Author Archives: curiouscat

RI FIRST

Ocean State to enlist all high schools in robotics challenge

tarting next year, state officials say, students at all 67 of Rhode Island’s public, charter and career and technical high schools will have a chance to participate in the FIRST Vex Challenge, a robot-building competition. The announcement last week makes the Ocean State the first to involve all its public high schools in the challenge, which involves building a robot able to complete a specific set of tasks.
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Throughout the challenge, students must maintain an engineering notebook to track their progress, successes and challenges. During the build period, teams work as a group to brainstorm solutions, design a robot to do various tasks, and build and test their designs. The projects culminate in competitions designed to be fun, high-energy, sports-like events with judges and awards.

FIRST is an exciting program we have mentioned before: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST). Dean Kaman (R&D Magazine’s 2006 Innovator of the Year) founded the program and it continues to do a great job of capturing the natural desire for people to learn and create. Learn about regional events this school year.

UK Young Engineers Competitions

Young Engineers is a organization in the United Kingdom that supports engineering events and competitions. Established in 1984, in 2005 there were 1,100 active clubs with over 18,000 club members (36% female).

The site is packed with information on events and especially photos. See the Young Engineer for Britain Galleries and Robotic Games.

$10 Million X Prize for DNA Decoding

X Prize for Genomics

The $10 million X PRIZE for Genomics prize purse will be awarded to the first Team that can build a device and use it to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less, with an accuracy of no more than one error in every 10,000 bases sequenced, with sequences accurately covering at least 98% of the genome, and at a recurring cost of no more than $10,000 per genome.

Teleportation Science

First Teleportation Between Light and Matter

The goal was to transfer, or teleport, the quantum state of a second light beam onto the cloud.

To do so, the group mixed a second, weaker laser pulse with the strong laser and split the superimposed beams into two arms. A detector in one arm measured the sum of the beams’ amplitudes and a detector in the second arm measured the difference between their phases.

Not exactly Star Trek… yet… 🙂

Scientists teleport two different objects

Academic Positions in Singapore

A friend shared this with me and I decided to post the opportunities here. The National University of Singapore is looking for a Head of Department and faculty in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Feel free to apply directly, or let me know and I can put you in touch with my friend.

The National University of Singapore is ranked in the top 25 universities in the world by the Times (newspaper in London). The top 10 are:

Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge University
Oxford University
Stanford University

Continue reading →

Monarch Travels

Fly Away Home:

The butterfly that goes from Canada to Mexico and partway back lives six to nine months, but when it mates and lays eggs, it may have gotten only as far as Texas, and breeding butterflies live only about six weeks. So a daughter born on a Texas prairie goes on to lay an egg on a South Dakota highway divider that becomes a granddaughter. That leads to a great-granddaughter born in a Winnipeg backyard. Come autumn, how does she find her way back to the same grove in Mexico that sheltered her great-grandmother?

A great question and interesting science. Students can help track the monarchs and other migrating species (bald eagles, robins, hummingbirds, whooping cranes…).

To test their ability to reorient themselves, Dr. Taylor has moved butterflies from Kansas to Washington, D.C. If he releases them right away, he said, they take off due south, as they would have where they were. But if he keeps them for a few days in mesh cages so they can see the sun rise and set, “they reset their compass heading,” he said. “The question is: How?”

Nobel Prize in Chemistry – 2006

Roger Kornberg, Stanford University, has recieved the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription.

Forty-seven years ago, the then twelve-year-old Roger Kornberg came to Stockholm to see his father, Arthur Kornberg, receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1959) for his studies of how genetic information is transferred from one DNA-molecule to another. Kornberg senior had described how genetic information is transferred from a mother cell to its daughters. What Roger Kornberg himself has now done is to describe how the genetic information is copied from DNA into what is called messenger-RNA. The messenger-RNA carries the information out of the cell nucleus so that it can be used to construct the proteins.

The Nobel Prize organization provides more information (foolishly the Nobel site broke the link so I have removed it – when will people learn to do a decent job of running a web site?) on his work:
Continue reading →

Discoveries by Accident

‘Failed’ experiment produces a bacterial Trojan horse by Katie Weber. Interestingly the usefulness of Penicillin, the most popular bacteria fighting agent, was discovered by accident (and then a smart scientist learning from the accident and applying that knowledge to creating an incredibly useful medication).

As he was puzzling out why what should have been a routine procedure wouldn’t work, he made a discovery that led to the creation of a new biological tool for destroying bacterial pathogens – one that doesn’t appear to trigger antibiotic resistance.

The discovery also led to the startup of a promising new biotechnology firm that has already brought Wisconsin a dozen new, high-paying, highly skilled jobs.

This is yet another example of the power of scientists and engineers to boost the economy and society at large.

2006 Nobel Prize in Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 goes to: John C. Mather, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot, University of California at Berkeley. More information, the Nobel Prize does an excellent job of providing additional details to the public. Other award programs, grant providers, museums, science societies… should learn from them, this is the right way to promote science and engineering in an internet age.

The experiment for which George Smoot was responsible was designed to look for small variations of the microwave background in different directions. Minuscule variations in the temperature of the microwave background in different parts of the universe could provide new clues about how galaxies and stars once appeared; why matter in this way had been concentrated to specific localities in the Universe rather than spreading out as a uniform sludge. Tiny variations in temperature could show where matter had started aggregating. Once this process had started, gravitation would take care of the rest: Matter attracts matter, which leads to stars and galaxies forming. Without a starting mechanism however, neither the Milky Way nor the Sun or the Earth would exist.

2006 Nikon Small World Photos

photo of Transgenic Nicotiana benthamiana plant

Photos (left, Transgenic Nicotiana benthamiana plant. right, Diatom – unicellular algae) from the from the 2006 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. The deadline for next year is April 30, 2007.