Category Archives: Education

Autonomous Flying Vehicles

Photo of Flying Robots

MIT’s intelligent aircraft fly, cooperate autonomously

Each UAV is networked with a PC. The setup allows a single operator to command the entire system, flying multiple UAVs simultaneously. Moreover, it requires no piloting skills; software flies the vehicles from takeoff to landing.

The vehicles in MIT’s test platform are inexpensive, off-the-shelf gadgets; they can be easily repaired or replaced with a new vehicle, just as might happen in a real-world scenario involving numerous small UAVs on a long-term mission. The researchers can thus experiment constantly without concern for mishaps with expensive equipment.
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In addition, the team recently achieved a milestone in autonomous flight: landing on a moving surface. Using “monocular vision,” one of the quadrotors successfully landed on a moving vehicle — a remote-controlled lab cart. A video camera fastened to the UAV uses a visual “target” to determine in real time the vehicle’s distance relative to the landing platform. The ground station then uses this information to compute commands that allow the UAV to land on the moving platform. This technology could enable UAVs to land on ships at sea or on Humvees moving across terrain.

More cool stuff: La Vida Robot – Autonomous Vehicle Technology Competition – Robot Football (Soccer) – More Unmanned Water Vehicles

Gel Stops Bleeding in Seconds

Self-assembling gel stops bleeding in seconds by Robert Adler:

Swab a clear liquid onto a gaping wound and watch the bleeding stop in seconds. An international team of researchers has accomplished just that in animals, using a solution of protein molecules that self-organise on the nanoscale into a biodegradable gel that stops bleeding.
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Their work exploits the way certain peptide sequences can be made to self-assemble into mesh-like sheets of “nanofibres” when immersed in salt solutions.
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Still, they caution that extensive clinical trials are needed to make sure the materials work properly and are safe. The MIT researchers hope to see those crucial human trials within three to five years.

Jaguars Back in the Southwest USA

photo of jaguar at night in Arizona

Gone for Decades, Jaguars Steal Back to the Southwest

Jaguars are the largest native American cat. They once roamed much of the Southwest, but when ranchers took cattle to the region in the last century, the jaguars were trapped and hunted to extinction in the United States. The last known resident female was killed in 1963 near the Grand Canyon.

Jaguars were thought to be gone from the Southwest until Warner Glenn, a cattle rancher and mountain lion hunter, saw a live one in the Peloncillos Mountains, near the New Mexico border with Mexico, on March 7, 1996.

Story and cool photo by the NY Times. Related: Big Cats in America – The Cat and a Black Bear – Cat Family Tree

Data on Grad Students

Diversity Up for Grad Students provides some interesting stats. Among the most interesting is that Engineering grad students in the USA are 52% USA citizens and permanent residents while overall 84% of grad students are (other fields, for example, health sciences 92%, business 83%, biological sciences 83%).

Google Gadget Awards

If you’re a student with an email address ending in .edu, the Google Gadget Awards is your chance to win a Google programming competition – even if you’re not a programming ninja. If you’ve ever taken a web design class, you can probably create a gadget in a few minutes – no need to download anything or even own hosting space. Once you’ve submitted your gadget, people can add it to their Google homepage with a few mouse clicks.

Gagets are plugins for Google Desktop or code that run work on web pages. Apply by November 1st.

Google asks students for gadgets

Why the Frogs Are Dying

photo of blue poison frog

Why the Frogs Are Dying by Mac Margolis (photo is of a Blue Poison Frog):

A study by 75 scientists published earlier this year in the journal Nature estimated that two thirds of the 110 known species of harlequins throughout Central and South America have vanished. And that may be just the beginning.
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Scientists monitoring wildlife around the world are echoing Pounds’s research. Their conclusion: many more species will perish.

This article does a good job of discussing the interactions caused by global warming and the consequences to some animal species.

Innovative Science and Engineering Higher Education

CMU student with small robot

Popular Mechanics provides glimpses of 10 cutting-edge science and engineering programs in: 10 Radically Innovative College Programs. Of course Olin College is highlighted again, as they should be: Olin Engineering Education Experiment. They also spotlight: University of California, Irvine; Florida State University, Panama City; Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design; Tufts University; MIT, The Ohio State University; Louisiana State University; Art Center College of Design; and Carnegie Mellon University:

CMU’s Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh is the world’s biggest academic robotics research center. Undergrads minoring in the subject take courses such as Introduction to Robotics, in which the weekly homework assignment is to build LEGO robots demonstrating that week’s concepts. “If the robot works, they get their A,” says Howie Choset, who teaches the course. But the real fun happens in the research labs, where students work on projects such as a slithering snake robot for search-and-rescue missions.

Students also participate in a dazzling array of competitions, such as the RoboCup, which pits teams of Sony AIBO robot dogs against each other in soccer. The highlight of the year is probably the Mobot Races at the CMU Spring Carnival. “Mobot is more important than the football team,” Choset says.

Tour the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab. One theme I see is the focus on projects – versus learning things for a test. A good thing. I would imagine some might worry it is too fun and not enough reading books 🙂 I think students will learn far more from a well crafted experiential education system. But it is a challenge to put that together well. We will all benefit from those that attempt to do so now.
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Science and Engineering Degrees – Career Success

Fortune magazine has selected the 50 most powerful women in business and selected 4 rising stars. It is another example (granted just an anecdote) illustrating that science and engineering degrees can pave the way to career success (also see: Top degree for S&P 500 CEOs? Engineering).

Shona Brown, Senior Vice President, Business Operations, Google, has a bachelor of computer systems engineering degree from Carleton University in Canada and a master’s degree in economics and philosophy from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. She received her Ph.D. and Post-Doctorate from Stanford University’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management. Our management blog mentioned her last month: Chaos Management (by design) at Google – and her book, Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos.

Adriane Brown, President and CEO, Transportation Systems, Honeywell. Degree: environmental health from Old Dominion University.

Padmasree Warrior, EVP, Chief Technology Officer, Motorola – “received a M.S. degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India.”
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Researcher Provides Undisclosed Data to FDA

Companies conduct medical studies and then provide their research to government authorities (the FDA in the USA) to receive approval to market the drugs. Medical studies are complicated, in the best of circumstances. But the financial pressure on companies to bias the results so that they gain approval can be great. There need to be vigorous enforcement to counter the danger of bias rising from the hope companies have for the drugs.

Harvard Researcher Forced Bayer to Give Drug Data

“It calls into question the honesty of Bayer and the honesty of the pharmaceutical industry in general,” says John Teerlink, director of the heart failure clinic at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

“I think the public health has been harmed in two ways,” said Teerlink, who is a member of the FDA panel that met to review Trasylol. “One, we didn’t have complete information to make our decision. But secondly, it calls into question a process that all of us depend on.”

Alexander Walker, a professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health, told the FDA he conducted a study that analyzed the safety of Bayer’s Trasylol and which confirmed an earlier study that the drug increased the risk of kidney failure, heart attacks and strokes. Good job.

2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2006 goes to: Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello for their discovery of
RNA interference – gene silencing by double-stranded RNA.

This mechanism, RNA interference, is activated when RNA molecules occur as double-stranded pairs in the cell. Double-stranded RNA activates biochemical machinery which degrades those mRNA molecules that carry a genetic code identical to that of the double-stranded RNA. When such mRNA molecules disappear, the corresponding gene is silenced and no protein of the encoded type is made.

RNA interference occurs in plants, animals, and humans. It is of great importance for the regulation of gene expression, participates in defense against viral infections, and keeps jumping genes under control. RNA interference is already being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes and it may lead to novel therapies in the future.

The Nobel Prize site also includes does a great job by including advanced information on this work.