Category Archives: Education

Biomedical Engineering Opinion

Nevertheless, the strict regulatory procedures that must be adhered to in biomedical engineering can be frustrating and feel like a barrier to innovation, even though engineers in this field are often working at the leading edge of technology. Colin Hunsley says: “Anything new has to be shown to be better than what is currently available. A modern hip replacement, for example, is expected to last for 15 years or more; even with thorough testing via the formal clinical trials process, it can be hard to prove conclusively that a new development is significantly better.

The take-up of new products and techniques also depends to some extent on the way the market operates. In the UK, for instance, the National Health Service (NHS) funds most healthcare, whereas the USA market is driven by private medical insurance. With the budgeting structure of the NHS, it can be difficult to justify the adoption in one department of a more expensive treatment, even if it could lead to significant long-term savings for another department. This illustrates why it is important that biomedical engineers understand the market in which they operate.

Mystery Ailment Strikes Honeybees

A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination. Researchers are scrambling to find the cause of the ailment, called Colony Collapse Disorder.
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The country’s bee population had already been shocked in recent years by a tiny, parasitic bug called the varroa mite, which has destroyed more than half of some beekeepers’ hives and devastated most wild honeybee populations.

Along with being producers of honey, commercial bee colonies are important to agriculture as pollinators, along with some birds, bats and other insects. A recent report by the National Research Council noted that in order to bear fruit, three-quarters of all flowering plants _ including most food crops and some that provide fiber, drugs and fuel _ rely on pollinators for fertilization.

Schoofs Prize for Creativity 2007

Single-handed fishing kit reels in first place in invention competition:

Brian “Sunya” Nimityongskul got the idea for a system for one-armed fishing while recovering from shoulder surgery last summer. “I wanted to be fishing and not sitting at home,” he says. “Being an engineer, I decided I’d do something about it.” He worked on it during his free time, doing the design and machining himself

No Sleep, No New Brain Cells

No sleep means no new brain cells

The researchers compared animals who were deprived of sleep for 72 hours with others who were not. They found those who missed out on rest had higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone. It would be interesting to see if partial sleep deprivation – getting a little bit less sleep every night that you need – had the same effect

They also produced significantly fewer new brain cells in a particular region of the hippocampus. When the animals’ corticosterone levels were kept at a constant level, the reduction in cell proliferation was abolished. The results suggest that elevated stress hormone levels resulting from sleep deprivation could explain the reduction in cell production in the adult brain.

Sleep patterns were restored to normal within a week. However levels of nerve cell production (neurogenesis) were not restored for two weeks, and the brain appears to boost its efforts in order to counteract the shortage.

Light to Matter to Light

Light and Matter United (includes videos) by William J. Cromie:

Lene Hau has already shaken scientists’ beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can’t be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

Two years later, she brought light to a complete halt in a cloud of ultracold atoms. Next, she restarted the stalled light without changing any of its characteristics, and sent it on its way. These highly successful experiments brought her a tenured professorship at Harvard University and a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation award to spend as she pleased.
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Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa.

Arctic Seed Vault Design

‘Doomsday’ vault design unveiled

he Svalbard International Seed Vault will be built into a mountainside on a remote island near the North Pole. The vault aims to safeguard the world’s agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change. Construction begins in March, and the seed bank is scheduled to open in 2008. The Norwegian government is paying the $5m (Â£2.5m) construction costs of the vault, which will have enough space to house three million seed samples.

Dr Fowler said Svalbard, 1,000km (621 miles) north of mainland Norway, was chosen as the location for the vault because it was very remote and it also offered the level of stability required for the long-term project. “We looked very far into the future. We looked at radiation levels inside the mountain, and we looked at the area’s geological structure,” he told BBC News. “We also modelled climate change in a drastic form 200 years into future, which included the melting of ice sheets at the North and South Poles, and Greenland, to make sure that this site was above the resulting water level.”

Declining Science and Maths Degrees in UK

Report: Core science and mathematics degree courses in the UK 1998-2007

In the decade to 2007, there has been a 10% reduction in the number of core, ie single honours, science and maths degree courses offered by UK higher education institutions.

8 Year Old Math Prodigy Corrects Science Exhibit

Math prodigy corrects Discovery Place (Phb broke the link so I removed it):

The exhibit had traveled to eight cities in four years. “And no one found this mistake — I just couldn’t believe it,” Briere said. The equations were developed at the Ontario Science Center, a museum similar to Discovery Place. The Canada museum will likely mail a new display for the pyramid to Charlotte by the end of the month, Briere said.

Find the Error…

A jelly bean has a volume of about 1 cubic cm.This container is half a pyramid.
Its base measures 46 cm by 23 cm and its height is 72 cm.
Here’s the formula to find the volume: 1/3 x base area x height.
Now divide your answer by 2 since this is half a pyramid.
Now multiply your answer by 0.9 to account for spaces between the jelly beans.
The answer should be 22,853.

Did you find the error? (it would be better with a photo but I can’t find one.

International Linear Collider

Price of Next Big Thing in Physics: $6.7 Billion

At a news conference in Beijing an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.
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Physicists acknowledge it could be years before the world commits to building the ILC, although jockeying for the costly privilege of hosting the giant machine has already begun. For its purposes, the committee priced three different sites: near CERN in Switzerland, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill, and in the mountains of Japan, and found that the so-called site-specific costs, like digging tunnels and shafts and supplying water and electricity, were nearly the same in each case, about $1.8 billion.

The host country would be expected to shoulder these costs, the design collaboration said, while the remaining $4.9 billion, which covers high-tech things like magnets and control rooms, would be split among all the participants. Extras like auditoriums, cafeterias and living space for scientists were not included in the cost estimate, since at some places like Fermilab they already exist.

World’s Largest Dry-Transport Ship

Blue Marlin world’s largest dry-transport vessel:

For widening the beam of the Blue Marlin from 42 to 63 meter, 130 block steel sections were produced, which started on 2 May 2003 and finished at the end of October. The total weight was approx. 8,300 tons. The blocks were pre-assembled to bigger blocks before installation and the total number of blocks ready for installation in drydock was reduced to 58 blocks. The erection of the blocks in the drydocks started on 1 September 2003. The starboard blocks first. The middle blocks of each side were assembled in three units of each approx. 35 meter long. Each unit with a total weight of 800 to 1000 tons.

More sea giant photos – Photo – credit and larger image – Flying Luxury Hotel – 60 Acre (24 hectare) Spider Web – Giant Wasp Nests – Solar Tower Power Generation