Category Archives: Education

When Galaxies Collide

When Galaxies Collide by Kathleen M. Wong:

When two galaxies collide, what transpires is very different from, say, one billiard ball smacking into another. Instead of ricocheting away in opposite directions, galaxies are much more likely to meld together. After all, Ma points out, “Galaxies are mostly empty, so the stars and dark matter mostly just pass each other by. The chances of two stars hitting each other is tiny.” In fact, only one percent of the masses of these galaxies consists of matter we can see, such as stars and gases. The rest consists of dark matter-material we can’t see but astronomers have inferred from many observations must exist.

Actual galaxy mergers are hard to find and even harder to view. So Ma is doing the next best thing – simulating galaxy collisions using computer models. This way, she can specify the types of mergers she wants to analyze head-ons versus glancing blows; galaxies of different masses and shapes; even the occasional threesome – and analyze their fates with mathematical precision.

Your Online Identity

Social Networking Sites: Enter At Your Own Risk by Amina Sonnie, IEE-USA Today’s Engineer:

Your Career Builders profile may be the professional face you wear online, but sites like MySpace or Facebook may be perceived as the “real” you. Many college students and entry-level employees may think that these social networking sites are not part of the adult world and forget that they are being viewed as an adult by their employer. To put a different face on the “real,” the first thing you may want to do is Google yourself. What comes up first?

Try me: John Hunter – usually my homepage or something about the another, John Hunter, the “father of modern surgery”, no relation. I found the above via: Facebook is public not private where John Dupuis added:

As an aside, when I’m on a search committee I always Google at least the short listed candidates and often many of the other applicants as well. I’ve never found anything shocking. On the other hand, I’m always surprised when I can’t find anything about a candidate. How can you be an active professional (or even an aspiring one) in this day and age and leave no impression on the web?

I agree.

As a society, we have a large bias toward punishing acts of commission – versus acts of omission. So the failure to have established a credible online presence is not normally as big a problem as creating one people object to. However, people should not become so fearful of doing something wrong that they fail to take advantage of the opportunity to enhance their career with a positive online presence: Ackoff on errors of omission.

Engineering a Better Blood Alcohol Sensor

Scott McCain - Duke Student

Scott McCain Aims for Better Blood Alcohol Sensor:

If third-year engineering graduate student Scott McCain gets his way, the fight against drunk driving may soon be waged with a new, non-invasive blood alcohol sensor that could make standard blood or breath sample tests obsolete. The St. Louis native’s interdisciplinary research – a combination of engineering, physics and computer science – aims to build a small and inexpensive optical device capable of using harmless light to pass through skin and directly determine blood alcohol concentration.

“The device uses light at wavelengths at which skin essentially becomes transparent,” McCain said. “We shine a laser through tissue where it interacts with blood. By analyzing the scattered light that comes back out, we can determine much about the blood’s chemical content.”
…
Similar devices hold promise for determining other constituents of blood. For example, they could measure cholesterol or blood sugar in a matter of minutes, McCain said. Ultimately, the goal is to have a sensor that could report a medical reading in less than 10 seconds.
…
“We don’t yet know if our blood alcohol sensor will really work,” said McCain. “It wouldn’t be research if we knew what it was all about.”

A Life-changing Gift

A nice human interest story, A life-changing gift:

All children have dreams. Many boys dream of growing up and becoming prime minister, a pilot, a doctor or an astronaut. For young Anusorn Pinsuwan, however, he didn’t dream that much. ”I just wanted to study. Then I could dare to dream of being something else, like an engineer or a teacher. But I didn’t think I could make my dreams come true as I didn’t have the money to study,” said Anusorn, now 25. ”But, at least, we shouldn’t sabotage our own dreams. We should give ourselves a chance.”

One of his dreams has been achieved, thanks to the support of the Bangkok Post readers, through a Bangkok Post Foundation scholarship. After excelling at Rajamangala University of Technology, Tak campus, he secured a place at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, North Bangkok, studying civil engineering. He graduated in 2005, and his first job offer from a private construction company followed shortly.

Science and Engineering Internships

Externs.com is another curious cat web site: an internship directory. It is getting late to try and find an internship for the summer but if you are still looking you can find science internships and engineering internships via that site.

The list of companies includes: Google, Intel, NASA, Dell, NIST, Scripps Research Institute, US Navy, National Cancer Institute, Microsoft and the International Crane Foundation. If you have any internship positions you would like included you may suggest an addition.

Engineering Quiet, Efficient Planes

Fly Silent, Fly Cheap by Jeffrey Winters, Mechanical Engineering magazine:

In all, the design changes would amount to a startling reduction in the amount of sound produced on takeoff and landing. The Cambridge-MIT team estimates that a landing SAX-40 would create less than 65 decibels of noise at the perimeter of the airport—about the same level as background noise. Transformed in this way, airplanes would be relatively neutral parts of the urban environment, rather than nuisances.

But there’s a side benefit: fuel efficiency. The same design elements that cut back on noise also reduce fuel consumption. With less energy lost to creating turbulence, more power would be devoted to moving passengers.

Engineering Activities: for 9-12 Year Olds

Design Squad Activity page:

Unleash your kids’ ingenuity and get them thinking like engineers with these 10 DESIGN SQUAD challenges. Designed for 9-12 year olds, each challenge has step-by-step instructions and age-appropriate explanations of the main idea.

FDA May Make Decision That Will Speed Antibiotic Drug Resistance

FDA Rules Override Warnings About Drug:

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency’s own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people. The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine’s last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.

This is why it is so important for government decisions that require scientific knowledge be made by knowledgeable scientists.

But Sundlof said that under FDA rules, those decisions must be left up to veterinarians unless there is clear evidence that wider use is causing harm.

“That is our policy” is not a good excuse for endangering public health. The dangers of anti-biotic resistance are obvious, well known, we see the results of bad decisions in the past creating havoc today and still government wants to act as though the inevitable consequences of their actions are somehow out of their hands. A policy that will lead to the deaths of many people should be fought. If you want to claim this policy will not do that, then make that argument. Don’t claim some policy prohibits you from saving lives.

Democratic/Republican forms of government give politicians oversight over bureaucracy to guide decisions for the public good. When politicians don’t understand basic science (in this day and age – when decisions require that understanding) that can lead to very dangerous policies. You would think that adults would be able to understand that just because consequences will be delayed a few years that doesn’t mean you should allow special interests to get what they want today. But the deficit (nearly $8,800,000,000,000 for the federal government now) provides a visible sign how much they care about future consequences of their actions. Combine that with little scientific understanding and that is not a prescription for good decisions.
Continue reading →

Basic Concepts: List of Posts

Basic Concepts in Science: A list collects posts on basic science concepts. This is a great collection of posts, including:

Force, Energy and Fields
Genes and Prions
Correlation, Algorithm and Sets

Take some time to look through this interesting, educational and growing list of concepts explained by science bloggers.

Related: Science and Engineering Blogs

European Innovation Scoreboard

European Innovation Scoreboard (pdf)

The US and Japan are still ahead of the EU25 in terms of innovation performance, but the innovation gap between the EU25 and Japan, and in particular with the US is decreasing (see Figure II). The EU25 has improved its relative performance compared to the US in S&E graduates, tertiary education, business R&D, early-stage venture capital, medium-high and high-tech manufacturing employment, EPO patents, USPTO patents and community trademarks. The EU has improved its relative performance compared to Japan mostly in S&E graduates and broadband penetration rate.
…
Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Japan and Germany are the innovation leaders, with SII scores well above that of the EU25 and the other countries…
The US, UK, Iceland, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Ireland are the innovation followers, with SII scores below those of the innovation leaders but above that of the EU25 and the other countries.