Author Archives: curiouscat

Innovation, America and Engineering: NAE Grand Challenges Summit

Innovation, America and Engineering: NAE Grand Challenges Summit in Raleigh, North Carolina:

Friday morning in Raleigh, a group of engineers from industry, academia and even government met to discuss the threat of America losing its global lead in innovation. The panel discussion was part of a Summit on the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges…

Jeff Wadsworth, CEO and president of Battelle Memorial Institute, noted that high school graduation rates have fallen from about 86 percent in the Baby Boomer generation to about 72 percent today. He compared that to a 96 percent graduation rate in Denmark, 92 percent in Japan and the fact that China graduates three engineering students for every one that we do. It’s not news that international competition is stiffening against us, but the statistics he presented about how the U.S. measures up to foreign countries in K-12 metrics was gut-wrenching.

“Our historic lead in secondary education has disappeared,” Wadsworth said. “And as a leader of a large organization, I worry about education.”
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Another panelist, Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) said the country was at a critical point in history. “We are in an economic war,” he said. “The future of our country rests on our ability to use STEM to solve problems.” Kauffman is the only sitting senator in Congress to have worked in the engineering field, and he repeatedly drummed out a message that policy could drive a solution to the STEM crisis.
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A third panelist – John Chambers, chairman and CEO of CISCO – said he believed changing teaching methods in K-12 settings to be more collaborative, projects-oriented and skills-mastery oriented would be a good starting point.
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the deans of the engineering colleges at both Duke and NC State universities announced today a new nationwide program targeting attracting school-aged children to the STEM fields. The Grand Challenge K-12 Partners Program will lean on engineering colleges throughout the U.S. to be resource hubs for K-12 students and teachers in their region.
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Three more NAE Grand Challenge Summits are scheduled to take place next month, in Phoenix, Chicago and Boston. A fourth is scheduled for Seattle in May.

The importance of innovation and engineering education to long term economic success is one thing I believe strongly in and have written about here: Engineering Economic Benefits, Techonolgy Innovation Global Economy Changing, Centers of Technical Excellence and Economic Power. And is one reason I work for the American Society of Engineering Education (this blog is my own and not associated with ASEE).

Norway Reduces Infections by Reducing Antibiotic Use

Norway conquers infections by cutting use of antibiotics

Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway’s public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutting back severely on the use of antibiotics.

Now a spate of new studies from around the world prove that Norway’s model can be replicated with extraordinary success, and public health experts are saying these deaths — 19,000 in the U.S. each year alone, more than from AIDS — are unnecessary.

“It’s a very sad situation that in some places so many are dying from this, because we have shown here in Norway that Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus [MRSA] can be controlled, and with not too much effort,” said Jan Hendrik-Binder, Oslo’s MRSA medical advisor. “But you have to take it seriously, you have to give it attention and you must not give up.”

The World Health Organization says antibiotic resistance is one of the leading public health threats on the planet. A six-month investigation by The Associated Press found overuse and misuse of medicines has led to mutations in once curable diseases like tuberculosis and malaria, making them harder and in some cases impossible to treat.

Now, in Norway’s simple solution, there’s a glimmer of hope.

Antibiotics Breed Superbugs Faster Than Expected

We continue to endanger ourselves by using antibiotics inappropriately. This is one of many things that happen when the public at large is ignorant about science and ignores scientific evidence. I don’t believe people want to put other people’s lives in danger. But our behavior in the face of the evidence has us doing just that. I believe because we don’t value science rather than because we don’t care about putting others (and ourselves) in danger. Antibiotics Breed Superbugs Faster Than Expected

Bacteria don’t just develop resistance to one drug at a time, but to many — and at accelerated rates. That’s because antibiotics boost bacterial production of free-radical oxygen molecules that damage bacterial DNA. Repairs to the DNA cause widespread mutations, giving bacteria more chances to randomly acquire drug-resistant traits.
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Drug resistance is a serious public health concern. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 70 percent of 1.7 million infections acquired in hospitals every year are resistant to at least one drug. Those infections annually kill 99,000 Americans — more than double the number that die in car crashes.

Drugs that once destroyed almost any bacteria now kill only a few, or don’t work at all. In the case of some drugs, like Cipro, the decline is dramatic: Where in 1999 it worked against 95 percent of E. coli, it treated only 60 percent by 2006. Against lung infection-causing Acinobacter, its effectiveness fell by 70 percent in just four years.

Though drug resistance is ultimately inevitable, conventional wisdom holds that antibiotics consumed at suboptimum doses hasten the process. Bugs that would have succumbed to a larger dose live to multiply, pushing the strain as a whole closer to resistance. That happens when a prescription goes unfinished, or when antibiotics used on farms enter food and water at low levels.
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Of the 35 million pounds of antibiotics consumed annually in the United States, 80 percent goes to farm animals. Much of it is used to treat diseases spread by industrial husbandry practices, or simply to accelerate growth. As a result, farms have become giant petri dishes for superbugs, especially multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which kills 20,000 Americans every year – more than AIDS.

Alarming cases of farm-based MRSA and other diseases led to a proposed Congressional law restricting the use of agricultural antibiotics. That bill, supported by the American Medical Association and American Public Health Association, is opposed by farm lobbyists and remains stuck in committee.

Researchers Explain How Rotifers Thrive Despite Forgoing Sex

Bdelloid rotifers haven’t had sex for at least thirty million years. Most asexual animals are doomed to extinction. The excellent show, Science Friday, looks at the extraordinary adaptations that allow rotifers to thrive sex-free.

For millions of years, the rotifers have reproduced asexually, flying in the face of an idea known as the Red Queen Hypothesis, which states that without the advantage of sexual reproduction, more-rapidly evolving parasites and predators will eventually doom the asexual species. Now, the researchers studying the tiny organism say that its ability to dry up and blow away to greener pastures may have given the rotifers a hidden tactical edge in this evolutionary war.

The webcast provides a nice overview of the research. Every week Science Friday provides many such interesting reviews of recent scientific research.

What Are Rotifers?

Rotifers are small, mostly freshwater animals, and are amongst the smallest members of the Metazoa — that group of multicellular animals which includes humans, and whose bodies are organized into systems of organs.
Most rotifers are about 0.5mm in length or less, and their bodies have a total of around a thousand cells. This means that their organ systems are a greatly simplified distillation of the organ systems found in the bodies of the higher animals.

A typical rotifer might have a brain of perhaps fifteen cells with associated nerves and ganglia, a stomach of much the same number, an excretory system of only a dozen or so cells, and a similarly fundamental reproductive system. They have no circulatory system. It is an anomaly that despite their complexity, many rotifers are much smaller than common single-celled organisms whose world they share.
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they are able to survive long periods — even perhaps hundreds of years — in a dried or frozen state, and will resume normal behaviour when rehydrated or thawed.
Secondly, they exhibit what biologists call cell constancy — they grow in size not by cell division, but by increase in the size of the cells which they already have.

Robot Playing Table Tennis

This video shows the robot has a ways to go to become a decent ping pong opponent. But progress is being made. How soon before I can have fun competing with some robot basketball players?

TOPIO can play table tennis with human beings. It has a head, two hands and six legs. It can hit the ball, calculate scores and express feelings upon losing or winning a game. Four high-speed cameras help TOPIO identify the trajectory of the ball and accurately return shots. TOPIO knows how to hit an incoming ping pong ball when it has traveled only 20 cm from the opponents paddle.

The made-in-Vietnam robot TOPIO captured special attention at the International Robot Exhibition (IREX) held in Tokyo in late 2007.

Researchers Find Switch That Allows Cancer Cells to Spread

Researchers discovered of a specific protein called disabled-2 (Dab2) that switches on the process that releases cancer cells from the original tumor and allows the cells to spread and develop into new tumors in other parts of the body.

The process called epithelial-mesenchymal transdifferientiation (EMT) has been known to play a role in releasing cells (epithelial cells) on the surface of the solid tumor and transforming them into transient mesenchymal cell: cells with the ability to start to grow a new tumor.

This is often the fatal process in breast, ovarian, pancreatic and colon-rectal cancers.

Searching to understand how the EMT process begins, Ge Jin, who has joint appointments at the Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine and the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, began by working backwards from EMT to find its trigger. The researchers found that a compound called transforming growth factor-ÃŸ (TGF-ÃŸ) triggers the formation of the Dab2 protein. It was this protein, Dab2, that activated the EMT process.

He discovered that when the researchers knocked out Dab2, EMT was not triggered. “This is the major piece in cancer research that has been missing,” Jin said. Most tumors are epithelial in origin and have epithelial markers on their surface. The EMT process takes place when some of those cells dislodge from the surface and undergo a transformation into a fibrous mesenchymal cell maker with the ability to migrate.

“EMT is the most important step in this process,” said Jin. He was part of a six-member research team, led by Philip Howe from the Department of Cancer Biology at the Lerner Research Institute in a National Institute of Cancer-funded study. The research group studied the biological processes that initiated the cancer spread by using cancer cells in animal models.

“If we can understand the signaling pathway for modulating EMT, then we can design drugs to delay or halt EMT cells and control tumor progression,” Jin said. Beyond cancer, Jin said. “The process we discovered may lead to understanding how other diseases progress.”

Snow Leopard Playing in the Snow in Ohio

Photo by Karen Schiely/Akron Beacon Journal

While many people were getting tired of the massive snowfall over the last week others are having fun, including some animals having Snow fun at the Akron Zoo

Shanti, a 1-year-old snow leopard that took up residence at the Akron Zoo last fall, thinks the snowfall and subfreezing temperatures are great fun, said David Barnhardt, director of marketing and guest services.

”It may be one of her first snowfalls,” Barnhardt said of the youngster that came to the zoo from The Binder Park Zoo in Battle Creek, Mich. ”She’s literally doing back flips,” he said.
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Also taking advantage of the snow and a respite from zoo visitors were red pandas, who thoroughly enjoyed playing outside, Barnhardt said.

My furnace chose the start of this snowfall, to break so I am surviving a few days without central heating. Doing so reminds me of the conveniences I take for granted – like being warm in the winter. It also makes me think that it would be nice to have fur like a snow leopard for a few days.
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$100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability

[Sadly the video was made private so I removed it. It is disappointing how often people fail to follow decade old usability advice to make internet urls permanent]

According to the United Nations, more than 40 percent of Africans live in poverty, subsisting on less than US$1 a day. As co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit social enterprise KickStart, Fisher develops and markets moneymaking tools such as low-cost, human-powered irrigation pumps that improve the lives of small-scale rural farmers – the majority of the poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

“These poor rural farmers have one asset: a small plot of land; and one basic skill: farming. The best business they can pursue is irrigated farming,” Fisher explained. “Once they employ irrigation, the farmers can grow and sell high-value crops, like fruits and vegetables. They can grow year-round and reap four or five harvests, instead of waiting for the rain to grow a staple crop once or twice a year.”

Engineering Majors Hold 8 of Top 10 Highest Paid Majors

In August, employers responding to a NACE survey reported plans to trim their college hiring, hiring 7% for 2010 graduates from 2009. In addition, just 29% of those employers said they would increase their starting salary offers for the Class of 2010.

Most, but not all majors, experienced salary decreases. In fact, as a group, graduates with computer-related degrees (computer programming, computer science, computer systems analysis, and information sciences/systems) posted a 6.1% increase – the highest increase reported, which pushed their average up from $56,128 to $59,570. Among those earning a computer science degree, the average rose 4.8% to $61,205.

As a whole, engineering graduates also fared well. Their average salary offer as a group is up by 1.2% to $59,245. Although that increase is modest, engineering majors account for eight of 10 top-paid bachelor’s degrees in the Winter 2010 Salary Survey.

Major	Average Salary Offer
Petroleum Engineering	$86,220
Chemical Engineering	$65,142
Mining & Minteral Engineering (incl. geological)	$64,552
Computer Science	$61,205
Computer Engineering	$60,879
Electrical/Electronics & Communications Engineering	$59,074
Mechanical Engineering	$58,392
Industrial/Manufacturing Engineering	$57,734
Aerospace/Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering	$57,231
Information Sciences & Systems	$54,038

Crow Using a Sequence of Three Tools

This crow was the first animal observed using 3 tools in the correct sequence, without explicit training.