Author Archives: curiouscat

Nanofibers Knit Severed Neurons Together

Hamster Study Shows Nanofibers Knit Severed Neurons Together, Restore Vision by David Biello, Scientific American:

“We have healing of the brain, which we’ve never seen before. We have axons growing through the center of the cut, which we’ve never seen before, and we have axons connecting to the target tissue,” Rutledge notes. “If we could use something like this to mitigate the damage caused by cutting the brain with a knife, that would be great.” The research appears online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Fixing Engineering’s Gender Gap

Fixing Engineering’s Gender Gap by Vivek Wadhwa, Business Week

We can debate whether an engineering gap between the U.S. and India and China exists, but among U.S. engineers there is an indisputable gender gap — fewer than 20% of engineering graduates are women, according to the National Science Foundation. Perhaps a simple solution to maintaining American competitiveness is to encourage more women to enter engineering.

I agree. We need to do a better job of taking advantage of what women engineers can bring to our economy. By taking sensible actions (see some of the related posts below) we can create a system that produces more women engineers and we will benefit from that result.

According to the National Science Foundation, women make up only 5.2% of tenured engineering faculty. Students felt that they had no one to turn to for help and guidance. One student said she felt disadvantaged “when it comes to being an engineer without being like a man.”

Swimming Ants

Scientists discover swimming ants

North Queensland scientists have discovered a new type of ant, believed to be the only species that can live, swim and navigate under water.
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The ants nest in submerged mangroves and survive by hiding in air pockets and then swimming to the surface.
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“I was actually working with a film crew working on insects in the mangroves and they wanted to film one of these ants and I said, ‘Well, lets put it on a rock in a puddle of water and that’ll stop it going away and then you’ll be able to film it,’ and the ant promptly just leapt off the edge of the rock and swam across the water and disappeared.

“We were sort of dumbfounded.”

Dr Robson says it is amazing that the ants can survive in such a hostile environment.

“We’ve been doing a lot of studies on their foraging behaviour and there’s a lot of things that eat them, so when they’re swimming, fish will sometimes eat them, mud skippers will eat them, crabs will attack them,” he said.

It is great to see experts can still be so suprised by nature.

Unique northern ants gain global attention

Engineer Revolutionizing Icemakers

Dartmouth engineer revolutionizing the icemaker business

Technology developed at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering is about to revolutionize the $1 billion icemaker business. The invention is called pulse electro-thermal de-icing (PETD).

PETD inventor, Victor Petrenko, professor of engineering at Dartmouth states: “In fact, we can safely say that this technology can increase an icemaker’s production capacity by 70 percent while decreasing its energy consumption by up to 30 percent.”

Petrenko’s invention could ultimately transform the entire $40 billion refrigeration-air conditioning industry which, according to Petrenko, has struggled with the challenge of keeping cold evaporator coils free of frost and ice. Dartmouth’s PETD technology has proven its ability to de-ice these coils in seconds using a fraction of the energy required by conventional coil defrosters.

“In addition to this,” says Petrenko, “there are many other equally exciting applications for PETD in the works, such as for de-icing buildings and bridges, car windshields, airplanes, windmills and ships, and power lines.”

Innovative Technology and Engineering Education

The Laboratory for Innovative Technology and Engineering Education (LITEE) at Auburn University is funded by the NSF: National Dissemination of MultiMedia Case Studies that Bring Real-World Issues Into Engineering Classrooms.

The mission statement is: Develop and disseminate innovative instructional materials that bring real-world issues into classrooms, using multi-media information technologies and cross-disciplinary teams.

One of the results of their efforts is the Journal of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education (STEM).

The mission seems like a worthy goal. Like other such NSF funded efforts though I wish the web sites offered much more for students and teachers. I think NSF (or others interested in funding such efforts) needs to look at the gap between the potential to use the internet to meet such goals and what has been done to date. I think there is a huge gap between what could be done effectively, and for a reasonable price (for NSF or whoever funds the creation of the material), and what I have been able to find online.

To me these materials should be available for download online without a fee and targeted for teachers and students. That is a feasible goal and a method that most completely meets the mission.

The NSF is funding many excellent concepts with good results (see examples below). Still the opportunity is there for these efforts to be much more effective with a better use of the internet in my opinion. I think there would be great benefit to funding several grants that would then serve as advisers and provide technical support to creating a much richer result for teachers and students. There are obviously challenges with how to do this and how to coordinate the efforts but the potential benefits are huge.

If I were allocating funds I would set this up in a way that the primary grants (projects like LITTE and those listed below) included funds that was to be used for services from these “technical support and advisers.” Then those getting the primary grants could chose which of the providers they wanted to use to provide the service (they should essentially work for those getting the primary grants). In order to use those funds in any other way they would have to demonstrate they were effectively using the internet already (and the expectations would be for a much better use than any I have seen thus far for this NSF grants).

Previous posts about similar NSF funded efforts:

The Future is Plastics

Polymer science for everyone: Case School of Engineering faculty, students show that plastics can be interesting—and lots of fun. World of polymers brought to kids at Cleveland Museum of Natural History event.

“Do you guys do birthday parties?”

That was the question a mother of four young girls asked Case School of Engineering professors Christoph Weder and Stuart J. Rowan as they brought the intricate world of polymers to a whole new audience visiting the Cleveland Museum of Natural History on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, January 16.
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Finally, undergraduate student Eric Giles, postdoctoral researcher Michael Schroeter and graduate student Wengui Weng highlighted the potential of polymeric materials in high-tech applications with their presentation, titled “The Future is Plastic!” They demonstrated the potential of polymer technology developed at Case, including stimuli-responsive polymer gels, high-strength/ultra light polymer AeroClay nanocomposites, smart polymers with built-in deformation and temperature sensors and shape memory materials.

via Polymer Science for Everyone

Chinese Engineering Innovation Plan

Building a self-innovation China:

Self-innovation has become a top priority to advance science and technology in China. Chinese President Hu Jintao launched the drive to build China into a self-innovative country by the end of 2020 early this year during the first national science and technology conference in the 21st century.
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Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice minister of Nat’l Development & Reform Comm., said: “In the next five years, the central government will set up 100 state-level engineering laboratories and push for the construction of 50 state engineering project research centers in the fields of the Internet, coal mine gas monitoring and digital equipment. These moves will help build technological centers in several hundred large-scale enterprises in various sectors.”

Avian Flu

Photo of the Bird Flu virus, courtesy of 3DScience.com.

Avian Flu (site broke link so I removed it), World Health Organization Meeting to Discuss Avian Flu Pandemic as Bird Flu Continues to Spread Through Europe

World Health Organization officials are meeting in Geneva to consider the possibility of a global human bird flu pandemic as the deadly H5N1 strain continues to spread rapidly in birds.

Top influenza official Margaret Chan said the outbreak in poultry is historically unprecedented. She said the deadly virus presents a greater challenge to the world than any other emerging infectious disease.

The meeting was called to plan a response in case the bird flu virus mutates into a widespread human flu virus.

Hottest Temperature on Earth

Record set for hottest temperature on Earth – Scientists produce gas more than 100 times hotter than the sun

Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit.

This is hotter than the interior of our sun, which is about 15 million degrees Kelvin, and also hotter than any previous temperature ever achieved on Earth, they say.

They don’t know how they did it.
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Thermonuclear explosions are estimated to reach only tens to hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin; other nuclear fusion experiments have achieved temperatures of about 500 million degrees Kelvin, said a spokesperson at the lab.

Wow! That’s Engineering?

Develop, Design, Discover: Women Innovating with Technology Week

Beginning on March 8th at our “Wow! That’s Engineering?” event in Chicago, and continuing through April 19th, the Society of Women Engineers is holding an essay contest asking girls ages 10 to 17 to write, in 100 words or less, about an invention/innovation they would create, using technology, to make the world a better place.

Girls will enter to win the ultimate grand prize: a trip to IBM Headquarters in Armonk, NY, where they will spend the day working with a leading engineer at IBM. Additional prizes will include a week at Camp Invention, laptops, MP3 players and more.

Enter the contest

In addition to Chicago events are planned for: Austin, Orlando, Philadelphia, Raleigh and San Francisco. See the web site for more details.