Photo: At left, the high conductance state has two molecular orbitals, shown in green. Some molecules even let the nanotube switch between highly conductive, left, and poorly conductive. MIT materials scientists tame tricky carbon nanotubes:
Using these molecules as handles, Marzari and Lee said, could overcome fabrication problems and lend the nanotubes new properties for a host of potential applications as detectors, sensors or components in novel optoelectronics.
Burnsville’s budding engineers?:
Through a Kern Family Foundation grant, District 191 is providing PLTW in seventh grade this year, with plans to extend it to eighth grade next year and possibly to the high school level in subsequent years.
…
“Problem-solving is the rest of their lives,” she said. “If they’re seeing the relevance between the math they’re learning out of a book and a project they’re doing, it sticks.”
Great stuff. Getting kids to actually apply concepts is not only fun but the best way to learn. A bunch of previous posts about k-12 engineering education and experiential learning: k-12 Engineering Education – Middle School Students in Solar Car Competition – Robots Wrestling, Students Learning – What’s so Exciting About Engineering? – Middle School Science Teacher – K-12 Engineering Outreach Programs – NSF Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education – Science Opportunities for Students – Why Schools Don’t Educate – Engineering is Elementary – Excellence in K-12 Mathematics and Science Teaching – Fun k-12 Science and Engineering Learning – K-12 Engineering Education Grant for Purdue – Colorado Science Teacher of the Year and on and on…
Celeste Baine Recognized for Exciting Students About Engineering
A new monthly journal, Engineering Education Advocate is available from the Engineering Education Service Center.
Related:
United Negro College Fund (UNCF) Google Scholarship Program:
The application deadline is October 6th. Previous posts on fellowships and scholarships in science and technology including: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (deadline early November) and the proposal for Graduate Scholar Awards in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math.
Puzzling Puffy Planet, Less Dense Than Cork, Is Discovered
“The short answer is, I have no idea,” said Dimitar Sasselov, a professor of astronomy at Harvard and a member of the research team. “It’s a very strange planet.”
Maquila sunrise: Jobs headed back to Mexico:
Today, Mexico’s pumping out more jet engines, semiconductors, and engine harnesses than its old staples like textiles and basic electronics. And that’s creating jobs for Mexican engineers inside the maquilas, like the Gulfstream Aerospace plant in Mexicali.
Read more about lean manufacturing (Toyota Production System) that values the performance improvement over short term savings on our management improvement blog. The kind of thing that allows Toyota to make a great deal of money manufacturing in the USA while Ford and GM can’t seem to do as well.
Continue reading
Florida county plans to vaporize landfill trash:
Supporters say the process is cleaner than traditional trash incineration, though skeptics question whether the technology can meet the lofty expectations.
The 100,000-square-foot plant, slated to be operational in two years, is expected to vaporize 3,000 tons of garbage a day. County officials estimate their entire landfill — 4.3 million tons of trash collected since 1978 — will be gone in 18 years.
No byproduct will go unused, according to Geoplasma, the Atlanta-based company building and paying for the plant.
Synthetic, combustible gas produced in the process will be used to run turbines to create about 120 megawatts of electricity that will be sold back to the grid. The facility will operate on about a third of the power it generates, free from outside electricity.
Engineering a ‘Trojan horse’ to sneak drugs into the brain by Terry Devitt:
Related: blog posts on medical breakthroughs – blog posts on heath care research
Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine
This paper from Princeton University examines the security issues involved with electronic voting machines. The The consensus of the computer security community seems to be that they are not secure and should not be used as they currently exist. Yet for some reason they are being used.
It strikes me as similar to the uproar are the butterfly ballot scandal. Then the public learned that every year millions, of ballots were discarded as unusable and neither party had done much to fix the systemic problems. And then, when the problem was brought to the attention of the public, the parties acted as though this were some unforeseeable problem. They knew the system didn’t work and didn’t fix it. It seems to me the current electronic voting machines are an example of continuing this behavior. It would be better if they would listen to the scientists and not use a system which was so susceptible to creating a scandal.