Author Archives: curiouscat

China Invests More in Science and Engineering

China to invest 6 bln yuan in scientific infrastructure

The Chinese central government will invest at least 6 billion yuan (750 million U.S. dollars) in major scientific infrastructure projects in the next five years.

China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced Thursday that the 12 major projects include an accelerator-based neutron source, a large area space telescope, marine research vessels, a space remote sensing system and other key projects.

The NDRC will invest a further 5 billion yuan (625 million U.S. dollars) in the third phase of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ (CAS) innovation project, building or upgrading 50 national engineering institutes and 100 national labs, and supporting 300 national authorized enterprise tech centers.

Protein Knots

graphic of human ubiquitin hydrolase

Knotty problem puzzles protein researchers by Anne Trafton:

Knots are rare in proteins–less than 1 percent of all proteins have any knots, and most are fairly simple. The researchers analyzed 32,853 proteins, using a computational technique never before applied to proteins at this scale.

Of those that had knots, all were enzymes. Most had a simple three-crossing, or trefoil knot, a few had four crossings, and the most complicated, a five-crossing knot, was initially found in only one protein–ubiquitin hydrolase.

That complex knot may hold some protective value for ubiquitin hydrolase, whose function is to rescue other proteins from being destroyed–a dangerous job.

Photo: MIT researchers recently found that human ubiquitin hydrolase, shown here, has the most complicated knot ever observed in a protein. The simplified diagram, inset, shows the knot in the protein, which crosses itself five times. Larger image.

Purdue Graduate Fellows Teach Middle School Science

Purdue to break ground on teaching center for improving science and engineering education.

The $10 million Discovery Learning Center, slated for completion in 2008, will focus on teaching techniques and environments conducive to learning. Also a focal point will be the way people learn best. An emphasis will be placed on science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, also known as the STEM disciplines.
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Wilella Burgess, managing director of the Discovery Learning Center, said projects like GK12 help make science seem more reachable for students in the primary grades.

“A lot of these kids don’t know there is such a thing as graduate school and it lets them meet scientists and grad students and learn that they’re not all weird, nerdy people,” she said. “It also lets classroom teachers have the access to cutting edge research.”

The Purdue Discovery Learning Center Gk-12 program brings graduate students to middle schools. Graduate “fellows will develop lesson plans and teach interdisciplinary-focused experiments geared toward science in everyday life.”

Yale to Provide Videos of Courses Online

Yale to Make Select Courses Available on the Internet

Yale University is producing digital videos of selected undergraduate courses that it will make available for free on the Internet through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project has received $755,000 for an 18-month pilot phase. The project will create multidimensional packages—including full transcripts in several languages, syllabi, and other course materials—for seven courses and design a web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007. If the venture proves successful, Yale hopes to significantly expand its online offerings over the next few years. The new venture joins a growing number of university-based initiatives that use the Internet to make educational materials widely available.

Good news. I hope, and expect that, they will do a better job with the web usability of their offering than others providing educational material online have recently.

Related: Open Educational Resources (OER) from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation – Open Course Ware from Japan – Open Access Legislation – Berkeley and MIT courses online

Sports Science Open Access Journal

Sport Science is a Peer-Reviewed Site for Sport Research (open access). An interesting recent publication: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Rowing Faster by Stephen Seiler:

Improvements in rowing technique have increased boat speed by reducing boat yaw, pitch and roll, and by improving the pattern of force application. New tools for real-time measurement and feedback of boat kinematics and force patterns are opening new approaches to training of individual rowers and to selection of rowers for team boats.

They also moderate a email list with items of interest including academic positions in areas such as: Mechanical Engineering, focusing on Biomechanics; Sports Physiologist; Exercise and Sport Science.

How Does a Missile Turns in Flight?

An interesting and detailed explanation of the dynamics of missile flight: Missile Control Systems:

In order to turn the missile during flight, at least one set of aerodynamic surfaces is designed to rotate about a center pivot point. In so doing, the angle of attack of the fin is changed so that the lift force acting on it changes. The changes in the direction and magnitude of the forces acting on the missile cause it to move in a different direction and allow the vehicle to maneuver along its path and guide itself towards its intended target.

String Theory

image of book cover: The Trouble With Physics

String theory: Hanging on by a thread? by Dan Vergano:

String theory is on the ropes. After decades of prominence as the key to physics’ elusive “theory of everything,” challengers say the hypothesis is unraveling.

Why? Because there haven’t been experiments to prove it — and there don’t seem to be any on the horizon.

“The interplay with experiments is essential, and string theory just doesn’t have that,” says physicist Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next
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Schwartz, one of the fathers of modern string theory, replies by e-mail that experiments will verify string theory in the future. The big question is how much energy an experiment would have to pound into a collision between particles to reveal strings, he adds. Many physicists hope that Europe’s Large Hadron Collider facility will offer some answers, starting in 2007.

Ultimately, Carroll says, “the only way for someone to kill string theory will be to come up with a better one.”

The The Elegant Universe:Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brain Greene is a great read.

Engine on a Chip – the Future Battery

micro engine - battery replacement

Engine on a chip promises to best the battery

MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight can, powering laptops, cell phones, radios and other electronic devices.
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The MIT team has now used this process to make all the components needed for their engine, and each part works. Inside a tiny combustion chamber, fuel and air quickly mix and burn at the melting point of steel. Turbine blades, made of low-defect, high-strength microfabricated materials, spin at 20,000 revolutions per second — 100 times faster than those in jet engines.

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340 Years of Royal Society Journals Online

The complete archive (from 1665) of the Royal Society journals, is freely available electronically for two months. You can try using the Journal archive – it sure does have spectacular content, if only you can unearth it:

The archive contains seminal research papers including accounts of Michael Faraday’s groundbreaking series of electrical experiments, Isaac Newton’s invention of the reflecting telescope, and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking.

Note to anyone with scientific content of high value that decides to allow internet access. Please contact Google and have them help you make it available online. They don’t have any official program to do so, but for collections of enough merit I can’t imagine you would have any trouble getting some Google engineer to take on the project.
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2006 MacArthur Fellows

photo of Edith Widder photo of Kenneth Catania photo of Linda Griffith
25 New MacArthur Fellows Announced. Photos from left to right: Edith Widder, Kenneth Catania and Linda Griffith.

My statement from last year seems worth repeating: “I think the fellowships are a great idea: give money to people who have done excellent work. I am not sure of the motivations of the MacArthur Foundation, but if it were me I would trust by providing funds to those people they would (as a group, not every single person) take advantage of those funds to create great advances for all of humanity.”

Each fellow will receive $500,000 over the next 5 years to do with as they please. Among the winners are scientist and engineers, including:

Edith Widder – biologist and deep-sea explorer, “Working with engineers, she has built a number of unique devices that enable scientists to see the ocean in new ways, including HIDEX, a bathyphotometer that measures how much bioluminescence there is in the oceans, and LoLAR, the most sensitive deep-sea light meter.”

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