Author Archives: curiouscat

Ancient Crash, Epic Wave

The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.

Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean.
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Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Dr. Masse said, “and we’re not there yet.”

Wireless Power

Wireless energy could power consumer, industrial electronics

Soljacic realized that the close-range induction taking place inside a transformer–or something similar to it–could potentially transfer energy over longer distances, say, from one end of a room to the other. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, a power transmitter would fill the space around it with a “non-radiative” electromagnetic field. Energy would only be picked up by gadgets specially designed to “resonate” with the field. Most of the energy not picked up by a receiver would be reabsorbed by the emitter.

Global Engineering Education Study

Global Engineering Education Study includes a great deal of useful information. Universities partnering in the study include: Technische UniversitÃ¤t Darmstadt, Germany; Georgia Institute of Technology, USA; MIT, USA; Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China and University of Tokyo, Japan.

This unique collaboration will study the influence and importance of technological expertise and education on the competitiveness of nations, people, and companies. At the heart of this initiative is a comprehensive study designed to reflect a broad spectrum of topics dealing with all aspects of engineering and natural sciences.

Recommendations include:

Global competence needs to become a key qualification of engineering graduates
Transnational mobility for engineering students, researchers, and professionals needs to become a priority
Global engineering excellence depends critically on a mutual commitment to partnerships, especially those that link engineering education to professional practice
Research on engineering in a global context is urgently needed

How flowering plants beat the competition

How flowering plants beat out the competition on ancient earth:

as the world headed into a cooler, drier climate around 250 million years ago, the early seed-bearing plants had a distinct advantage over their simpler, spore-releasing relatives that then flourished in moist, warm swamps.

Seed-bearing plants also figured out better ways to get around. Some seeds sprout improbably elaborate barbs in order to snag a lift on passing animals. A significant number hitch a ride by growing a morsel called a elaiosome that entices ants to carry them off a few feet. Other seeds are textured or buoyant, so they can float away on wind or water.

The human appetite for seeds has resulted in new forms of dispersal as well. Thousands of years ago, people began collecting and cultivating nutrient-rich seeds, like corn, lentils, and oats, for food.

Prochlorococcus

She sees vistas in a tiny speck of life

Even to the most dedicated biologists, Prochlorococcus may appear to be an unpromising subject. “They have no features,” acknowledges Chisholm. “They just look like little black specks.” But she believes that these microbes are, in fact, a window onto a larger vista. A milliliter of ocean water can contain 100,000 Prochlorococcus cells.

“They’re the minimum form of life,” she says. “We’ve decoded their genome sequence and found that it’s made of 1,700 genes. That’s the smallest number of genes that can convert sunlight into life.”

Teaching Ideas

Learn . Create . Succeed is a blog by SolidWorks dedicated to assisting Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) instructors in incorporating SolidWorks into their course curriculum. The posts include ties to algebra, geometry, physics, and robotics.

Suggested by Marie Planchard via the Curious Cat Post Suggestion form.

Nanoscale Images Using an X-ray Laser

Scientists capture nanoscale images with short and intense X-ray laser

Using the free-electron laser at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Livermore scientists, as part of an international collaboration led by LLNL’s Henry Chapman and Janos Hajdu of Uppsala University, were able to record a single diffraction pattern of a nanostructured object before the laser destroyed the sample. A Livermore-developed computer algorithm was then used to recreate an image of the object based on the recorded diffraction pattern. This “lensless” imaging technique could be applied to atomic-resolution imaging because it is not limited by the need to build a high-resolution lens. The flash images could resolve features 50 nanometers in size, which is about 10 times smaller than what is achievable with an optical microscope.

Nanotechnology Research

Brave nano world by Nate Birt:

At the federal level, the National Nanotechnology Initiative has requested more than $1 billion for nanotechnology research and development in 2007. The initiative is a network of 25 federal organizations, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense, that fund nanotechnology research at their own labs and at universities around the country, including MU.

Former President Bill Clinton started the initiative in 2000, and it became a part of the federal budget in fiscal 2001. Back then, the federal government spent an estimated $464 million on nanotechnology

Science and Engineering Graduate Data from NSF

NSF presents a large amount of data on the Characteristics of Recent S&E Graduates: 2003. The data covers undergraduates and graduates in 2001 and 2002. The report shows 937,700 bachelor’s graduates (*682,200 in science fields; 112,300 in engineering; and 143,300 in health care). And 246,700 master’s graduates (117,000 science; 47,000 engineering; 82,700 health).

Median 2003 salary for 2001 and 2002 bachelor’s graduates:

all science: $32,000
all engineering: $50,000

Some of the specific areas median salaries: computer and information sciences $60,000; electrical/computer engineering $70,000 and industrial engineering $70,000.

2003 median salaries for 2001 and 2002 masters graduates:

all science: $45,000
all engineering: $65,000

* the report totals do not exactly add do to rounding estimates by NSF.

Old Viruses Resurrected Through DNA

Old Viruses Resurrected Through DNA by Carl Zimmer:

About 100,000 segments of human DNA are remarkably similar to retroviruses, a class of viruses that includes HIV. Retroviruses insert a copy of their genes into the genome of their host cell. Scientists estimate that 8 percent of the human genome is made up of this viral DNA, known as human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs.