Author Archives: curiouscat

3 “Moore Generations” of Chips at Once

HP nanotech design could be leap forward for chips by Therese Poletti

The scientists said their advance would equal a leap of three generations of Moore’s Law, a prediction formulated in 1964 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that forecast chip makers could double the number of transistors on a chip every couple of years. “This is three generations of Moore’s Law, without having to do all the research and development to shrink the transistors,” said Stan Williams, a senior fellow at HP in Palo Alto. “If in some sense we can leapfrog three generations, that is something like five years of R&D. That is the potential of this breakthrough.”
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HP researchers plan to start manufacturing prototypes of their chip design later this year. They also said they expect to see a high rate of defects in the finished products, but that the greater amount of defects will be compensated for by the ability of the circuitry to quickly route around the failed circuits. The model for their chip design is based on a 45-nanometer chip, but with much smaller wiring in the chicken-wire crossbars of 4.5 nanometers.

“Hopefully, by the middle of this year, we will have a real working chip that we have run through an HP fab,” Williams said. “Our goal is that by 2010, we will have something that we can give our customers to play with.”

Inspiring a New Generation of Inventors

Here is some information on a great program that I was forwarded by a blog reader. Please post your comments to the blog and feel free to suggest information for us to share using the share your ideas link on the left column. Inspiring a New Generation of Inventors

Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams is a national grants initiative of the Lemelson-MIT Program to foster inventiveness among high school students. InvenTeams composed of high school students, teachers and mentors are asked to collaboratively identify a problem that they want to solve, research the problem, and then develop a prototype invention as an in-class or extracurricular project. Grants of up to $10,000 support each team’s efforts. InvenTeams are encouraged to work with community partners, specifically the potential beneficiaries of their invention.

InvenTeams was launched in 2002 as a pilot program that awarded grants to three New England high school teams for the 2002-03 academic year. It has expanded each year since its inception, and in the fall of 2005, awarded up to 18 InvenTeams grants.

Our Science and Engineering links have some great info (though I do need to improve the organization when I get some time); we have added a link to this program to our: Science Education Link Directory. Please share your suggestions.

Water From Air

Magic water harvesting machine:

Amazing. A gizmo which sucks the air in, then sucks the water out of the air, and then spews out clean fresh water. 500 Gallons of it – a day.

Pretty cool. Getting clean water is a large problem throughout the world. Unfortunately this is not the solution yet – each machine costs $500,000. still for the right situations this is useful. FEMA bought 2.

Its precise workings aren’t public, but they use a chemical process similar to the one that causes salt to absorb moisture from the air (and clump up your saltshaker). The water-harvesting technology was originally the brainchild of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which sought ways to ensure sustainable water supplies for U.S. combat troops deployed in arid regions like Iraq.

Darpa gave millions to research companies like LexCarb and Sciperio to create a contraption that could capture water in the Mesopotamian desert. But it was Aqua Sciences, that was first to put a product on the market that can operate in harsh climates.

Helium-3 Fusion Reactor

Future In Fusion? by John Lasker:

Nevertheless, UW fusion researchers believe their plan could get civilization off fossil fuels. That’s if crews could return to the moon to mine for helium-3, super-heat it out of the lunar soil to process the gas, and return it to the Earth.
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But scientists and investors have taken notice. Nearly all of UW fusion research is privately funded. And meanwhile, with China, India, the European Space Agency and at least one Russian corporation all pursuing plans for a manned lunar base in the coming decades, there is increasing talk of a race to control this fuel, one shuttle load of which could theoretically power the United States for a year.
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Aftergood doesn’t believe a race with China for lunar helium-3 has begun. Yet a race to the moon against China — whether real or superficial — may be in NASA’s best interest, he said. “There are some who wish this would be the case — this race with China. They believe it would recapture the dynamic of the United States’ and Russia’s race to the moon,” he said.

This sounds pretty incredible to me and I find the claims of using fuel from the Moon economically to power our needs on Earth. Still it is interesting and just because it sounds fantastic does not mean it can’t be true. But I am skeptical.

Hispanic Engineering Students

A Future Engineer:

While they are the largest minority group in the United States at 14.5 percent of the population, only 4 percent of engineers in the workforce in this country are Hispanic. Just 7 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in engineering, 5 percent of master’s degrees and even fewer doctoral degrees are awarded to Hispanics
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To this end, several universities host summer camps to expose young Hispanics and other minorities to STEM subjects. New Mexico State University’s College of Engineering, for instance, brings 180 middle and high school students to campus each summer for intense math and science workshops. “We target demographics that we really want to push engineering on,” says Castillo, who became interested in engineering himself at a summer camp at rival University of New Mexico. “It’s been an extremely successful program for us.”

Edinburgh University $115 Million Stem Cell Center

Stem cell centre plan confirmed

Additional Scottish Executive funding of Â£24m will allow Edinburgh University to develop the Â£59m centre in collaboration with Scottish Enterprise. The Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine (SCRM) is thought to be equalled only one in Kobe, Japan. Prof Ian Wilmut, formerly of the Roslin Institute, will be the director.

The state-of -the-art facilities are expected to house 220 academic researchers and will include a centre for “scale-up” development and manufacture of cells. Space will also be made available for commercial regenerative medicine. It is hoped that the SCRM, which will be part of the new Centre for Biomedical Research at Edinburgh’s Little France, will create about 560 jobs and generate Â£18.2m per year for the Scottish economy.

via: Univ. of Edinburgh Launches $115 Million Dollar Stem Cell Research Center

Concrete Houses 1919 and 2007

Robo-builder threatens the brickie [the broken link was removed]

Is the writing on the wall for the brickie? Engineers are racing to unveil the world’s first robot capable of building a house at the touch of a button. The first prototype — a watertight shell of a two-storey house built in 24 hours without a single builder on site — will be erected in California before April.

Brickie?: a search seems to indicate that is a bricklayer.

By building almost an entire house from just two materials – concrete and gypsum – the robots will eliminate the need for dozens of traditional components, including floorboards, wooden window frames and possibly even wallpaper. It may eventually be possible to use specially treated gypsum instead of glass window panes. Engineers on both projects say the robots will not only cut costs and avoid human delays but liberate the normal family homes from the conventional designs of pitched roofs, right-angled walls and rectangular windows.

Edison patented a process for constructing concrete buildings in 1908 (1917 issued). Photo is of a concrete Edison house being constructed in one day in Union, NJ on October 9th, 1919. See more photos of concrete houses and much more at the great National Park Service Edison photo gallery [sadly the NPA broke the link and it has been removed].

Harvard Plans Life Sciences Campus

Harvard Unveils Plans for 250 Acre Stem Cell and Life Sciences Campus:

During the first 20 years of the expansion, Harvard would build 4 million to 5 million square feet of buildings and create at least 5,000 jobs, university officials said. Construction in Allston could begin this summer when Harvard hopes to break ground on a 500,000-square-foot (46,450-square-metre) science complex that will house the school’s stem-cell researchers and other institutes. The science complex, university officials said, would be the nucleus for new interdisciplinary research and is expected to go a long way toward boosting Boston’s economy by encouraging partnerships with biotechnology firms that may displace the region’s long-fading manufacturing base.

5,000 jobs is a huge number (even looking out 20 years). Manufacturing is still a huge economic factor (for the USA and the world) but investing in creating science and engineering centers of excellence is critical in determining where strong economies and good jobs will be 30+ years from now. They don’t explain what those 5,000 jobs are, but it seems that thousands could be for science and engineering graduates. The value of that to Boston’s economy is huge.

Evolved for Cancer?

Evolved for Cancer? by Carl Zimmer:

In cancer, cells play the role of organisms. Cancer- causing changes to DNA cause some cells to reproduce more effectively than ordinary ones. And even within a single tumor, more adapted cells may outcompete less successful ones.
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Tumor suppressor proteins are among the most effective defenses against cancer. Studies suggest that some of these proteins prevent cancer by monitoring how a cell reproduces. If the cell multiplies in an abnormal way, the proteins induce it to die or to slip into senescence, a kind of early retirement. The cell survives, but it can no longer divide. Tumor suppressor proteins play a vital role in our survival, but scientists have recently discovered something strange about them: in some respects, we would be better off without them.

Scientists discover new class of RNA

These new RNAs are named after their distinctive features: Each molecule contains 21 chemical building blocks (or nucleotides), and each begins with the chemical uridine, represented by the letter U (the only RNA nucleotide not also found on DNA). In addition, each of the 5,000 different 21U-RNA molecules comes from one of two chromosomal regions.

Further, “we can predict where additional 21U-RNA genes might reside,” says Bartel, who is also a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Combining these predictions with the 5,000 (21U-RNAs) that we experimentally identified, we suspect that there are more than 12,000 different 21U-RNA genes in the genome.” Because each gene typically produces a unique 21U-RNA, a very large diversity of molecules is made.

RNA description from the Nobel Prize site:

When an organism needs to use the data stored in the genome, e.g. to build components of a new cell, a copy of the required DNA part is made. This copy is called RNA and is almost identical to DNA. Just like DNA, RNA is an abbreviated form of a chemical name which in the case of RNA is ribonucleic acid. Unlike the double stranded DNA, RNA is only made up of a single strand. Furthermore, the base T, thymine, is replaced by U, uracil in RNA. This RNA string is used by the organism as a template when it builds protein molecules, sometimes called the building blocks of the body. For example, your muscles and hair are mostly made up of proteins.

Related: DNA-RNA-Protein Introduction