Author Archives: curiouscat

The Science Barge

The Science Barge is a prototype, sustainable urban farm and environmental education center. It is the only fully functioning demonstration of renewable energy supporting sustainable food production in New York City. The Science Barge grows tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce with zero net carbon emissions, zero chemical pesticides, and zero runoff.

From May to October 2007, the Science Barge hosted over 3,000 schoolchildren from all five New York boroughs as well as surrounding counties as part of our environmental education program. In addition, over 6,000 adult visitors visited the facility along with press from around the world.

NY Sun Works: The Science Barge

Limited growing space means growing upwards, with stacked pots for strawberries, and vines that grow up to the ceiling and are then folded over to grow back down. Instead of using pesticides, pests are kept in check using ladybugs, parasitic wasps, and other predators as needed. Environmentally friendly substrates such as rice husks, coconut shells, and Earth Stone (recycled glass), are used to aerate the root systems for the plants.

Most fascinating of all was the Aquaponic system for providing nutrients to the plants using catfish. Nutrients from the plants and worms feed the catfish, who produce nitrogen-rich waste, which feeds the plants. Tilapia were originally used, but eventually replaced with catfish, which were better suited to the climate. The result of all this effort is a bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables given out to all the children who visit the barge.

Printing Buildings

Projections indicate costs will be around one fifth as much as conventional construction. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.
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The machine will cost between $500K to $700K for average size (2000 sq ft — 200 m2) detached houses. This is not much given that a concrete pump truck is now $300k-$400K. Note that with one machine numerous homes can be built. The first commercial machines to be available this year, 2008. The machine will be collapsible to form into an easy truck load. The unloading and setup will take between 1-2 hours.

Behrokh Khoshnevis is the visionary who has been driving this concept. He is the Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT) and Director of Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at USC.

Very cool stuff. Related: Open Source 3-D Printing – A plane You Can Print – $35 million to the USC School of Engineering – Contractor Warned NYC About Crane – Sandwich Brick, Reusing Waste Material

Antimicrobial Wipes Often Spread Bacteria

Can we ‘wipe out’ hospital MRSA?

Led by microbiologist Dr Jean-Yves Maillard, the study into the ability of antimicrobial-surface wipes to remove, kill and prevent the spread of such infections as MRSA, has revealed that current protocols utilised by hospital staff have the potential to spread pathogens after only the first use of a wipe, particularly due to the ineffectiveness of wipes to actually kill bacteria.

The team is now calling for a ‘one wipe – one application – per surface’ approach to infection control in healthcare environments.
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The research, supported by a grant from the Wales Office of Research and Development for Health and Social Care, involved a surveillance programme observing hospital staff using surface wipes to decontaminate surfaces near patients, such as bed rails, and other surfaces commonly touched by staff and patients, such as monitors, tables and key pads, which were later replicated in the lab.

A three-step system was also developed to test the ability of several commercially available wipes to disinfect surfaces contaminated with strains Staphylococcus aureus, including MRSA and MSSA. The system tested the removal of pathogens, the transmission of them, and the anti-microbial properties of wipes.

It was found that the wipes were being applied to the same surface several times and used on consecutive surfaces before being discarded. It also revealed that although some wipes can remove higher numbers of bacteria from surfaces than others, the wipes tested were unable to kill the bacteria removed. As a result, high numbers of bacteria were transferred to other surfaces when reused.
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“On the whole, wipes can be effective in removing, killing and preventing the transfer of pathogens such as MRSA but only if used in the right way. We found that the most effective way is to prevent the risk of MRSA spread in hospital wards is to ensure the wipe is used only once on one surface.”

Engineering Education in India

Report recommends steps to improve engineering education in India

The number of engineering doctorates awarded in India each year is about 1,000 which is less than one per cent of the total engineering graduate degrees awarded every year. The international comparison showed that, in most countries, the number of PhD degrees awarded annually range between 5-9 per cent of the engineering graduate degrees awarded. Involvement of industry to sponsor special doctoral fellowships was one of the ways to attract good students to the PhD programme, the report noted.

Majority of engineering graduates not employable: Experts

On the other hand, tier-I and tier-II colleges, namely the IITs, IISc and the NITs produce , less than 1% of engineering graduates, 20% M.Techs and 40% PhD in India

The issue is not the best universities which are excellent. But the huge numbers of graduates are not receiving that type of education.

Cause of Super Heated Ground

Unexplained ground heat burns boy’s feet

There was no fire, but the ground was hot enough in a Colorado Springs park to burn through an eight year old boy’s shoes and cause at least second degree burns on his feet.
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After the boy was treated and sent to the hospital firefighters took surface readings that showed hard to believe temperatures. According to Chief Matthews, “The highest temperature we got at the surface of the soil with the sun shining on it was 800 degrees, which is pretty darn significant. Radiant heat from the sun will get it up around 150, 160 degrees, but not to that level.”

Firefighters have taped off the area and are monitoring it until they can figure out what’s causing the ground to get so hot. Tests by hazmat team members show there are no dangerous gases. Crews have cut a fire-line around the area to prevent the heat from potentially starting a wildfire.

Early assessments show the problem area is coal dust. Neighbors say the area has appeared blackened as long as they can remember. What has to be determined is if it was dumped here years ago or if there’s something happening underground. Crews from the state geological are on the way to figure out an explanation.

So can you figure it out? I was happy I could (if not I didn’t I would just leave off this sentence).

Cause of super-heated ground found

What they found has a relatively simple solution according to Kurt Schroeder with Colorado Springs Parks, “What the state representatives indicated to us is that the coal spoil that’s been on top of the ground for years and years reacts with the sun, heat of the sun and it spontaneously combusts.”

Because it’s coal refuse likely dumped at this spot years ago, the recommendation from geologists is capping it. Crews will dump two feet of fill over the spot to keep the sun causing the coal remnants from igniting again.

Good old scientific thinking leads to understanding what happens in the world around us. See more posts with scientific explanations for what we experience.

Mars Sunset

Photo from 19 May 2005 by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars.

Still Just a Lizard

Still just a lizard by PZ Myers

in 1971, scientists started an experiment. They took 5 male lizards and 5 female lizards of the species Podarcis sicula from a tiny Adriatic island called Pod Kopiste, 0.09km2, and they placed them on an even tinier island, Pod Mrcaru, 0.03km2, which was also inhabited by another lizard species, Podarcis melisellensis. Then a war broke out, the Croatian War of Independence, which went on and on and meant the little islands were completely neglected for 36 years, and nature took its course. When scientists finally returned to the island and looked around, they discovered that something very interesting had happened.

The original population of P. sicula was still present on Pod Kopiste, so we have a nice control population. These lizards are small, fast, insect-eaters in which the males defend territories. Sadly, P. melisellensis on Pod Mrcaru had been extirpated. So we had a few innocent casualties of the experiment.

The transplanted P. sicula thrived and swarmed over the island of Pod Mrcaru, but they were different, and they had evolved in multiple ways.

The original P. sicula were insectivores who occasionally munched on a leaf; approximately 4-7% of their diet was vegetation. The P. sicula of Pod Mrcaru, though, had adopted a more vegetarian diet: examining their gut contents revealed that 34% of their diet was plants in the spring, climbing to 61% in the summer…and much of this diet was hard-to-digest stuff, high in cellulose. This is a fairly radical shift.

There were concomitant changes. The lizards’ skulls were wider, deeper, and longer, and they had stronger bites — a necessity for chomping off bits of tough plants, instead of soft mosquitos. Instead of chasing bugs, they’re browsing stationary plants, and their legs are shorter and they are slower. Population densities are higher. The Pod Mrcaru lizards no longer seem to defend territories, so there have been behavioral changes.

Still just a lizard, I know.

Now here’s something really cool, though: these lizards have evolved cecal valves. What those are are muscular ridges in the gut that allow the animal to close off sections of the tube to slow the progress of food through them, and to act as fermentation chambers where plant material can be broken down by commensal organisms like bacteria and nematodes — and the guts of Pod Mrcaru P. sicula are swarming with nematodes not found in the guts of their Pod Kopiste cousins.

Engaging the YouTube Generation in Hands-on Science

Cherlyn Anderson is one of eight Einstein Fellows spending this academic year at NSF. In her other life, Anderson is an eighth-grade science teacher in South Carolina. She has used an experiment involving Mentos candy and Diet Coke as a teaching tool. The accompanying video offers a demonstration of the experiment, and discusses its benefits for eighth-grade science students.

Follow the link for a webcast. Somewhat ironically the NSF headline mentions YouTube but fails to take advantage of one of the things that has made YouTube (and others sharing videos: TED…) so successful. The ability to embed the videos on web sites, blog posts… The technical quality of the video is very nice (more pixels than YouTube videos).

Materials Engineers Create Perfect Light “sponge”

Materials engineers create perfect light “sponge”

The team designed and engineered a metamaterial that uses tiny geometric surface features to successfully capture the electric and magnetic properties of a microwave to the point of total absorption.

“Three things can happen to light when it hits a material,” says Boston College Physicist Willie J. Padilla. “It can be reflected, as in a mirror. It can be transmitted, as with window glass. Or it can be absorbed and turned into heat. This metamaterial has been engineered to ensure that all light is neither reflected nor transmitted, but is turned completely into heat and absorbed. It shows we can design a metamaterial so that at a specific frequency it can absorb all of the photons that fall onto its surface.”
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The metamaterial is the first to demonstrate perfect absorption and unlike conventional absorbers it is constructed solely out of metallic elements, giving the material greater flexibility for applications related to the collection and detection of light, such as imaging, says Padilla, an assistant professor of physics.

Nobel Laureate Initiates Symposia for Student Scientists

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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