Category Archives: Education

Regular Exercise Reduces Fatigue

Regular Exercise Plays A Consistent And Significant Role In Reducing Fatigue:

Health professionals encourage regular exercise to prevent or improve symptoms of conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity, but the scientific evidence on whether exercise increases or reduces fatigue had never been reviewed quantitatively. O’Connor, kinesiology professor Rod Dishman and lead author Tim Puetz, who recently completed his doctoral work at UGA, analyzed 70 randomized, controlled trials that enrolled a total of 6,807 subjects. They found strong support for the role of exercise in reducing fatigue.

For myself this seems true. But what seems true for me doesn’t mean much.
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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,”

Sea Urchin Genome

Sea Urchin photo

Sea Urchin Genome Reveals Striking Similarities to Humans by Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic News:

The scientists identified more than 23,000 genes in the 814 million base pairs, or “letters,” of DNA code taken from the sea urchin.

The sea urchin represents the first sequenced genome from the echinoderms, which are the closest known relatives of the chordates, the group that includes vertebrates, animals with spinal columns. The genome includes analogs to many essential human genes that were previously thought to be exclusive to vertebrates.
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The eyeless sea urchin also has genes associated with taste, smell, hearing, balance—and surprisingly, even vision.

How Our Brain Resolves Sight

Brain Pathway Brings Order to Visual Chaos

The world you see around you appears perfectly stationary, even though your eyes dart back and forth two to three times every second in little hops called saccades. For more than a century researchers have assumed that the brain must keep track of the impulses that cause these tiny motions, so as to subtract their effect from our visual awareness. Now researchers have identified a circuit in the monkey brain that seems to play this role.

The Silent Aircraft Initiative

Conceptual aircraft image

Silent Aircraft gives young engineers a flight of fancy:

these students are not undergraduates. They are budding young engineers, aged 13 to 18, taking part in a three-month design challenge with Cambridge’s Engineering Department to tackle aircraft noise. Working in teams, the students – from schools and colleges across the country, from Bristol to Sheffield – are doing a project related to the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s Silent Aircraft Initiative. This initiative links researchers at Cambridge and MIT with industrial partners to design a radically quieter passenger plane, and includes research into ways to reduce the noise from the undercarriage – one of the major noise sources on a landing aircraft. So this challenge has tasked these young students to design, and make a model of, a quieter undercarriage.

The Silent Aircraft Initiative (SAI) team has succeeded in coming up with a radically quieter plane. Crucially, the SAX-40 is also 35% more fuel-efficient than any airliner currently flying.

Microbes on Earth

Tiny microbes play big role (broken link removed Feb 2007 – shame on the Detroit Free Press):

Like explorers of old, scientists are venturing into the immense but little-known realm of the microscopic organisms that dominate our planet.

“It’s an entire world that most of us have no idea about,” said Alan Leshner, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Countless trillions of microbes — mostly bacteria and a recently discovered kingdom of one-celled creatures known as archaea — inhabit every cranny of the globe. They reshape their environment, make life possible and sometimes destroy it.

Web Science

MIT and University of Southampton launch World Wide Web research collaboration:

The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) will generate a research agenda for understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web. Of particular interest is the volume of information on the web that documents more and more aspects of human activity and knowledge. WSRI research projects will weigh such questions as: How do we access information and assess its reliability? By what means may we assure its use complies with social and legal rules? How will we preserve the web over time?

Commenting on the new initiative, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a founding director of WSRI, said, “As the web celebrates its first decade of widespread use, we still know surprisingly little about how it evolved, and we have only scratched the surface of what could be realized with deeper scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society.

Tim Berners Lee continues to show great insight. Continue reading →

Video Goggles

Update: new video goggles

Cool product and nice gift: ezVision Video iWear the iPod Video and DVD Movie Goggles. Using these is like watching a 50 inch screen and you can easily carry them with you anywhere. You can use them to watch videos from your iPod.

Related: Science and Engineering Books

Physicists Observe New Property of Matter

Physicists Observe New Property of Matter by Kim McDonald

Physicists at UC San Diego have for the first time observed the spontaneous production of coherence within “excitons,” the bound pairs of electrons and holes that enable semiconductors to function as novel electronic devices.

Scientists working in the emerging field of nanotechnology, which is finding commercial applications for ultra-small material objects, believe that this newly discovered property could eventually help the development of novel computing devices and provide them with new insights into the quirky quantum properties of matter.
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“What is coherence and why is it so important?” said Butov. “To start with, modern physics was born by the discovery that all particles in nature are also waves. Coherence means that such waves are all ‘in sync.’ The spontaneous coherence of the matter waves is the reason behind some of the most exciting phenomena in nature such as superconductivity and lasing.”

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.