Category Archives: Education

Honeybees Warn Others of Risks

They trained honeybees to visit two artificial flowers containing the same amount and concentration of food. They left one flower untouched, making it a “safe” food source for the bees.

On the other flower, they placed the bodies of two dead bees, so they were visible to arriving insects, but would not interfere with their foraging. They then recorded whether and how the bees performed a waggle dance on their return to other members of the hive colony.

On average, bees returning from safe flowers performed 20 to 30 times more waggle runs that bees returning from dangerous flowers.

That shows that the bees recognise that certain flowers carry a higher risk of being killed or eaten by predators, such as crab spiders or other spider species that ambush visiting bees.

Another Survey Shows Engineering Degree Results in the Highest Pay

The PayScale salary survey looked at both starting and mid career salary. Engineering topped both measures. Of the top 10 mid career salaries, 7 were engineering degrees – including the top 4. The survey is based upon data for full-time employees in the United States who possess a Bachelor’s degree and no higher degrees and have majored in the subjects listed above.

The top 11 paying degrees are:

	Highest Paid Undergrad College Degrees
Degree	Starting Median Salary	Mid-Career Median Salary
Aerospace Engineering	$59,600	$109,000
Chemical Engineering	$65,700	$107,000
Computer Engineering	$61,700	$105,000
Electrical Engineering	$60,200	$102,000
Economics	$50,200	$101,000
Physics	$51,100	$98,800
Mechanical Engineering	$58,900	$98,300
Computer Science	$56,400	$97,400
Industrial Engineering	$57,100	$95,000
Environmental Engineering	$53,400	$94,500
Statistics	$48,600	$94,500

Research findings Contradict Myth of High Engineering Dropout Rate

Research findings suggest that, contrary to popular belief, engineering does not have a higher dropout rate than other majors and women do just as well as men, information that could lead to a strategy for boosting the number of U.S. engineering graduates.

“Education lore has always told us that students – particularly women – drop out of undergraduate engineering programs more often than students in other fields,” said Matthew Ohland, an associate professor in Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education. “Well, it turns out that neither is true. Engineering programs, on average, retain just as many students as other programs do, and once women get to college they’re just as likely to stick around in engineering as are their male counterparts.”

The research also shows that hardly any students switch to engineering from other majors, pointing to a potential strategy for increasing the number of U.S. engineering graduates, Ohland said.

“A huge message in these findings is that engineering students are amazingly like those in other disciplines, but we need to do more to attract students to engineering programs,” he said. “If you look at who graduates with a degree in social sciences, 50 percent of them started in social sciences, and for other sciences it’s about 60 percent. If you look at who graduates with a degree in engineering, however, 93 percent of them started in engineering. The road is narrow for students to migrate into engineering from other majors.”

Findings were drawn largely from a database that includes 70,000 engineering students from nine institutions in the southeastern United States. Ohland manages the database, called the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Development, which followed students over a 17-year period ending in 2005.

Data show that the nine institutions vary dramatically in how well they retain engineering students over eight semesters, ranging from 66 percent to 37 percent. Those findings indicate policies and practices at some institutions may serve to retain students better than those at other institutions.

The findings suggest educators should develop a two-pronged approach to increase the number of engineering graduates: identify which programs best retain students and determine why they are effective, and develop programs and policies that allow students to more easily transfer into engineering from other majors.

Google Uses Only Outside Air to Cool Data Center in Belgium

Another example of what makes Google such a good engineering company. They do some spectacular things but as importantly they take many, many, many, many individual steps which when taken together make a big difference. Google’s Chiller-less Data Center

Rather than using chillers part-time, the company has eliminated them entirely in its data center near Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, which began operating in late 2008 and also features an on-site water purification facility that allows it to use water from a nearby industrial canal rather than a municipal water utility.

Year-Round Free Cooling
The climate in Belgium will support free cooling almost year-round, according to Google engineers, with temperatures rising above the acceptable range for free cooling about seven days per year on average. The average temperature in Brussels during summer reaches 66 to 71 degrees, while Google maintains its data centers at temperatures above 80 degrees.

So what happens if the weather gets hot? On those days, Google says it will turn off equipment as needed in Belgium and shift computing load to other data centers. This approach is made possible by the scope of the company’s global network of data centers, which provide the ability to shift an entire data center’s workload to other facilities.

Washing Machine Uses 90% Less Water

We wrote about the nearly waterless washing machine from Xeros previously, here are some additional details. The nearly waterless washing machine (which uses 90% less water) was developed by transferring known science to another application. After extensive R&D by University of Leeds scientists a nylon polymer was selected to absorb stains and dirt due to its unique property to become highly absorbent in humid conditions. Better still, it is highly resilient so can be re-used time after time without losing its strength.

The power of polymer cleaning
The nylon polymer has an inherent polarity that attracts stains. Think of how your white nylon garments can get dingy over time as dirt builds up on the surface despite constant washing. However, under humid conditions, the polymer changes and becomes absorbent. Dirt is not just attracted to the surface, it is absorbed into the center.

Such research in university settings, then transferred to products are a great source of economic growth and environmental improvement.

Young Engineers Take LEGO ‘Bots For a Swim

The Stevens Institute of Technology hosts this competition annually on its campus here, gathering students earlier this month from more than 40 middle and high schools to pit their designs against one another in kiddie pools on the banks of the Hudson River. In dozens of such competitions around the world, young people build, program and drive vehicles made of Legos and other more rugged materials. These events are a bid to interest a new generation in careers in engineering and robotics, and they are becoming more sophisticated.
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Upping the ante this year, Build IT introduced Lego’s NXT programmable control box. At least one student on each team learned to program the NXT. The programmer determined which of the vehicle’s propellers would spin and in which direction when the driver moved the levers.

Holding up the device, Abigail Symons from Lincoln Park Middle School demonstrated her work. “Those are the controls and those are the touch sensors and this is a rotation sensor,” she said. She had never used such technology before she joined the team.

“I thought I was going to be bad at it because I wasn’t sure if the right motor would go with the right propeller, but in the end I got it so, it was good,” she said.
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The Build IT program is funded by a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation with further funding by the Motorola Foundation. It is one facet in the NSF’s scheme to entice students into future careers in engineering and other sciences.

Roger Tsien Lecture On Green Florescent Protein

Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien discusses his research on green florescent protein. From the Nobel Prize web site:

n the 1960s, when the Japanese scientist Osamu Shimomura began to study the bioluminescent jelly-fish Aequorea victoria, he had no idea what a scientific revolution it would lead to. Thirty years later, Martin Chalfie used the jellyfish’s green fluorescent protein to help him study life’s smallest building block, the cell.
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when Anton van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope in the 17th century a new world opened up. Scientists could suddenly see bacteria, sperm and blood cells. Things they previously did not know even existed. This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewards a similar effect on science. The green fluorescent protein, GFP, has functioned in the past decade as a guiding star for biochemists, biologists, medical scientists and other researchers.
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This is where the third Nobel Prize laureate Roger Tsien makes his entry. His greatest contribution to the GFP revolution was that he extended the researchers’ palette with many new colours that glowed longer and with higher intensity.

To begin with, Tsien charted how the GFP chromophore is formed chemically in the 238-amino-acid-long GFP protein. Researchers had previously shown that three amino acids in position 65–67 react chemically with each other to form the chromosphore. Tsien showed that this chemical reaction requires oxygen and explained how it can happen without the help of other proteins.

With the aid of DNA technology, Tsien took the next step and exchanged various amino acids in different parts of GFP. This led to the protein both absorbing and emitting light in other parts of the spectrum. By experimenting with the amino acid composition, Tsien was able to develop new variants of GFP that shine more strongly and in quite different colours such as cyan, blue and yellow. That is how researchers today can mark different proteins in different colours to see their interactions.

Crows Can Recognize People

Crows can recognize people and remember them for years. Listen to this interesting report from NPR. Researchers alienated a crow, and then were razzed and harassed by its family and neighbors wherever they go.

Dangerous Infinity

In this BBC documentary, Dangerous Knowledge, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt GÃ¶del and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God’s messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity.

They explore, among other things, varying levels of infinity. With Ludwig Boltzmann they explore challenges to the understanding of physics.

Bear Defeats Combination Bear Lock

Bear-Proof Can Is Pop-Top Picnic for a Crafty Thief

Yellow-Yellow, a 125-pound bear named for two yellow ear tags that help wildlife officials keep tabs on her, has managed to systematically decipher a complex locking system that confounds even some campers.
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“She’s quite talented,” said Jamie Hogan, owner of BearVault, based in San Diego. “I’m an engineer, and if one genius bear can do it, sooner or later there might be two genius bears. We’re trying to work on a new design that we can hopefully test on her.”

His company and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation have cautioned campers in the Adirondacks against using the BearVault because of its vulnerability here. There have been no reports of the BearVault being regularly broken into anywhere else in the country.

So last year Mr. Hogan introduced the 450, a two-pound cylinder costing about $60, and a larger version, the 500, each with a second tab. On them, a camper must press in one tab, turn the lid partway, then press the second tab to remove the lid. “We thought, ‘O.K., well, one bump didn’t work so maybe two bumps will thwart her,'” he said.

But Yellow-Yellow figured that lid out, too.