Author Archives: curiouscat

Backyard Wildlife: Fox

This photo shows a fox in my backyard from a few months ago. It liked to rest on that tree stump for a couple days – I have not seen it since. Other wildlife spotted include: possum, raccoon, rabbits, turtle, many birds including hawks and/or falcons, robins, starlings, doves, butterflies, bats, lightning bugs, all sorts of bees, ants, praying mantis, and many more birds. And I see several cats prowl the yard frequently. Maybe I can view CatCam photos of the cats prowls ðŸ™‚ I added a Cat category to the blog today: showing all the cat related posts.

Another Humanoid Robot

promet3 - Humanoid Robot

Kawada Industries press release on HRP-3 Promet Mk-II (link to Google translation from Japanese to English). The robot is waterproof and does not need the power backpack most other humanoid robots require. It can work in real environments (small spaces, uneven flooring…) – see links for videos and more photos.

They refer to the pose to the left as the work pose. So I guess the device in its hand is a power tool not an advanced laser weapon – though it does resemble such a weapon when I look (maybe that shows my bias).

robot Watch story (link to the Google translation of Japanese to English) – many photos and links to more info.

Kawada Industries HRP-2″Promet”,G on the previous version (with several videos):

The total robotic system was designed and integrated by Kawada Industries, Inc. together with Humanoid Research Group of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Yasukawa Electric Corporation provided the initial concept design for the arms and AIST 3D Vision Research Group and Shimizu Corporation provided the vision system.

HRP-2’s height is 154 cm and mass is 58 kg including batteries. It has 30 degrees of freedom (DOF) including two DOF for its hip. The cantilevered crotch joint allows for walking in a confined area. Its highly compact electrical system packaging allows it to forgo the commonly used “backpack” used on other humanoid robots.

Using Bacteria to Carry Nanoparticles Into Cells

Bacteria ferry nanoparticles into cells for early diagnosis, treatment

Researchers at Purdue University have shown that common bacteria can deliver a valuable cargo of “smart nanoparticles” into a cell to precisely position sensors, drugs or DNA for the early diagnosis and treatment of various diseases. The approach represents a potential way to overcome hurdles in delivering cargo to the interiors of cells, where they could be used as an alterative technology for gene therapy, said Rashid Bashir, a researcher at Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center.

The researchers attached nanoparticles to the outside of bacteria and linked DNA to the nanoparticles. Then the nanoparticle-laden bacteria transported the DNA to the nuclei of cells, causing the cells to produce a fluorescent protein that glowed green. The same method could be used to deliver drugs, genes or other cargo into cells.

“The released cargo is designed to be transported to different locations in the cells to carry out disease detection and treatment simultaneously,” said Bashir, a professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Because the bacteria and nanoparticle material can be selected from many choices, this is a delivery system that can be tailored to the characteristics of the receiving cells. It can deliver diagnostic or therapeutic cargo effectively for a wide range of needs.”

Harmless strains of bacteria could be used as vehicles, harnessing bacteria’s natural ability to penetrate cells and their nuclei, Bashir said. “For gene therapy, a big obstacle has been finding ways to transport the therapeutic DNA molecule through the nuclear membrane and into the nucleus,” he said. “Only when it is in the nucleus can the DNA produce proteins that perform specific functions and correct genetic disease conditions.”
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Robot Navigation Using Prediction

Guessing robots predict their environments, navigate better (they broke the link so I removed it. what phb removes news release web pages. They really need to find some students that actually know what the internet is and replace whoever they have running their site now.)

Engineers at Purdue University are developing robots able to make “educated guesses” about what lies ahead as they traverse unfamiliar surroundings, reducing the amount of time it takes to successfully navigate those environments. The method works by using a new software algorithm that enables a robot to create partial maps as it travels through an environment for the first time. The robot refers to this partial map to predict what lies ahead.
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Future research will extend the concept to four robots working as a team, operating with ant-like efficiency to explore an unknown environment by sharing the mapped information through a wireless network. The researchers also will work toward creating an “object-based prediction” that recognizes elements such as doors and chairs, as well as increasing the robots’ energy efficiency.

Building an Electricity Producing Wind Turbine

How I home-built an electricity producing Wind turbine:

Several years ago I bought some remote property in Arizona. I am an astronomer and wanted a place to practice my hobby far away from the sky-wrecking light pollution found near cities of any real size. I found a great piece of property. The problem is, it’s so remote that there is no electric service available.
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Whether you build your own, or buy one, you will need some sort of controller for your wind turbine. The general principal behind the controller is that it monitors the voltage of the battery(s) in your system and either sends power from the turbine into the batteries to recharge them, or dumps the power from the turbine into a secondary load if the batteries are fully charged (to prevent over-charging and destroying the batteries). The schematic and write-up on the above web page does a good job of explaining it.
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My ultimate goal is to have enough power from wind and solar sources to power a small cabin and observatory on my remote property that will only be occupied occasionally and won’t have much need for electricity. If you need a bigger system, then you need someone with experience with bigger systems to help you out.

Very interesting home engineering project. Related: Awesome CatCam – Engineering at Home – The sub-$1,000 UAV Project

Re-engineering Engineering Education

Re-engineering the engineer, Business 2.0’s take on the Olin education experiment:

You don’t have to spend much time at Olin to sense that something important has changed. Instead of the difficult, and often boring, math and physics classes of the old weed-’em-out-early engineering schools, you find courses like Engineering 2250: User Oriented Collaborative Design. In a typical session, you might encounter kids dressed in pajamas, sweats, shorts, and sandals and an atmosphere that feels more like an art studio than a classroom. On one spring day, a couple of couches and armchairs occupied the center of the room, and a student sat cross-legged atop a table, philosophizing about the lives and demands of makeup artists. Students in UOCD don’t build actual products, touch any technology, or even work a single math problem.

“It doesn’t look like engineering,” admits Benjamin Linder, the assistant professor who helped create the class. Olin’s curriculum is centered on courses like UOCD and Design Nature — the class that produced those climbing critters. Miller, 57, a thin, bald, engaging administrator who is prone to analogies, likens the traditional curriculum to a music school where students learn history and theory but never touch their instruments. Olin, by contrast, introduces project-based courses to its students early and often.

Olin also insists that students spend more than a quarter of their time studying business and entrepreneurship, humanities, and social sciences. “Olin really bends over backward to get the students to recognize the interactions between these disciplines,” says Constance Bowe, who studied the college as a researcher at Harvard Medical International. To help instill the entrepreneurial spirit, the college created the Olin Foundry, in which the school houses and partially funds as many as a dozen student startups.

Students also experience the business world firsthand through Olin’s senior consulting program for engineering. This year 12 corporations — including Boeing, Boston Scientific, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM — paid Olin a combined $700,000 to have groups of five seniors serve as consultants for a full academic year on some of the companies’ pressing technological and engineering problems. “By the time they’re seniors, they’re nearly operating at a professional level,” says David Barrett, the Olin associate professor who heads the program. “It gives them authenticity they wouldn’t get in a classroom.”

Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation

Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation:

Humans are very good at detecting patterns, but rather poor at detecting randomness. We expect random incidents of cancer to be spread homogeneously, when in fact true randomness results in random clusters, not homogeneity. It is a mistake for an experiment to consider a pool of 47,000 possibilities, and then only report on the 7 cases that seem interesting.
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A proper experiment states its hypothesis before gathering evidence and then puts the hypothesis to the test. Remember when you did your seventh grade science fair experiment: you made up a hypothesis first (“Hamsters will get fatter from eating Lucky Charms than Wheaties”) and then did the experiment to confirm or refute the hypothesis. You can’t just make up a hypothesis after the fact to fit the data.

This is an excellent article discussing very common errors in how people use data. We have tendencies that lead us to draw faulty conclusions from data. Given that it is important to understand what common mistakes are made to help us counter the natural tendencies.

EasyJet EcoJet

The easyJet ecoJet: to cut CO2 emissions by 50% by 2015:

Rear-mounted “open-rotor” engines offer unrivalled environmental performance for short-haul flying due to their higher propulsive efficiency. However, there are significant difficulties in fixing such a large engine under a wing of a narrow-body aircraft, making rear-mounting of the engines the optimum solution.
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In addition to engine efficiency and weight reduction, one of the primary methods of reducing fuel burn is by reducing drag. Conventional jet aircraft currently suffer increased drag from turbulent airflow over their wings. A wing profile that allows the easyJet ecoJet to maintain laminar flow over a significant proportion of the wing will greatly reduce cruise drag.

Giving the wing a slight forward sweep increases the proportion of laminar flow over the wing (as the clean airflow from the wingtip tends to flow to the wing root in contrast to the turbulent air from the fuselage being dragged across the wing with conventional reverse sweep). In addition, it improves the stall performance of a laminar flow wing. Minimising drag is imperative in the design of glides and most gliders with laminar flow wings also have a slight forward sweep to the wing.

Scanning Electron Microscope Rose Art

Rose Petal Installation Inspired by Science:

Carnegie Mellon University School of Art senior Lisa Huyett has created a large-scale installation titled “S.E.M. Rose” (Scanning Electron Microscope Rose), a re-creation of the surface of a rose petal, at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. The artist rendered the magnified image of a rose petal using a scanning electron microscope while a student in the university’s interdisciplinary Art and Biology course.
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Scanning electron microscopy uses a beam of electrons to reveal the nanostructures of material surfaces at up to one million times their normal size. Under the guidance of Joseph Suhan, electron microscopist at the Electron Microscope Facility in the university’s Mellon College of Science, Huyett magnified a rose petal 500 times, revealing bristly, knob-like structures that make up the velvety appearance of the petal.

Universities allowing students to be inspired by science is great. While creating scientists and engineers is important it is also important to let students studying other area to engage with science. I also enjoy the art inspired by science, including previous posts: Art of Science 2006 – Get Your Own Science Art – Art of Science at Princeton

Scientific Review

This is the way science should always work:

Here’s the short version. Dr. Hall made a mistake in the software he wrote to do something. Another scientist, Dr. Otto, saw the mistake, contacted Dr. Hall and told him about it, and the two of them worked together to confirm that it was in fact a mistake. Recognizing the error, Dr. Hall has now retracted the paper and is working to ensure that people quickly learn that the conclusions are in error. Knowing that will keep others from using Dr. Hall’s original conclusions in their own work, which means that they won’t be starting from a position that’s wrong.

And that, ladies and gents, is exactly how this thing called “science” is supposed to work.

Great post. Interesting comments too. It is not any easier for scientists (than anyone else) to admit mistakes, but scientists view advancing scientific thought as the most important factor. By exposing papers to colleagues the community’s collective effort is brought to bear on finding any weaknesses and to building on the new knowledge to advance scientific understanding further.