) and Shigeru Miyagawa.
Excellent article: The Olin Experiment by Erico Guizzo:
And if the curriculum is innovative, the school itself is hardly a traditional place: it doesn’t have separate academic departments, professors don’t get tenured, and students don’t pay tuition - every one of them gets a $130 000 scholarship for the four years of study.
Find out more about the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
Building a Better Engineer by David Wessel:
We share more thoughts on Olin’s efforts to improve engineering education on our other blog.
“Protecting America’s Competitive Edge” Legislation Proposal
Proposals include:
Related Posts
Most lucrative college degrees by David Ellis, CNNMoney.com:
The data reflects, college seniors in most majors are experiencing an increase in starting-salary offers, according to a quarterly survey published by the National Association of Colleges & Employers’ (NACE). 83 private and public schools were included in this survey.
Last year 6 of the to 7 highest paid degrees were in engineering (computer science was in 4th place). The graphic to the left leaves off: computer engineering, aerospace engineering and industrial engineering.
NACE press release on salary data
Related Links:
An inexpensive, modular solar-energy technology that could be used to heat water and generate electricity (see photo) won $12,500 and took first place in both the Schoofs Prize for Creativity and Tong Prototype Prize competitions, held Feb. 9 and 10 during Innovation Days on the UW-Madison College of Engineering campus.
In a package about the size of a small computer desk, the winning system uses a flat Fresnel lens to collect the sun’s energy and focus it onto a copper block. Then a unique spray system removes the energy from the copper block and converts it into steam, says inventor Angie Franzke, an engineering mechanics and astronautics senior from Omro, Wisconsin. The steam either heats water for household use or powers a turbine to generate electricity.
Other 2006 Schoofs Prize for Creativity winners include:
* Second place and $7,000 — William Gregory Knowles, for the OmniPresent Community-Based Response Network, a personal, business or industrial security system that draws on networked users and devices to more efficiently verify burglar alarms, fire alarms or medical emergencies.
* Third place and $4,000 — Garret Fitzpatrick, Jon Oiler, Angie Franzke, Peter Kohlhepp and Greg Hoell for the Self-Leveling Wheelchair Tray, a stowable working surface for wheelchairs that self-levels, even when the wheelchair is tilted or reclined up to a 45-degree angle.
Google 2006 Anita Borg Scholarship for female computer science and computer engineering students.
A group of female undergraduate and graduate student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. The scholarship recipients, selected from the finalists, will each receive a $10,000 scholarship for the 2006-2007 academic year.
Eligibility:
* be entering their senior year of undergraduate study or be enrolled in a graduate program in 2006 - 2007 at a university in the United States.
* be Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field majors.
* be enrolled in full-time study in 2006 - 2007.
* maintain a cumulative GPA of at least 3.5 on a 4.0 scale or 4.5 on a 5.0 scale or equivalent in their current program.
“Last year we awarded 23 scholarships; this year we’d like to do more.”
Apply - Deadline: 20 Jan 2006
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