Category Archives: Awards

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,”

Student Algae Bio-fuel Project

photo of Tessa Churchill, left, and Holly Jacobson

Students take algae-to-biofuel project to MIT by J.T. Leonard. Photo: Tessa Churchill, left, and Holly Jacobson. The students are competing in the regional finals of the Siemens Math, Science & Technology competition.

Holly Jacobson and Tessa Churchill, seniors at Greely High School in Cumberland, are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, explaining how they would use fast-growing algae to help solve the energy crisis.

In a nutshell, the young women may have found a way to produce more biodiesel fuel while consuming fewer organic resources.

The project got its start two years ago when Jacobson and Churchill began examining natural oils stored in fatty acids — called lipids — in various forms of marine algae. Recently, they identified a strain of algae that produces more oil for a given mass.

Programing Bacteria

Duke Packard Fellow to Examine Processing Speed of “Reprogrammed” Bacteria:

research into the development of synthetic gene circuits, carefully designed combinations of genes that can be “loaded” into bacteria or other cells, directing their activity in much the same way that a basic computer program directs a computer. Such re-programmed bacteria might eventually serve in a wide variety of applications, including biocomputing, medical treatments, and environmental cleanup
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The research now, however, is in its very early stages, You said. So far, E. coli bacteria have been programmed to grow in numbers until a certain population size is reached. The bacteria then kill themselves off, growing again only after their numbers dwindle sufficiently.

The relatively simple program takes advantage of bacteria’s ability to communicate with one another, a process known as “quorum sensing,” and essential genetic pathways that control cell death.

Google Gadget Awards

If you’re a student with an email address ending in .edu, the Google Gadget Awards is your chance to win a Google programming competition – even if you’re not a programming ninja. If you’ve ever taken a web design class, you can probably create a gadget in a few minutes – no need to download anything or even own hosting space. Once you’ve submitted your gadget, people can add it to their Google homepage with a few mouse clicks.

Gagets are plugins for Google Desktop or code that run work on web pages. Apply by November 1st.

Google asks students for gadgets

2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2006 goes to: Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello for their discovery of
RNA interference – gene silencing by double-stranded RNA.

This mechanism, RNA interference, is activated when RNA molecules occur as double-stranded pairs in the cell. Double-stranded RNA activates biochemical machinery which degrades those mRNA molecules that carry a genetic code identical to that of the double-stranded RNA. When such mRNA molecules disappear, the corresponding gene is silenced and no protein of the encoded type is made.

RNA interference occurs in plants, animals, and humans. It is of great importance for the regulation of gene expression, participates in defense against viral infections, and keeps jumping genes under control. RNA interference is already being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes and it may lead to novel therapies in the future.

The Nobel Prize site also includes does a great job by including advanced information on this work.

Engineers Save Energy

Dr. Rosenfield - Fermi Award Winner

Arthur Rosenfeld the 2005 Enrico Fermi Award Winner which is the “government’s oldest award for scientific achievement” according to the Department of Energy. I question that, and on another page they say “one of the oldest…”

“Dr. Rosenfeld is one of the ‘founding fathers’ of energy efficiency, and the legacy of his research and policy work is an entire new energy efficiency sector of our economy, which now yields an astounding annual savings of around $100 billion, and growing.”
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Rosenfeld received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1954 and was Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi’s last graduate student.
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In 1973, when OPEC embargoed oil sales to the West, Dr. Rosenfeld redirected his career. He recognized the potential for energy savings in the building sector, which uses one third of U.S. primary energy and two-thirds of our electricity. In 1975, he founded a program which grew into the Center for Building Science at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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The U.S. National Research Council (NRC) has estimated that energy efficiency improvements developed solely at DOE’s National Laboratories, saved the U.S. $30 billion between 1978 and 2000

Great stuff. Another great example of how much good scientists and engineers can do. And also a good reminder of the economic benefits that are less obvious – such as increasing energy efficiency.

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.

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.