Category Archives: Education

Think Tech Hawaii Podcasts

Think Tech Hawaii provides webcasts of radio shows on topics such as: Why the College of Engineering at Manoa Is Important–and Why It’s So Hard to Get Students to Study Engineering, Hawaii Academy of Science and its 50th Science Fair and New Technologies for an Aging Population.

New Yorker on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider

Can a seventeen-mile-long collider unlock the universe?

A proton is a hadron composed of two up quarks and one down; a neutron consists of two downs and one up.) Fermions also include neutrinos, which, somewhat unnervingly, stream through our bodies at the rate of trillions per second.
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The L.H.C., Doser explained, relies on much the same design, and, in fact, makes use of the tunnel originally dug for LEP. Instead of electrons and positrons, however, the L.H.C. will send two beams of protons circling in opposite directions. Protons are a good deal more massive than electrons—roughly eighteen hundred times more—which means they can carry more energy. For this reason, they are also much harder to manage.

“Basically, what you must have to accelerate any charged particles is a very strong electric field,” Doser said. “And the longer you apply it the more energy you can give them. In principle, what you’d want is an infinitely long linear structure, in which particles just keep getting pushed faster and faster. Now, because you can’t build an infinitely long accelerator, you build a circular accelerator.” Every time a proton makes a circuit around the L.H.C. tunnel, it will receive electromagnetic nudges to make it go faster until, eventually, it is travelling at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light. “It gets to a hair below the speed of light very rapidly, and the rest of the time is just trying to sliver down this hair.” At this pace, a proton completes eleven thousand two hundred and forty-five circuits in a single second.

Opossum Genome Shows ‘Junk’ DNA is Not Junk

Opossum Genome Shows ‘Junk’ DNA Source Of Genetic Innovation

Scientists previously thought that evolution slowly changed the genes that create specific proteins. As the proteins changed, so did the creatures that owned them. The current research shows that opossum and human protein-coding genes have changed little since their ancestors parted ways, 180 million years ago. It has been the regulation of their genes – when they turn on and off – that has changed dramatically.

“Evolution is tinkering much more with the controls than it is with the genes themselves,” said Broad Institute director Eric Lander. “Almost all of the new innovation … is in the regulatory controls. In fact, marsupial mammals and placental mammals have largely the same set of protein-coding genes. But by contrast, 20 percent of the regulatory instructions in the human genome were invented after we parted ways with the marsupial.”
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It had been initially thought that most of a creature’s DNA was made up of protein-coding genes and that a relatively small part of the DNA was made up of regulatory portions that tell the rest when to turn on and off. As studies of mammalian genomes advanced, however, it became apparent that that view was incorrect. The regulatory part of the genome was two to three times larger than the portion that actually held the instructions for individual proteins.

Very interesting. The more recent articles I read on DNA discoveries the more interesting it seems to get. Related: Learning About the Human Genome – New Understanding of Human DNA – DNA Transcription Webcast

$10 Million for Engineering Education Scholarships

$10 million perk aims to help prove engineering is the profession to pursue (link broken)

Kao today will announce that his family foundation is donating $10 million to establish scholarship funds at six regional universities for students majoring in electrical and computer engineering. Kao, an electrical engineer who co-founded Garmin, said he decided to fund the program because he was concerned the United States was losing its edge in engineering and design.

“As a business leader of a company like Garmin, and as an immigrant, I feel it should be a real concern for this country,” Kao said. “I don’t think it’s good for a country to be a pure service business.” The education initiative is the somewhat private billionaire CEO’s first significant endowment in the Kansas City area. “Compared to Asian countries, the career of engineer is somewhat overlooked” in the United States, Kao said. “Young kids don’t aspire to be engineers.”
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The endowment from the Kao Family Foundation will be used to fund 100 scholarships a year, offering students $5,000 annually. It will be tied in with Garmin’s internship program, offering 75 or more summer jobs that include a furnished apartment and health and dental benefits.

Encyclopedia of Life

Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

They are using wiki technology to create an encyclopedia of life as discussed by E.O. Wilson in his TED Prize Wish speech. It seems like a great idea to me.

South Pacific to Stop Bottom-trawling

S Pacific to stop bottom-trawling:

A quarter of the world’s oceans will be protected from fishing boats which drag heavy nets across the sea floor, South Pacific nations have agreed. The landmark deal will restrict bottom-trawling, which experts say destroys coral reefs and stirs up clouds of sediment that suffocate marine life. Observers and monitoring systems will ensure vessels remain five nautical miles from marine ecosystems at risk.

From my previous post, Fishy Future?:

The measured effects today should be enough for sensible people to realise the tragedy of the commons applies to fishing and obviously governments need to regulate the fishing to assure that fishing is sustainable. This is a serious problem exacerbated by scientific and economic illiteracy. The obvious scientific and economic solution is regulation. Determining the best regulation is tricky (and political and scientific and economic) but obviously regulation (and enforcement) is the answer.

Granted I have a very limited knowledge of this area, but this ban seems like a good idea to me.

Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act

I agree with restricting the use of genetic information for things like insurance – US to outlaw corporate prejudice based on genes:

Soon it will be illegal to deny US citizens jobs or insurance simply because they have an inherited illness, or a genetic predisposition to a particular disease.

On 25 April, the House of Representatives voted 420 to 3 to pass the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). The Senate is expected to endorse the act within a few weeks, which is also supported by President Bush. “I am so stunned by the majority,” says Sharon Terry, president of the Genetic Alliance, a charity lobbying for the rights of people with inherited illnesses.

Genetic information can provide valuable information about risks. It is not often that I am for saying people should be prohibited from using information that would aid them in making better decisions. However it can be the best public policy to require insurance companies to be prohibited from using information that would allow them to better access risks and price insurance accordingly. So those that know they have such genetic risks will be paying less than they would if the insurance companies were allowed to use that information and everyone else will pay more (to cover for those with the increased risk). I think that is the best policy for the society. However it is not really about outlawing corporate prejudice it is about saying that we will have everyone is society share the cost of risks rather than those that can be identified as greater health risks.

Thinking this is about preventing bad corporate behavior seems to me an attempt to change the focus of the real issue. And that is not a good idea because this is a complex area that we are going to have to make a wide number of decisions about as a society. Pretending the issue is simple does society a disservice. This is an large economic issue and what choices various societies decided to make will be debated extensively for quite some time I believe..

Related: Improving the heath care system posts (from our management blog) – post about health care (from this blog)

3-D Images of Eyes

High-res, 3-D images of eye:

Future clinical studies, as well as further development, may someday enable ophthalmologists to routinely obtain three-dimensional “OCT snapshots” of the eye, containing comprehensive volumetric information about the microstructure of the retina. Such snapshots could potentially improve diagnoses of retinal diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration.
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The current research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Purple Frog Delights Scientists

Purple Frog photo

This interesting looking frog (N. sahyadrensis), discovered in India in 2003, has is in its own taxonomic family and represents the only known living example of frogs that lived alongside dinosaurs 65 million years ago, Purple frog delights scientists:

Its head appears too small for its body and it looks more like a squat, grumpy blob than a living creature.

But to the scientists who describe it in the journal Nature, the frog is a beautiful find because of what it tells them about Earth history.

“It is an important discovery because it tells us something about the early evolution of advanced frogs that we would not know otherwise because there are no fossil records from this lineage,” says Franky Bossuyt, of Free University of Brussels, Belgium.

Bee Colony Collapse Disorder

Bee Die-Off Threatens Food Supply:

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Still threatening the food supply seems like an extreme claim to me, but maybe I am just too optimistic.

Colony Collapse Disorder podcast:

In our first episode, hear from Senior Extension Agent and Honey Bee Specialist, Maryann Frazier, about honey bees and why they are such important pollinators in Pennsylvania and the United States. Find out why this die off is getting the attention of experts, and learn about the characteristics and extent of the collapse. Finally, get a preview of who the key players are and what is being done to investigate Colony Collapse Disorder.