Author Archives: curiouscat

Digital Camera Photographer of the Year 2006

The Digital Camera Photographer of the Year 2006 site has a large number of great photos. The potter wasp photo above took 3rd place in the animals and nature category.

World Robot Olympiad

This year 195 teams from 17 countries (mainly from Asia) will participate in the World Robot Olympiad next week. The World Robot Olympiad brings together young people to develop their creativity and problem solving skills through challenging and educational robot competitions.

Brunei’s bid to make history at World Robotics Olympiad

Microbe Food

Microbes May Use Chemicals to Compete for Food

Microbes may compete with large animal scavengers by producing repugnant chemicals that deter higher species from consuming valuable food resources—such as decaying meat, seeds and fruit, a new study suggests.
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Hay hopes the research will make ecologists think more critically about the broad role of microbes in the ecosystem. Microbes are often omitted or relegated to a minor role in food web diagrams, but they should be depicted as direct competitors with larger animals, he said.

Regular Exercise Reduces Fatigue

Regular Exercise Plays A Consistent And Significant Role In Reducing Fatigue:

Health professionals encourage regular exercise to prevent or improve symptoms of conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity, but the scientific evidence on whether exercise increases or reduces fatigue had never been reviewed quantitatively. O’Connor, kinesiology professor Rod Dishman and lead author Tim Puetz, who recently completed his doctoral work at UGA, analyzed 70 randomized, controlled trials that enrolled a total of 6,807 subjects. They found strong support for the role of exercise in reducing fatigue.

For myself this seems true. But what seems true for me doesn’t mean much.
Continue reading →

Australia Student Formula One Engineering Competition

On November 8 2006 four students from Laverton Secondary College, Victoria, Australia, won the national final of the Formula One Competition held in Brisbane. They will now represent Australia internationally. In 2005 students from the same school, Laverton Secondary College, were runners up in the national competition. The National winners of that year went on to win the international final. Laverton students and staff will be keenly watching their team’s performance in the international event which will be held in Melbourne this time. Last year’s international competition was held in the UK.

Comment sent to us from Jan Van Dalfsen

Mini-F1s take over Technology Park:

“We give them a kit that has a rectangular shaped piece of balsa wood inside it, then the task for them is to design the car in the context of the piece of balsa wood, using CAD software, and having that car machined in a computer-controlled milling machine and then they can test it in wind tunnels and all sort of other exciting gear,”

Sea Urchin Genome

Sea Urchin photo

Sea Urchin Genome Reveals Striking Similarities to Humans by Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic News:

The scientists identified more than 23,000 genes in the 814 million base pairs, or “letters,” of DNA code taken from the sea urchin.

The sea urchin represents the first sequenced genome from the echinoderms, which are the closest known relatives of the chordates, the group that includes vertebrates, animals with spinal columns. The genome includes analogs to many essential human genes that were previously thought to be exclusive to vertebrates.
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The eyeless sea urchin also has genes associated with taste, smell, hearing, balance—and surprisingly, even vision.

Engineering Outsourcing Effects

A Business Week article discusses two Duke studies of Engineering jobs in the USA and world: Outsourcing: Job Killer or Innovation Boost?

One finds that companies are going offshore because they are desperate for talent and are shifting more complex work to nations such as India and China for strategic reasons. The other Duke study concludes that the offshoring phenomenon is all about cost and that there is no shortage of engineers in the U.S. Therefore, the labor shift is coming at the expense of U.S. jobs.

How Our Brain Resolves Sight

Brain Pathway Brings Order to Visual Chaos

The world you see around you appears perfectly stationary, even though your eyes dart back and forth two to three times every second in little hops called saccades. For more than a century researchers have assumed that the brain must keep track of the impulses that cause these tiny motions, so as to subtract their effect from our visual awareness. Now researchers have identified a circuit in the monkey brain that seems to play this role.

The Silent Aircraft Initiative

Conceptual aircraft image

Silent Aircraft gives young engineers a flight of fancy:

these students are not undergraduates. They are budding young engineers, aged 13 to 18, taking part in a three-month design challenge with Cambridge’s Engineering Department to tackle aircraft noise. Working in teams, the students – from schools and colleges across the country, from Bristol to Sheffield – are doing a project related to the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s Silent Aircraft Initiative. This initiative links researchers at Cambridge and MIT with industrial partners to design a radically quieter passenger plane, and includes research into ways to reduce the noise from the undercarriage – one of the major noise sources on a landing aircraft. So this challenge has tasked these young students to design, and make a model of, a quieter undercarriage.

The Silent Aircraft Initiative (SAI) team has succeeded in coming up with a radically quieter plane. Crucially, the SAX-40 is also 35% more fuel-efficient than any airliner currently flying.

Microbes on Earth

Tiny microbes play big role (broken link removed Feb 2007 – shame on the Detroit Free Press):

Like explorers of old, scientists are venturing into the immense but little-known realm of the microscopic organisms that dominate our planet.

“It’s an entire world that most of us have no idea about,” said Alan Leshner, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Countless trillions of microbes — mostly bacteria and a recently discovered kingdom of one-celled creatures known as archaea — inhabit every cranny of the globe. They reshape their environment, make life possible and sometimes destroy it.