Category Archives: Education

Sports Engineering

Wind Tunnel at MIT for sports testing

MIT is not the first school to come to mind when discussing athletics. However, the MIT Center for Sports Innovation (CSI) is making news. The CSI mission is to expand the students’ learning experience by involving them in the development of sports technology and products.

One project at the Center is a wind tunnel used for bicycle testing:

The design and construction of the bike test stand was Brian Hoying’s senior thesis project. The data acquisition software upgrade was Mark Cote’s freshman term project. The resulting test system was deemed “the best cycling test system I’ve ever seen” by Phil White, owner of Cervélo Cycles, and sponsor of the CSC professional cycling team.

It is great to see student projects with such success.

Mark Cote, a researcher at the MIT Center for Sports Innovation, has an impressive list of clients — from Tour de France stage winners to some of North America’s leading bicycle manufacturers. Now the wind tunnel specialist plans to use his expertise in fluid dynamics to develop and, he hopes, patent his own advances in aerodynamic cycling gear.

Not bad, considering that Cote, 21, is still an undergraduate.

$1 Million Each for 20 Science Educators

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Names 20 New Million-Dollar Professors – Top Research Scientists Tapped for their Teaching Talent:

“The scientists whom we have selected are true pioneers—not only in their research, but in their creative approaches and dedication to teaching,” said Thomas R. Cech, HHMI president. “We are hopeful that their educational experiments will energize undergraduate science education throughout the nation.”

The Institute awarded $20 million to the first group of HHMI professors in 2002 to bring the excitement of scientific discovery to the undergraduate classroom.

The experiment worked so well that neurobiologist and HHMI professor Darcy Kelley convinced Columbia University to require every entering freshman to take a course on hot topics in science. Through Utpal Bannerjee’s HHMI program at the University of California, Los Angeles, 138 undergraduates were co-authors of a peer-reviewed article in a top scientific journal. At the University of Pittsburgh, HHMI professor Graham Hatfull’s undergraduates mentored curious high school students as they unearthed and analyzed more than 30 never-before-seen bacteriophages from yards and barnyards. And Isiah Warner, an award-winning chemist and HHMI professor at Louisiana State University, developed a “mentoring ladder,” a hierarchical model for integrating research, education, and peer mentoring, with a special emphasis on underrepresented minority students.

Google Announces 2006 Anita Borg Scholarship Winners

Google Announces 2006 Anita Borg Scholarship Winners

The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship was established to honor the legacy of Anita Borg and her efforts to encourage women to pursue careers in computer science and technology. The award is a $10,000 scholarship for outstanding female undergraduate and graduate students completing their degrees in computer science or related fields.

More on the Google Anita Borg Scholarship.

Previous posts:

Virus-Assembled Batteries

Virus coated polymer dipped in battery material

Virus-Assembled Batteries by Kevin Bullis:

More than half the weight and size of today’s batteries comes from supporting materials that contribute nothing to storing energy. Now researchers have demonstrated that genetically engineered viruses can assemble active battery materials into a compact, regular structure, to make an ultra-thin, transparent battery electrode that stores nearly three times as much energy as those in today’s lithium-ion batteries. It is the first step toward high-capacity, self-assembling batteries.
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One of the ways they have done this in the past is using a process called “directed evolution.” They combine collections of viruses with millions of random variations in a vial containing a piece of the material they want the virus to bind to. Some of the viruses happen to have proteins that bind to the material. Isolating these viruses is a simple process of washing off the piece of material –only those viruses bound to the material remain. These can then be allowed to reproduce. After a few rounds of binding and washing, only viruses with the highest affinity for the material remain.

NASA Engineering Challenges

NASA has been increasing the use of challenges to encourage innovation along the lines they could use for their future missions. The NASA challenges now 9 open challenges including the: beam power challenge and the astronaut glove challenge.

These centennial challenges provide a small monetary award to encourage solutions to challenges.

By making awards based on actual achievements, instead of proposals, Centennial Challenges seeks novel solutions to NASA’s mission challenges from non-traditional sources of innovation in academia, industry and the public.

Previous post: NASA Telerobotic Competition

Like to Tinker? NASA’s Looking for You by Noah Shachtman

Many of NASA’s contests also center on robotics. The Telerobotic Construction Challenge, scheduled for August 2007, requires a team of machines to assemble items with minimal human supervision. The idea is to let robots, instead of astronauts, build shelters and machinery on the moon and Mars.

Why Schools Don’t Educate

Why Schools Don’t Educate by John Taylor Gatto (speech by John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990):

We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom.
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I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching – that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.
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Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn’t cost anything. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why.

Are Antibiotics Killing Us?

Are Antibiotics Killing Us? by Jessica Snyder Sachs:

To counteract these killers, some physicians have turned to lengthy or lifelong courses of antibiotics. At the same time, other researchers are counterintuitively finding that bacteria we think are bad for us also ward off other diseases and keep us healthy. Using antibiotics to tamper with this complicated and little-understood population could irrevocably alter the microbial ecology in an individual and accelerate the spread of drug-resistant genes to the public at large.

Articles on the overuse of antibiotics.

Salyers says her research shows that decades of antibiotic use have bred a frightening

degree of drug resistance into our intestinal flora. The resistance is harmless as long as the bacteria remain confined to their normal habitat. But it can prove deadly when those bacteria contaminate an open wound or cause an infection after surgery.

Related posts:

Organs Engineered in a Lab

Straight Out of Science Fiction: Organs Engineered in a Lab:

Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy.

It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality.

Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Science Education in the 21st Century

Photo of Dr. Carl Wieman

Science Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science podcast by Dr. Carl Wieman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. Also received the first NSF Distinguished teaching Scholars award (NSF’s “highest honor for excellence in both teaching and research”) and the National Professor Of The Year (CASE and Carnegie Foundation).

Dr. Carl Wieman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, discusses the failures of traditional educational practices, even as used by “very good” teachers, and the successes of some new practices and technology that characterize this more effective approach. Research on how people learn science is now revealing how many teachers badly misinterpret what students are thinking and learning from traditional science classes and exams.

However, research is also providing insights on how to do much better. The combination of this research with modern information technology is setting the stage for a new more effective approach to science education based on using the tools of science. This can provide a relevant and effective science education to all students.

Podcast recording 21 Nov 2005 at the University of British Columbia.

Text of March 15, 2006 Dr. Wieman testimony to the US House of Representatives Science Committee.

Nobel Laureate Joins UBC to Boost Science Education

via: Maintaining scientific humility

Robot Dreams

RAYERD-X robot

Video podcast of amazing robot:

One of the most surprising robots that appeared at the 9th Robo-One competition held here in Tokyo on March 18-19th, 2006, was RAYERED-X developed by Asurada. Its unique design allows it to reconfigure and transform itself into some amazing shapes. At first it looks like a short tower, then becomes a carousel, then a walking spider, then into a tall biped battle robot.

All sorts of robot news via the Robot Dreams blog, including RAYERD-X – The Magical Robot:

The robot really surprised the crowds, but may have puzzled the panel of judges to some extent. It’s hard to make a direct comparison between RAYERD-X and the more conventional robot designs. Nevertheless, it did capture the 24th position during the initial Demonstration phase of the Robo-One 9 competition and was awarded the Sunrise Special Prize.

RAYERD-X web site (Japanese).