Category Archives: Education

2006 Nobel Prize in Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 goes to: John C. Mather, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot, University of California at Berkeley. More information, the Nobel Prize does an excellent job of providing additional details to the public. Other award programs, grant providers, museums, science societies… should learn from them, this is the right way to promote science and engineering in an internet age.

The experiment for which George Smoot was responsible was designed to look for small variations of the microwave background in different directions. Minuscule variations in the temperature of the microwave background in different parts of the universe could provide new clues about how galaxies and stars once appeared; why matter in this way had been concentrated to specific localities in the Universe rather than spreading out as a uniform sludge. Tiny variations in temperature could show where matter had started aggregating. Once this process had started, gravitation would take care of the rest: Matter attracts matter, which leads to stars and galaxies forming. Without a starting mechanism however, neither the Milky Way nor the Sun or the Earth would exist.

Related: Science Education in the 21st Century – Nobel Laureate Discusses Protein Power – Nobel Laureates Speaking to High School in Japan – Nobel for Stomach Ulcer Discovery

What Kids can Learn

This is a fascinating interview discussing what children can learn if given a computer and little, if any, instruction. Very Cool. Links on the progress since this interview are at the end of the post.

Q: This is your concept of minimally invasive education?

A: Yes. It started out as a joke but I’ve kept using the term … This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction that might lead into a blind alley.

The interview explores what happened when:

Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.

What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.

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50 New Species Found in Indonesia Reefs

Photo of walking shark

“Walking” Sharks Among 50 New Species Found in Indonesia Reefs

The sharks are about 3 to 4 feet (1 to 1.2 meters) long and walk along the shallow reef flats on their fins, preying on shrimp, crabs, snails, and small fish.

“If they get spooked they can swim away, but the thing that stands out is their walking over the bottom,” Troeng said.

The photo is of one of two species of walking sharks found. See video of the sharks and of more of the species found in Indonesia.

Google 2007 Anita Borg Scholarship

Google 2007 Anita Borg Scholarship

USA: Open to female, undergraduate seniors or graduate students at a university in the United States studying Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical fields. Apply by January 15, 2007. The scholarship recipients will each receive a $10,000 scholarship for the 2007-2008 academic year. Remaining finalists will receive $1,000 each. Both groups will visit Google headquarters April 5-7, 2007 for workshops with a series of speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities.

Europe: Similar to the above, apply by January 12th, 2007

Related: Google Announces 2006 Anita Borg Scholarship Winners – NSF Graduate Research Fellowship – Anita Borg Scholarship, Australia – How to Win a Graduate Fellowship

More Great Science Webcasts

Lectures from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center including: Whispers of the Big Bang by Sarah Church, Archimedes: Accelerator Reveals Ancient Text by Uwe Bergman, Our Lopsided Universe: The Matter with Anti-Matter by Steve Sekula and The Runaway Universe by Roger Blandford. This collection is yet another great resource.

The number of great resources has prompted me to created a directory of great science and engineering webcast libraries: Curious Cat Science and Engineering Webcast Libraries. These sites have awesome science and engineering videos. Definitely worth viewing.

Related: Google Technology Webcasts – open access science posts – Google Tech Talks – UC-Berkeley Course Videos – The Inner Life of a Cell: Animation

Artificial Corneas

Closer to fooling the eye

Transplanting human corneas from cadavers can restore someone’s vision. But because of a tissue shortage, only 100,000 corneal transplants are performed worldwide annually — serving just 1% of the 10 million people who are stricken with corneal blindness.
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Bioengineers are making significant progress. They predict that within a few years we could have cornea substitutes that slip over the surface of the eye as easily as contact lenses and mesh neatly with surrounding tissue to form a protective barrier against the outside elements.

UC-Berkeley Course Videos

Google offers a huge number of University of California, Berkeley course videos. They include full courses on subjects including:

Great stuff and hopefully much more to follow. A great example of open access education material. It is a bit surprising that it is not easier to navigate the videos to find what you might be interested in. The videos are not great quality (like all of Google Video) but the content is great. And it seems likely (hopefully) 5 years from now we will get great quality such videos from many schools.
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Nanoparticles to Aid Brain Imaging

Nanoparticles to aid brain imaging, team reports by Cathryn M. Delude

If you want to see precisely what the 10 billion neurons in a person’s brain are doing, a good way to start is to track calcium as it flows into neurons when they fire.
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So Jasanoff designed the new sensor to incorporate so-called “superparamagnetic nanoparticles”–extra-strength molecular-sized magnets previously designed for ultrasensitive tumor imaging. They produce large MRI contrast changes capable of producing very high-resolution images.

5th State of Matter

Physicists create ‘new state’ of matter in a solid

An international team of physicists have coaxed particles into an exotic “fifth state” of matter at a higher temperature than ever before, according to new research.

The research also represents the first time a Bose-Einstein condensate has been created in a solid, rather than in a super-cooled gas.

The Bose-Einstein condensate is a super-cooled state of matter in which all the atoms have the same energy and quantum characteristics, similar to the way all photons in a laser share the same characteristics.

This new form of matter was first predicted mathematically by Indian physicist S.N. Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924.

Three American physicists — Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman — first created a Bose-Einstein condensate in the lab in 1995 and shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for physics for their work.