Category Archives: Education

Human Sonar – Echolocation

Ben Underwood’s echolocation isn’t a hoax, but it’s not an unexplained mystery, either. Ben really can sense nearby objects with reflected sound waves. But so can you.
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Go ahead and try out the skill you never knew you had. First, close your eyes and put on a blindfold, and then ask a friend to move a frying pan forward and backward in front of your face. Now start making noises—any noises you want. You can click your tongue like Sonar Boy, or you can whistle, or you can sing a scale. With a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to tell when the pan is close to you and when it’s not.

Also see, two interesting videos, CBS story and an Ellen show appearance. And read a 2003 BBC article on how the Blind ‘see with sound’.

Computer Image Tagging

Researchers Teach Computers How to Name Images By ‘Thinking’

Penn State researchers have “taught” computers how to interpret images using a vocabulary of up to 330 English words, so that a computer can describe a photograph of two polo players, for instance, as “sport,” “people,” “horse,” “polo.”
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More than half the time, the computer’s first tag out of the top 15 tags is correct. In addition, for 98 percent of images tested, the system has provided at least one correct annotation in the top 15 selected words. The system, which completes the annotation in about 1.4 seconds…

This seems to be interesting, but still has a long way to go. Google has been using a human based process for the last few month. They show two people the same image and if their tags match Google accepts that tag as good.

Anti-microbial ‘paint’

anti-microbial ‘paint’ kills flu, bacteria

A new “antimicrobial paint” developed at MIT can kill influenza viruses that land on surfaces coated with it, potentially offering a new weapon in the battle against a disease that kills nearly 40,000 Americans per year. If applied to doorknobs or other surfaces where germs tend to accumulate, the new substance could help fight the spread of the flu, says Jianzhu Chen, MIT professor of biology.
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The “antimicrobial paint,” which can be sprayed or brushed onto surfaces, consists of spiky polymers that poke holes in the membranes that surround influenza viruses. Influenza viruses exposed to the polymer coating were essentially wiped out. The researchers observed a more than 10,000-fold drop in the number of viruses on surfaces coated with the substance.
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One of the benefits of the new polymer coating is that it is highly unlikely that bacteria will develop resistance to it, Klibanov said. Bacteria can become resistant to traditional antibiotics by adjusting the biochemical pathways targeted by antibiotics, but it would be difficult for bacteria to evolve a way to stop the polymer spikes from tearing holes in their membranes.

Electricity Savings

Surprise: Not-so-glamorous conservation works best

When high school science teacher Ray Janke bought a home in Chicopee, Mass., he decided to see how much he could save on his electric bill.

He exchanged incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents, put switches and surge protectors on his electronic equipment to reduce the “phantom load” – the trickle consumption even when electronic equipment is off – and bought energy-efficient appliances.

Two things happened: He saw a two-thirds reduction in his electric bill, and he found himself under audit by Mass Electric. The company thought he’d tampered with his meter. “They couldn’t believe I was using so little,” he says.
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Cutting back on electricity used for lighting (9 percent of residential usage nationwide) presents the quickest savings-to-effort ratio. The EPA estimates that changing only 25 percent of your home’s bulbs can cut a lighting bill in half. Incandescent bulbs waste 90 percent of their energy as heat, and compact fluorescents, which can be up to five times more efficient, last years longer as well.

I am far from doing everything I could, but at least I have installed compact fluorescent light bulbs as old ones burned out. Actually I don’t think I have changed a light bulb in several years (another benefit of these energy efficient lights is they last a long time).

Open Source for LEGO Mindstorms

Lego Tribot

Open Source Firmware, Developer Kits for LEGOÂ® MINDSTORMSÂ®:

“Most often, innovation comes from the core community of users. Our ongoing commitment to enabling our fan base to personalize and enhance their MINDSTORMS experience has reached a new level with our decision to release the firmware for the NXT brick as open source,” said SÃ¸ren Lund, director of LEGO MINDSTORMS.

photo: Lego TriBot – a flexible 3-wheeled driving robot with sound, light, touch and ultrasonic sensors – see more details.

China’s Science and Technology Plan

Interesting article – China’s 15-year science and technology plan by Cong Cao, Richard P. Suttmeier, and Denis Fred Simon:

China initiated a 15-year “Medium- to Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology.” The MLP calls for China to become an “innovation-oriented society” by the year 2020, and a world leader in science and technology (S&T) by 2050
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China will invest 2.5% of its increasing gross domestic product in R&D by 2020, up from 1.34% in 2005; raise the contributions to economic growth from technological advance to more than 60%

Building minds by building robots

Photo of Llever Elementary students

Building minds by building robots:

Emily Conner said she likes to spent free time on the Internet at home, learning about nanotechnology and specifically, nanomedicine.

The small video devices that can be attached to tubes and inserted through natural body openings for medical exploratories and procedures sound pretty high tech.

But through nanomedicine, “people could swallow a ‘pillcam’ and would’ have to use wires,” said Emily.

That’s pretty heavy duty stuff for a J.D. Lever Elementary School fifth-grader. Emily and her classmates are getting ready for a regional FIRST LEGO League competition at the James Taylor Center on the Aiken High school campus Saturday. Eleven teams from Aiken and other areas are expected to participate, with the top performers going on to a state contest in January.

Finding Dark Matter

Dark matter hides, physicists seek

Scientists don’t know what dark matter is, but they know it’s all over the universe. Everything humans observe in the heavens—galaxies, stars, planets and the rest—makes up only 4 percent of the universe, scientists say. The remaining 96 percent is composed of dark matter and its even more mysterious sibling, dark energy. Scientists recently found direct evidence that dark matter exists by studying a distant galaxy cluster and observing different types of motion in luminous versus dark matter. Still, no one knows what dark matter is made of.
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The experiment is the most sensitive in the world aiming to detect exotic particles called WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which are one of scientists’ best guesses at what makes up dark matter. Other options include neutrinos, theorized particles called axions or even normal matter like black holes and brown dwarf stars that are just too faint to see.

WIMPS are thought to be neutral in charge and weigh more than 100 times the mass of a proton. At the moment these elementary particles exist only in theory and have never been observed.

Shuttle Computer Not Designed For New Year While in Flight

Shuttle Discovery to launch at night:

If the launch does not happen on Dec. 7, NASA can keep trying through Dec. 17. After that, the agency will re-evaluate its options and may call it quits until January.

NASA wants Discovery back from its 12-day mission by New Year’s Eve because shuttle computers are not designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the first day of the new year while in flight.

The space agency has figured out a solution for the New Year’s Day problem, but managers are reluctant to try it since it has not been thoroughly tested.

I heard this on the radio this morning. Am I the only one that finds this fairly amazing?

Misleading headline of the week

Misleading headline of the week:

But armed with an author name, Christine Born, I could do a Google search, and found many more articles — for example, this one from the Washington Post. Of course, I still want to know more about the study, which brings me to another pet peeve of mine: mainstream media reports on research that hasn’t yet been peer reviewed. This article doesn’t appear to have been published, just presented at a conference. We don’t know how the group defines “better-known” brands, or even what brands were used. We don’t even know if this research is actually publishable.

There is a conflict between publishing news and properly vetting the science (this conflict is pretty simple to manage I believe but exists nonetheless). I wish, at least, news stories made it clearer when the ideas are speculation, when they are very early research with some evidence in support of the contentions… And online news site should link to original research, more information, related information… That is one big problem with non-open access material. No simple way to share the material online. Links provide a big step toward providing an easy way for the reader to learn more themselves.