Category Archives: Education

Biodegradable Plastic Bags and Bottles

researchers look to make environmentally friendly plastics

Every year, more than 30 billion water bottles are added to America’s landfills, creating a mountainous environmental problem. But if research at Missouri University of Science and Technology is successful, the plastic bottles of the future could literally disappear within four months of being discarded.

The Missouri S&T research team is constructing new breeds of biodegradable and bioavailable plastics in an effort to reduce the tons of plastic waste that ends up in the nation’s landfills each year. Bioavailable plastics contain substances that can be absorbed by living systems during their normal physiological functions.

By combining and modifying a variety of bio-based, oil-based and natural polymers, the team seeks to create optimal blends that can be used to make agricultural films, bottles, biomedical and drug delivery devices, and more.
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As polylactic acid degrades, the material reacts with water to decompose into small molecules, which are then mineralized into water and carbon dioxide.

“In general, the main end products of polymer degradation are water and carbon dioxide,” Shahlari explains. “Polylatic acid has the potential of replacing the regular water bottles, and we anticipate that our research could be incorporated into that field too.

It sure seems like they are saying these would really biodegrade. Plastic bags can photodegrade where they break down into small bits of plastic that might be hard to see but are still toxic that can be eaten by animals, and us. As one would figure – that is not a good thing. The ocean garbage floats are not huge amounts of plastic bags and bottles but instead huge amounts of small and tiny plastic particles. I know using corn based bags has been looked at previously and used.

Medical Study Integrity (or Lack Thereof)

Merck wrote drug studies for doctors

The drug maker Merck drafted dozens of research studies for a best-selling drug, then lined up prestigious doctors to put their names on the reports before publication, according to an article to be published Wednesday in a leading medical journal.

The article, based on documents unearthed in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx, provides a rare, detailed look in the industry practice of ghostwriting medical research studies that are then published in academic journals.
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“It almost calls into question all legitimate research that’s been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician,” said Ross, whose article, written with colleagues, was published Wednesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and posted Tuesday on the journal’s Web site.

Merck acknowledged Tuesday that it sometimes hired outside medical writers to draft research reports before handing them over to the doctors whose names eventually appear on the publication. But the company disputed the article’s conclusion that the authors do little of the actual research or analysis.

It is sad that the integrity of journals and scientists is so weak that they leave them open to such charges. The significant presence of the corrupting influence of too much money leaves doubt in my mind that the best science is the goal. Which is very sad. In, Funding Medical Research, I discussed my concern that universities are acting more like profit motivated organizations than science motivated organizations. I am in favor of profit motivated organization (those getting the micro-financing in this link, for example) but those organization should not be trusted to provide honest and balanced opinions they should be expected to provide biased opinions.

If universities (and scientists branding themselves as … at X university) want to be seen as honest brokers of science they can’t behave as though raising money, getting patents… are their main objectives. Many want to be able to get the money and retain the sense of an organization focused on the pursuit of science above all else. Sorry, you can’t have it both ways. You can, and probably should, try stake out some ground in the middle. And for me right now, partially because they fail to acknowledge the extent to which money seems to drive decisions I don’t believe they are trying to be open and honest, instead I get the impression they are leaning more toward trying to market and sell.
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The Last Lecture Book

We wrote about this last August: CMU Professor Gives His Last Lesson on Life. If you haven’t seen the lecture I encourage you to do so now. Now there is a book by Dr. Randy Pausch called The Last Lecture where he expands on his lecture with “many more stories from my life and the attendant lessons I hope my kids can take from them.”

Like any teacher, my students are my biggest professional legacy. I’d like to think that the people I’ve crossed paths with have learned something from me, and I know I learned a great deal from them, for which I am very grateful. Certainly, I’ve dedicated a lot of my teaching to helping young folks realize how they need to be able to work with other people–especially other people who are very different from themselves.

Is Computer Science a Science?

Is computer science a science?

Most people seem to apply a certain litmus test of sorts to determine if something is a science. Something is a science if

(1) it uses the scientific method (i.e., empirical research and observation)
(2) it involves studying “fundamental principles” of the natural or physical world

(1) is, I think, a bit easier to address. I use the scientific method all the time in my work: I form hypotheses about how a particular system or algorithm should behave, develop experiments to test the hypothesis, gather data, analyze, etc. Several commenters to the first post in the series discuss the same thing. Joe, for instance, says this about his work: “One of the things I’ve noticed as a developer/engineer for the last 20 years is that I use the techniques of science all the time, only I’m not studying “nature” (be it the physics world, chemicals, biology, or people). I’m applying the disciplines and the scientific process to stuff that other people have done.” (I’ll get back to this point in a minute.)

Turtle Camps in Malaysia

Drawing of sea turtles

Pelf Nyok has posted drawing of turtle camps students that she taught in Malaysia. On the image shown on the left:

The third poster shows the threats that our turtles are facing — a turtle is trapped in a fisherman’s net, a turtle is consuming a plastic bag, which it mistakes as a jellyfish, and there are rubbish on the sea floor.

Pelf is on her way to the USA for turtle conservation training on the Asian Scholarship Program for in-situ Chelonian Conservation:

a 4-month scholarship, and involves professional training in the conservation of turtles (including sea turtles, freshwater turtles and tortoises, I presume). The flow of the program has yet to be finalized but according to the Director of the Program, we (the Laotian student and I) would be spending one month visiting turtle scientists and turtle research centers in New Jersey, Tennessee, Florida and maybe California.

And the remaining 3 months would be spent at the Wetlands Institute at Stone Harbor, New Jersey. The training will be conducted at the Wetlands Institute, together with other local participants.

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Bikini Atoll 50 Years Later

Nuked coral reef bounces back

Three islands of Bikini Atoll were vapourised by the Bravo hydrogen bomb in 1954, which shook islands 200 kilometres away. Instead of finding a bare underwater moonscape, ecologists who have dived it have given the 2-kilometre-wide crater a clean bill of health.

“It was fascinating – I’ve never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands,” says Zoe Richards of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia. Richards and colleagues report a thriving ecosystem of 183 species of coral, some of which were 8 metres high. They estimate that the diversity of species represents about 65% of what was present before the atomic tests. The ecologists think the nearby Rongelap Atoll is seeding the Bikini Atoll, and the lack of human disturbance is helping its recovery.
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“When I put the Geiger counter near a coconut, which accumulates radioactive material from the soil, it went berserk,” says Beger.

ASU Science Studio Podcasts

Science Studio offers podcasts by the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences with professors discussing science; it is another excellent source of science podcasts. Podcasts include:

Of Whales, Fish and Men: Managing Marine Reserves – With 90% of the world’s fisheries in a state of collapse, the questions around establishing marine reserves, monitoring, and species/stock recovery take on critical dimensions. But how do decision-makers, stakeholders, and the public formulate effective conservation policies; ones right for their community?
Biology on Fire – Regents’ Professor, Mac Arthur Fellow, author and a world’s expert on fire and fire ecology Stephen Pyne talks about how fire, its use, misuse, and its biological nature have shaped our world, before and because of man, and learn how policies of the past still reverberate in our present, in Arizona and globally.
Giant Insects: Not just in B movies – Professor Jon Harrison sheds light on the evolution of his scientific career and nature’s biggest order: arthropods. How big is big? In the Paleozoic, cockroaches were the size of housecats and dragonflies the size of raptors.
Special Feature: Building a science career – One of the most highly cited ecologists in the world, Jane Lubchenco trod her own unique path to success. In this live recording with the Association for Women in Science, she explains how assertiveness, the art of negotiation, and knowing the currency for promotion and tenure can make the difference between achieving balance between family and career and dropping out the leaky academic pipeline that leads to advancement.

These podcasts are great way to use the internet to serve the mission of universities: to educate. And a great way to promote science.

Study challenges notion of ‘pandemic’ flu

Peter Doshi, a graduate student in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society Program at MIT, based his study on an analysis of more than a century of influenza mortality data. He found that the peak monthly death rates in the 1957-1958 and 1968-1969 pandemic seasons were no higher than–and were sometimes exceeded by–those for severe nonpandemic seasons.

Doshi says the pandemic-equals-extreme-mortality concept appears to be a generalization of a single data point: the 1918 season, a period in which “doctors lacked intensive care units, respirators, antiviral agents and antibiotics.” He argues that “had no other aspect of modern medicine but antibiotics been available in 1918, there seems good reason to believe that the severity of this pandemic would have been far reduced.”

As may be expected given improvements in living conditions, nutrition and other public health measures, influenza death rates substantially declined across the 20th century. Doshi calculates an 18-fold decrease in influenza deaths between the 1940s and 1990s, a trend that began far before the introduction of widespread vaccination.

Eating Breakfast Keeps Teenagers Leaner

Breakfast ‘keeps teenagers lean’

In a five year study of more than 2,000 youngsters, those who skipped breakfast weighed on average 5lbs (2.3kg) more than those who ate first thing. This was despite the fact that the breakfast-eaters consumed more calories in the course of the day. But the study in Pediatrics found they were likely to be much more active.

The University of Minnesota research adds weight to a growing body of evidence that those who eat breakfast – whether young or old – are leaner than those who do not.
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“The real problem is the profusion of messages about obesity. We need to make clear that eating regular meals is vital – and that a proper breakfast is very important. “If you eat well first thing, you’ll feel brighter, you’ll have more get up and go – and that will mean you’ll expend more energy.”

Teenagers are not the only ones who may benefit from sitting down to a proper breakfast. In a study of nearly 7,000 middle-aged people in Norfolk, a team from Cambridge University found that those who ate the most in the morning put on the least amount of weight.

Inspirational Engineer

One of the topics I care about is engineers making a real difference in the world. I lived in Singapore and Nigeria while I was growing up and traveled widely. My father was a professor of engineering (chemical, industrial), statistics and business. He was very interested in applying technology and human knowledge to help people have better lives, and I share that interest.

People like William Kamkwamba are the people that are worthy of respect. I wish the USA was more focused on people that are worthy of attention, instead of who the news media choose to show and people choose to read about. At least a few of you seem to like reading about those I do, based on the traffic this blog receives (well actually that would be a pretty poor metric, let say the attention popular science sites, magazines, podcasts, TV shows… receive).

Another video with William at TED. I posted about William previously: Make the World Better and Home Engineering: Windmill for Electricity.