Category Archives: Education

Self Re-assembling Robots

Cool modular robots can self re-assemble if kicked apart. Shape-shifting robots take form:

DARPA programme manager Mitch Zakin is pursuing what he calls “programmable matter”. These are so-called “mesoscale” mini-machines, a millimetre to a centimetre in size, that can arrange themselves to form whatever shape is desired. Initially, Zakin expects the outcome to be devices the size of small Lego pieces, but as the technology improves the modules and the machines assembled from them should scale down further. Ultimately you could tell a sack of “smart sand” what to do, and the grains would assemble themselves into a hammer, a wrench or even a morphing robotic aircraft. “It’s making machines more like materials, and materials more like machines,” says Daniela Rus, a robotics researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Building Engineers by Letting Kids Build Robots

Building engineers

This year Google has enthusiastically supported my initiative to bring a local group of girls closer to technology through the FIRST Robotics Competition.

“People claim that only with the perspective of years can you know how much influence a particular event has had on you,” Tal Tzangen says and proceeds to explain how she is convinced her participation in the FIRST Robotics Competition last year has significantly changed the course of her life. Tal, a 17 year old girl from a rural part of Israel, was taking technology courses at her school, not because she was particularly interested in technology but because the other options seemed even less appealing to her. Although Israel is also known as “Silicon Wadi,” Tal thought technology was “just for geeks.” Last year she agreed to be a member of a newly forming FIRST team, not knowing what she was letting herself in for.

The competition involves 1,686 teams from more than 42,000 high schools spanning the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Turkey, and the U.K. Each team has six weeks to build a robot from a common kit of parts provided by FIRST. Then, they compete with other robots in a new game devised each year.
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She has enlisted some pre-high school girls with the hope of serving as a role model to them. Likewise, she has encouraged the forming of a FIRST LEGO team (9-14 year olds) to ensure the “next generation” for the Robotics Competition.

Darwin’s Beetles Still Producing Surprises

As part of National Science Foundation-funded research on the evolution of male dimorphism in insects, biology professors J. Mark Rowland, UNM, and Douglas J. Emlen, UM, were surprised to find that many species of beetles are capable of producing not only two, but three different types of males.

The sex lives of animals is known to be complicated business. Where competition in mating is particularly intense, many kinds of animals produce enlarged weapons that function in male combat and utilize alternative tactics in deploying them. Such exaggerated structures include horns in dinosaurs and deer, and tusks in elephants and walrus.

Elaborate male weapons are also known to occur in many types of insects. Now it appears, as the research of Rowland and Emlen illustrates, that male weaponry and alternative mating tactics can be much more complex in the lives of beetles than previously imagined.

“We discovered a novel mating system in which the individual males of various species of beetles have the capacity to express one of three alternative morphologies,” said Rowland. “In many dung beetles , smaller males are unlikely to prevail in direct contests with alpha males. These beta males develop disproportionally smaller horns and employ alternative, less aggressive, reproductive tactics.

“The trimorphic species reported here have alpha, beta and gamma (completely hornless) male – three qualitatively distinct forms. A mating strategy with three such tactics implies considerable complexity, but may actually involve operational rules reminiscent of the old rock, paper, scissors game.”
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Friday Cat Fun #13: Kitten in His Box

Kitten colonized his box and defends it against his siblings.

Canada Film Board Provides Open Access

The National Film Board of Canada is marking its 70th anniversary in 2009 with a gift to Canadians and Web users: a new online Screening Room providing free home viewing of over 700 productions, films, trailers and clips from the NFB’s world-renowned collection.

“This new online Screening Room is the latest example of how the NFB plays a major role in the free exchange of ideas through cinema,” said Tom Perlmutter, Government Film Commissioner and Chairperson of the National Film Board of Canada. “At a time when issues are inter-connected and global communications are mobile and instantaneous, Canada needs a voice. More than ever, the NFB provides that voice: empowering Canadians to share their concerns, express their points of view, tell Canada’s stories. The world is changing – our stories continue.”

From historical films dating back to 1928 to current contemporary releases, including award-winning documentaries, animation and fiction, this initiative invites Canadians from all regions, to browse, discover and be entertained by the stories that bind us together.

The NFB has also opened its vaults to bring forgotten gems to light: archival works that offer rare glimpses back into our past, from Canada’s sacrifices during World War II to traditional communities, exploring the changing face of Canada over the decades.

The site includes many science and nature films including: Life on Ice – Kluane National Park – In Search of the Bowhead Whale – The Enduring Wilderness (Canada’s Natural Parks)

The National Film Board of Canada showing far more vision than many others clinging to outdated models. The internet provides a great opportunity for sharing and using open access to share ideas.

Lunacy – FIRST Robotics Challenge 2009

The For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotic Challenge is a great way to get high school students involved in engineering. Lunacy is the 2009 competition which mimics the low friction environment on the moon (using a slick surface and slick wheels on the robots). For more information see the competition manual and related documents.

Searching for More Effective Tuberculosis Drugs

In India: A Search for More Effective Tuberculosis Drugs

The multi-drug regimen is a major problem for several reasons. It requires TB patients to manage taking four drugs exactly as prescribed over six to nine months. If patients don’t take the full course of the medicines, the TB bacteria may develop resistance to the drugs and become even more difficult to treat. To reduce that risk, many countries require that patients go to a clinic so a healthcare professional can watch them take the medication and ensure they are complying with their drug-treatment regimen. This is both expensive and time consuming. Gokhale said that a single drug that targets multiple pathways could save time and money by eliminating the need to take so many drugs over such a long period of time.

To create their new compound, Gokhale and his colleagues exploited an evolutionary quirk in the way Mycobacterium tuberculosis builds the lipid layer that coats its surface. Unlike other organisms, M. tuberculosis displays a suite of complex lipids on its outer membrane. Some scientists have suggested that these long lipid molecules contribute to the bacteria’s ability to maintain long-term infections by confusing the host’s immune system.

Extinct Ibex is Resurrected by Cloning

Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning

The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain. Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen.

Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned.

Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects. But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue.

It has also increased the possibility that it will one day be possible to reproduce long-dead species such as woolly mammoths and even dinosaurs.

An Artificial Nerve Networks

When neurons – brain nerve cells – are grown in culture, they don’t form complex ‘thinking’ networks. Moses, Feinerman and Rotem wondered whether the physical structure of the nerve network could be designed to be more brain-like. To simplify things, they grew a model nerve network in one dimension only – by getting the neurons to grow along a groove etched in a glass plate. The scientists found they could stimulate these nerve cells using a magnetic field (as opposed to other systems of lab-grown neurons that only react to electricity).

Experimenting further with the linear set-up, the group found that varying the width of the neuron stripe affected how well it would send signals. Nerve cells in the brain are connected to great numbers of other cells through their axons (long, thin extensions), and they must receive a minimum number of incoming signals before they fire one off in response. The researchers identified a threshold thickness, one that allowed the development of around 100 axons. Below this number, the chance of a response was iffy, while just a few over this number greatly raised the chance a signal would be passed on.

The scientists then took two thin stripes of around 100 axons each and created a logic gate similar to one in an electronic computer. Both of these ‘wires’ were connected to a small number of nerve cells. When the cells received a signal along just one of the ‘wires,’ the outcome was uncertain; but a signal sent along both ‘wires’ simultaneously was assured of a response. This type of structure is known as an AND gate. The next structure the team created was slightly more complex: Triangles fashioned from the neuron stripes were lined up in a row, point to rib, in a way that forced the axons to develop and send signals in one direction only. Several of these segmented shapes were then attached together in a loop to create a closed circuit. The regular relay of nerve signals around the circuit turned it into a sort of biological clock or pacemaker.

Moses: ‘We have been able to enforce simplicity on an inherently complicated system. Now we can ask, ‘What do nerve cells grown in culture require in order to be able to carry out complex calculations?’ As we find answers, we get closer to understanding the conditions needed for creating a synthetic, many-neuron ‘thinking’ apparatus.’

Full press release

Promoting Bio-Literacy

Wisconsin State Herbarium tries to ‘counteract bio-illiteracy’

“In a past century people could go outside and name the flowers or trees,” said Ken Cameron, the herbarium’s director. “Now you take a kid outside and the most they can say is, ‘It’s a tree.’ If we can get students in and get them excited, then I think we’ve helped to counteract bio-illiteracy.”
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Herbaria are becoming more of a rarity. And the UW-Madison has the third largest collection of any public university in the country, behind the universities of California and Michigan. At many universities, botany has been absorbed into large biology departments, and collections put into storage. That has not happened at UW-Madison.

“The combination of having a botany department and a big herbarium is getting pretty rare,” said David Baum, botany department chairman. “And more and more herbaria are closing or making the decision to move off campus into storage, which has a real negative effect on research.”

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Herbarium, founded in 1849 (the year the University was founded), is a museum collection of dried, labeled plants of state, national and international importance, which is used extensively for taxonomic and ecological research, as well as for teaching and public service. It contains the world’s largest collection of Wisconsin plants, about one-third of its 1,000,000 specimens having been collected within the state. Most of the world’s floras are well represented, and the holdings from certain areas, such as the Upper Midwest, eastern North America and western Mexico, are widely recognized as resources of global significance.