Author Archives: curiouscat

UK Science and Research Funding

UK Science and Innovation Awards from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council:

University of Oxford – over Â£3.3 million has been awarded to establish a forward looking world class research centre in the Analysis of Non-linear Partial Differential Equations (PDEs).
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Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and Imperial College London – almost Â£6 million to create a new collaboration of complementary expertise between the Physics Departments at Cambridge, Imperial & Oxford in the area of quantum coherence…

Universities get Â£31m research awards:

The money is going to leading research-intensive universities. Four out of the seven awards are for joint projects, indicating how even players like Cambridge and Imperial are having to collaborate to keep up with the international competition.

Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds

Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds, Study Finds by Shankar Vedantam:

the brief training sessions seemed to confer enormous benefits as many as five years later. That would be as if someone went to the gym Monday through Friday for the first two weeks of the new year, did no exercise for five years, and still saw significant physical benefits in 2012.
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The researchers also showed that the benefits of the brain exercises extended well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned. Older adults who did the basic exercises followed by later sessions were three times as fast as those who got only the initial sessions when it came to activities of daily living, such as reacting to a road sign, looking up a number in a telephone book or checking the ingredients on a medicine bottle — abilities that can spell the difference between living independently and needing help.

Related: Feed your Newborn Neurons – Another Paper Questions Scientific Paper Accuracy (just a reminder that the conclusions of many studies are not confirmed in future studies) – Virus may be eating your brain

$25 Million for Marquette College of Engineering

$25 million gift for the Marquette College of Engineering:

The Marquette University College of Engineering has received a gift commitment of more than $25 million as the first part of a legacy grant that could provide the university with an additional future $1 million a year in perpetuity, Marquette President Robert A. Wild announced Monday. The gift is from an engineering alumnus and his wife who have asked to remain anonymously.
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The $25 million gift is part of a broader fund-raising initiative to “transform the College of Engineering through endowed scholarships and faculty positions, an enhanced curriculum, extensive research opportunities and completion of a Discovery Learning Complex with state-of-the-art facilities and equipment,” Wild said. The benefactors, he noted, hope the gift “inspires others to help fund the bold initiatives that will position the College of Engineering as the premiere Catholic institution in the nation for engineering education.”

Mind controls body in extreme experiments

Mind controls body in extreme experiments by William J. Cromie, Harvard University Gazette:

During visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.

The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. “It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result,” Benson exclaims.

To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation.

In my opinion, much more evidence is needed to take these claims seriously but still it is interesting.

Nanotechnology Education

Teaching the Notion of Nanotechnology

Scientist Robert P.H. Chang of Northwestern University had no trouble persuading education officials in Mexico to introduce the burgeoning field of nanotechnology to schools there, but it’s been a far tougher sell in the United States. In Mexico, Chang said he had only to speak about the subject to top government officials, who then simply ordered school officials to teach it.
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Nanotechnology presents an especially difficult challenge in education. It is not a traditional discipline but rather a combination involving physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, engineering and technology.
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That’s what Chang has been developing as he directs Northwestern’s new national center for the university’s Materials World Modules program, charged with creating materials on nanotechnology for students in grades seven through 12.

How Do Wii Game Controllers Work?

How Do Motion-Sensing Video Game Controllers Work?:

The new Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3 gaming systems, just released for the holidays, both include motion-sensing controllers.
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But how are the controllers able to precisely and accurately measure physical movement? At the heart of the controller technology are tiny accelerometers. Inside these chips, silicon springs anchor a silicon wafer to the rigid controller. As you wave the controller through the air at an attacking enemy, the wafer presses onto the springs, just as you are pressed against the seat of a car when you stomp on the gas pedal. The faster the controller accelerates, the more the wafer moves relative to the rest of the chip.
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But accelerometers alone cannot provide complete control, because small positional errors add up over time, like when you need to re-center your mouse on a mousepad. Nintendo addressed this problem by including a sensor bar that can be placed above or below the television. Each end of the bar emits a beam of infrared light like a television remote, which is monitored by a sensor on the controller that works like a digital camera: by seeing where the two spots of light fall on its grid of more than 750,000 pixels, the sensor can determine where the controller is pointing and translate it to a position on the television screen.

Diabetes Breakthrough

Diabetes breakthrough by Tom Blackwell:

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease
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The researchers caution they have yet to confirm their findings in people, but say they expect results from human studies within a year or so. Any treatment that may emerge to help at least some patients would likely be years away from hitting the market.

More: Canadian scientists reverse diabetes in mice – Type 1 Diabetes May Be Caused By Disruption of Link Between Nerve Cells and Beta Cells

Mexican Engineering Brain Drain

Network to curb Mexican brain drain by Kathleen Miller

Mexico hopes its nascent high-tech sector can create good jobs and help diversify the economy at a time when rising wages for low-skill labor are driving textile and assembly factories to poorer nations in Asia and Central America.
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A recent analysis by Mexican and U.S. immigration experts found that nearly a third of all Mexicans with advanced degrees leave Mexico for the U.S.
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Camacho, who heads the program’s pioneering Silicon Valley chapter, says the idea arose during a 2004 meeting between Mexican President Vicente Fox and the chief executive of major chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Hector Ruiz, who was born in Mexico but studied engineering in the United States and went on to build a career there.

Mexico’s government has sponsored conferences for the network, but Camacho says the group is growing more by word of mouth. His Silicon Valley chapter holds regular meetings to share ideas and there are plans for similar groups in other U.S. cities.

Micro-robots to ‘swim’ Through Veins

image of Escherichia coli bacterium with flagella

Micro-robots take off
Photo: Transmission Electron Microscopy photograph of an Escherichia coli bacterium with flagella. The micro-robots are being developed to mimic the swimming behaviour of E.coli.

Micro-robots that can ‘swim’ through the vascular and digestive systems of the human body to perform medical tasks via remote control and, in many cases, avoid invasive major surgery, are being developed at Monash University following today’s announcement that the project has been funded through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects scheme.

Arctic Sharks

Arctic Shark photo

The Greenland shark typically inhabits the deep, dark waters between Greenland and the polar ice cap. At over six metres long and weighing up to 2,000 kilograms, it is the largest shark in the North Atlantic and the only shark in the world that lives under Arctic ice. Once heavily harvested for its vitamin A-rich oil — as many as 50,000 were caught annually according to a 1948 estimate — little is known about the animal.