Category Archives: Education

Water Pump Merry-go-Round

I wrote about PlayPumps in 2006: Safe Water Through Play. This video by National Geographic gives more detail on PlayPumps and water needs in general. Some facts from KnowH₂O

A child dies every 15 seconds from diseases related to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water.

40 billion hours each year are spent collecting water in sub-Saharan Africa, equal to over 19 million full-time employees.

Every $1 invested in water yields an economic return worth $8 in saved time, increased productivity and reduced healthcare costs. (UNDP)

In many areas of sub-Saharan Africa women and girls often walk an average of five miles to the nearest water source every day. If a woman only had to carry water for one hour a day, she could earn an additional US $100 a year.

Million-Degree Plasma May Flow throughout the Galaxy

Researcher Manuel GÃ¼del at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland and colleagues from Switzerland, France and the US have recently observed the plasma flow phenomenon for the first time in the Orion Nebula. Based on images taken with an x-ray satellite called the XMM-Newton, the researchers observed the existence of a million-degree plasma flowing from the nebula into the adjacent interstellar medium, and then into the neighboring superbubble Eridanus.

“Although there has been a theoretical model that predicted hot gas bubbles blown by just one massive star, such has not been detected until we found confirmation in the Orion Nebula,” GÃ¼del told PhysOrg.com. “We didn’t look for it – we actually found this diffuse emission by chance while looking at the many stellar x-ray point sources in the field.
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“Hot gas has been seen in some extremely massive star-formation regions, and some of this gas might have been produced by supernova explosions,” said GÃ¼del. “However, the Orion Nebula is the first region of its (more modest) kind that shows this phenomenon, and there is no supernova that can account for it. Such more modest regions of star formation are naturally more frequent in the galaxy than the more extreme cases. Therefore, we believe that plasma outflows from star-forming regions are widespread.”

National Science Board Report on Improving Engineering Education

Moving Forward to Improve Engineering Education a report from the National Science Board:

Changes in the global environment require changes in engineering education. Markets, companies, and supply chains have become much more international and engineering services are often sourced to the countries that can provide the best value. Basic engineering skills (such as knowledge of the engineering fundamentals) have become commodities that can be provided by lower cost engineers in many countries, and some engineering jobs traditionally done in the U.S. are increasingly done overseas. To respond to this changing context, U.S. engineers need new skill sets not easily replicated by low-wage overseas engineers.
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Society at large does not have an accurate perception of the nature of engineering. Survey data indicate that the public associates engineers with economic growth and defense, but less so with improving health, the quality of life, and the environment.
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The third challenge for engineering education is to retain those students who are initially attracted to engineering. Attrition is substantial in engineering, particularly in the first year of college. About 60 percent of students who enter engineering majors obtain a degree within 6 years. Although this retention rate is comparable to some other fields, it is especially critical for engineering to retain the pool of entering students.

Biofuels use Could Worsen Global Warming

Biofuels use could worsen warming (site broke link so link removed)

The biofuels themselves produce less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, but not nearly enough to offset the carbon dioxide that is released when land is cleared and plowed up to produce crops, the studies said. Carbon dioxide is one of the leading contributors to global warming.

One of the studies released Thursday by the journal Science estimated that ethanol would nearly double the greenhouse emissions over a 30-year period if the impact of land conversion is taken into account.

NSF Awards $50 Million for Collaborative Plant Biology Project

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced a $50 million award to a University of Arizona-led team to create the first national cyberinfrastructure center to tackle global “grand challenge” plant biology questions that have great implications on larger questions regarding the environment, agriculture, energy and the very organisms that sustain our existence on earth. The five-year project, dubbed the iPlant Collaborative, potentially is renewable for a second five years for a total of $100 million.

Like no other single research entity, the iPlant Collaborative will provide the capacity to draw upon resources and talent in remote locations and enable plant scientists, computer scientists and information scientists from around the world for the first time ever to collaboratively address questions of global importance and advance all of these fields. It will bring together and leverage the resources and information generated through the National Plant Genome Initiative, enabling more breadth and depth of research in every aspect of plant science.

“We are confident in the positive returns of this substantive investment in basic research,” said NSF Director Arden L. Bement. “The iPlant Collaborative will harness the best and the brightest scholars and research in plant biology in order to tackle some of the profound issues of our day and for our future. Challenges that may need plants for solutions include addressing the impacts of climate change, dwindling oil supply, decreasing agricultural land area, increasing population and environmental degradation.”
Continue reading →

Surprising New Diabetes Data

But these measures are only surrogates for disease. And in many cases, the connection between “better” numbers and better health is tenuous. In the case of cholesterol, many people won’t see a health benefit from lower numbers.

Now comes yet another sobering reminder that lowering a surrogate marker doesn’t necessarily bring better health. On Feb. 6, the National Institutes of Health announced it was halting a key trial for diabetes. Researchers had hoped the trial, dubbed ACCORD (Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes), would show that more aggressive lowering of blood sugar would significantly reduce deaths. Instead, the opposite happened. More people in the intensive treatment group died than in the group getting standard care. “A thorough review of the data shows that the medical treatment strategy of intensively reducing blood sugar below current clinical guidelines causes harm in these…patients,” says Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute.

Scientific study often results in less than clear conclusions, especially in complex systems. There is great difficulty understanding what is actually going on, what interactions are present, what factors are significant, etc.. One of the great problems with the low level of scientific literacy in the USA is so many people think science is about simple absolute truth.

Scientific inquiry, especially related to health care, must attempt to gain insights from confusing signals. To gain scientific literacy one must understand basics concepts, like data is a proxy for what you aim to understand. To understand yourself you need to accept that science is not math. For a long time we are going to have to do our best to build up our understanding of human health (and other complex systems) as best we can. We need to be able to sort out what are solid conclusion, what are guesses, what seem like reasonable explanation and what level of confidence we can have in statements.

It is not enough to learn facts we need to be able to think scientifically and comprehend the subtleties surrounding the advances in scientific understanding. Some criticize newspapers and popular science for providing too simplistic a view of new scientific knowledge. While this can be a problem I really see the problem much more serious if people read obviously overly simplistic articles and don’t understand that it is just scratching the surface. The reader needs to take responsibility too. I enjoy many great articles that gloss over many of the details but provide a quick view of intriguing new breakthroughs.

Cancer Killing Ideas From Honeybees

Honeybee Weapon in War on Cancer

No, researchers haven’t found a beehive-based cure (though major royal jelly, the wondrous protein concoction that turns lowly workers into queens, may have anti-cancer properties.) But bee colonies experience their own type of cancer, and maybe human researchers can learn from their victories.
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Like Amdam said, it’s not clear how the honeybees won. Perhaps the successful colonies produced bees adapted to noticing the intruder; perhaps it produced individual bees whose interactions caused some sort of superorganism-wide shift. And maybe when we figure that out, we’ll have some fresh ideas for fighting cancer — maybe not for tweaking our own cells, but for customized nanomolecule cancer hunters.

A New Epoch – Anthropocene

Has Earth entered a new epoch?

Geologists wonder if they should add a new epoch to the geological time scale. They call it the Anthropocene – the epoch when, for the first time in Earth’s history, humans have become a predominant geophysical force. Naming such a new epoch would also recognize that humans now share responsibility with natural forces for the state of our planet’s ecological environment.

Geologists have been using the term informally for at least half a decade. Now members of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London have laid out the case for giving the term official scientific status.

They make a good point I think.

BBC In Our Time Science Podcast Archive

BBC In Our Time Science Podcast Archive including: Plate Tectonics – the day the Earth moved, Genetic Mutation – the error-strewn secrets of life, The Fibonacci Sequence – the numbers in nature, Antimatter – where has it all gone?, Gravitational Waves – a new window on the universe. Great stuff. This is the type of stuff that makes the internet so great. It is wonderful the amount of great science and engineering resources are online.

Nature Recreation Declining

Glacier National Park photo by John Hunter

Photo looking north across Lake McDonald from my Village Inn balcony in Glacier National Park, by John Hunter.

Do people still care about nature

Nature recreation worldwide — from camping, hunting and fishing to park visitation — has declined sharply since the 1980s
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The study examines data from the United States, Japan and Spain on everything from backpacking to duck hunting…that correlated a decline in visits to U.S. National Parks with an increase in television, video game and Internet use.
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The decline in some nature use seems to be accelerating, such as U.S. state park and national forest visits, as well as fishing. Others show a more steady decline, such as U.S. and Japanese national park visits and U.S. Bureau of Public Lands visits. Most reliable long-term per capita visitation measures of nature recreation peaked between 1981 and 1991. They’ve declined about 1.2 percent per year since then, and have declined a total of between 18 percent and 25 percent.
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Other research shows that the time children spend in nature — particularly the activities we looked at in this study – determines their environmental awareness as adults. We recently wrote a review paper looking at this phenomenon as well as at the effects of videophilia on childhood development. These effects are substantial and include obesity, attentional disorders, lack of socialization and poor academic performance.

I must say I am surprised by this. My visits to national parks have led me to believe the attendance was increasing but that seems to be wrong. The National Parks Service has a simple web tool to view visits to US national parks by year. Go visit great parks, here are some photos from my trips: Grand Teton National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Shenandoah National Park and Grand Canyon National Park.