Category Archives: Students

Items for students and others, interested in learning about science and engineering and the application of science in our lives. We post many of the general interest items here.

Nanotechnology Investment as Strategic National Economic Policy

We have quite a few posts on the intersection of science, research, economic, investment… such as: Diplomacy and Science Research, Science and Engineering in Global Economics and Engineering the Future Economy. Here is another example, from the Wired Science BlogBeating the United States in the Race for Nanotechnology:

When the United States began the National Nanotechnology Initiative, it became clear to a number of small countries including Singapore, Taiwan, and Israel that it was time to invest heavily in similar frontier areas of science. With a level of decisiveness and determination comparable to the efforts of the United States after the launch of Sputnik, Singapore quickly became a global niche player in nanotechnology.

It’s fascinating to hear a high ranking government official who is so incredibly technology savvy and focused on economic development through investment in science. It makes the current climate in the U.S. look really bad, but on the other hand the other countries followed our lead. Since then, they have sort of outdone us at our own game.

Singapore is doing the right things to invest in a science and engineering economy. 10 minute webcast of Foreign Minister George Yeo at the 3rd International Conference on Bioengineering and Nanotechnology:

Raised Without Antibiotics

Tyson is going to start selling chicken Raised Without Antibiotics. The overuse of antibiotics is a huge problem and the overuse in the raising of livestock is a huge problem.

“While we have great confidence in the quality of our traditional chicken, we’re also committed to providing mainstream consumers with the kind of products they want,” said Richard L. Bond, president and CEO of Tyson Foods. “According to our research, 91% of consumers agree it’s important to have fresh chicken produced and labeled ‘raised without antibiotics’,” Bond said.

Tyson started selling 100% All Naturalâ„¢, Raised Without Antibiotics chicken this week. The product is being distributed nationwide in newly-designed packaging highlighting that the chicken is raised without antibiotics and contains no artificial ingredients.

While it is nice they will start selling a portion of chicken raised without using antibiotics and endangering the health of the community by helping evolve super-resistant bugs this is really a pretty small step I would guess. The risk is not even mainly to the person eating the food pumped full of antibiotics it is to everyone when drug resistant bacteria are evolved through the overuse of antibiotics. Also, 100% All Natural is trademarked? Give me a break.

Nationwide Survey Reveals Most Americans are Unaware They Consume Beef and Poultry Raised on Antibiotics (2003)

“Antibiotic medicines are losing effectiveness on humans due to their increased use in animal feed,” said Margaret Mellon, Ph.D, JD, director of the food and environment program for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Animals raised in natural environments rarely require the use of antibiotics. Americans who choose meat produced this way are making conscious decisions to ensure that antibiotics will still be working when they or their family need them.” The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 70 percent of all antibiotics in the United States are now fed to animals raised for human consumption in order to hasten the animals’ growth or prevent illness amid crowded, unsanitary conditions on factory farms.

Abuse of Antibiotics at Factory Farms Threatens the Effectiveness of Drugs Used to Treat Disease in Humans:

According to the Center for Disease Control, more than one-third of the salmonella poisoning cases in 1997 were found to be resistant to five antibiotics. Drug resistance in campylobacter bacteria, the most commonly known cause of bacterial food-borne illness in the United States, increased from zero in 1991 to 14 percent in 1998.
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The European Union, on the recommendation of the World Health Organization, has banned the use of antibiotics to promote the growth of livestock animals when those drugs are also used to treat people. The Center for Disease Control has agreed with this position, but the U.S. government has failed to reduce the threat that ineffective antibiotics pose to human health. (Lieberman, et.al., 1999)

To reduce serious health threats, the Food and Drug Administration should ban the use of antibiotics to promote livestock growth when those antibiotics are used to treat humans.

Discover the Supercollider

The Biggest Thing in Physics

It has taken over 20 years, $8 billion, and the combined efforts of more than 60 countries to create this extraordinary particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, built and operated by CERN, the European physics consortium.
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When the machine is switched on for the first time at the end of this year, particles will make a lap around the LHC in less than one ten-thousandth of a second. Keeping those particles on track requires serious bending power from more than 1,200 superconducting magnets, each of which weighs several tons apiece. Each magnet must be kept at –456 degrees Fahrenheit—colder than the void between galaxies—requiring CERN to build the world’s biggest cryogenic system to handle the 185,000 gallons of liquid helium that will be used to chill the magnets.

Yet another interesting article on the LHC. See previous posts: New Yorker on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – CERN Pressure Test Failure – CERN Prepares for LHC Operations

Galactic Dust with the Ability to Reproduce?

Dust ‘comes alive’ in space:

An international panel from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck institute in Germany and the University of Sydney found that galactic dust could form spontaneously into helixes and double helixes and that the inorganic creations had memory and the power to reproduce themselves.

The new research, to be published this week in the New Journal of Physics, found nonorganic dust, when held in the form of plasma in zero gravity, formed the helical structures found in DNA. The particles are held together by electromagnetic forces that the scientists say could contain a code comparable to the genetic information held in organic matter. It appeared that this code could be transferred to the next generation.

Professor Greg Morfill, of the Max Planck institute of extra-terrestrial physics, said: “Going by our current narrow definitions of what life is, it qualifies. “The question now is to see if it can evolve to become intelligent. It’s a little bit like science fiction at the moment. The potential level of complexity we are looking at is of an amoeba or a plant.”

“I do not believe that the systems we are talking about are life as we know it. We need to define the criteria for what we think of as life much more clearly.”

Interesting, though I don’t really understand what they mean by memory and reproduction in this context.

Related: Cosmic ‘DNA’: Double Helix Spotted in Space – “Magnetic forces at the center of the galaxy have twisted a nebula into the shape of DNA, a new study reveals. The double helix shape is commonly seen inside living organisms, but this is the first time it has been observed in the cosmos.”

Lake Under 2 Miles of Ice

Vostok Under-ice Lake

Raiders of the Lost Lake by Alan Bellows:

In the early 1990s, a Russian drilling rig encountered something peculiar two miles beneath the coldest and most desolate place on Earth. For decades, the workers at Vostok Research Station in Antarctica had been extracting core samples from deep scientific boreholes, and analyzing the lasagna-like layers of ice to study Earth’s bygone climate. But after tunneling through 414,000 layers or so– about two miles into the icecap– the layers abruptly ended.
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Unbeknownst to the Russians, their drill had mingled with the uppermost reaches of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world; a pristine pocket of liquid whose ecosystem was separated from the rest of the Earth millions of years ago. As for what sort of organisms might lurk in that exotic environment today, no one can really be certain.
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Extremophile organisms have turned up in the unlikeliest of places, including within volcanic vents on the ocean floor, in the rocks deep in the Earth’s crust, and in frozen arctic soil. It is not unreasonable to suggest that cold-tolerant creatures could thrive in the waters of Lake Vostok, overcoming the oxygen saturation with extraordinary natural antioxidants. But millions of years of evolutionary isolation in an extreme environment may have created some truly bizarre organisms. This notion is supported by the ice samples drawn from the ice just above Lake Vostok, where some unusual and unidentifiable microbial fossils have been found. But the possibility that they are merely contaminates has not yet been completely ruled out.

Very interesting. Related: The Brine Lake Beneath the Sea – Life Untouched by the Sun

Over-reliance on Prescription Drugs to Aid Children’s Sleep?

Waiting for the sandman

In the report, published in the Aug. 1 issue of the journal Sleep, researchers at Ohio State University in Columbus analyzed 18.6 million reported cases of sleep disorders in patients age 17 and younger. They found that 81 percent of these cases resulted in the prescribing of a drug to treat the problem. Only 7 percent of patients received dietary counseling, and only 22 percent were given behavioral therapies such as psychotherapy or stress management counseling.

Along with the perception (which I share) that we look to pills to fix problems too often (and the belief that drugs have risks and should not be overused) this is not good news.

He adds that it’s very reasonable for doctors to prescribe a sleep aid for a short time, to smooth the transition while behavioral changes are made. Behavioral approaches are almost always worth trying, he says: “It’s very easy to develop some disorders, and it can be very easy to get rid of them as well.”

However, only 19 percent of cases in the study received medication in concert with behavior therapy. Chervin adds that in some cases, such as when a child is developmentally impaired, behavioral approaches may not be appropriate.

But there are other factors at work, experts say. Pediatricians may be too busy, or influenced by parents not to try behavioral approaches, which can be time-intensive. Oftentimes, says Dr. William Kohler, medical director of the Florida Sleep Institute, “if we don’t use [medication], both the family and the child are going to suffer.”

Great Speech by Marissa Mayer on Innovation at Google

Marissa Mayer speech at Stanford on innovation at Google (23 minute speech, 26 minutes of question and answers). She leads the product management efforts on Google’s search products- web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Excellent speech. Highly recommended. Google top 9 ideas:

(inside these are Marissa’s thoughts) [inside these are my comments]

Ideas come from anywhere (engineers, customers, managers, executives, external companies – that Google acquires)
Share everything you can (very open culture)
Your Brilliant We’re Hiring [Google Hiring]
A license to pursue dreams (Google 20% time)
Innovation not instant perfection (iteration – experiment quickly and often)
Data is apolitical [Data Based Decision Making – common errors in interpreting data – read the related links too]
Creativity loves Constraints [process improvement and innovation]
Users not money (Google focuses on providing users what they want and believe it will work out)
Don’t kill projects morph them

So far every time I hear one of Google’s leaders speak I am happier that I own a bit of stock – this is another instance of that.

Nectar-Feeding Bats

Why Nectar-Feeding Bats Need A ‘Power Drink’ To Fly

Nectar-feeding bats burn sugar faster than any other mammal on Earth
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“We found that nectar-feeding bats made use of the sugar they were drinking for their metabolism within minutes after drinking it, and after less than half an hour they were fuelling 100% their metabolism from this source. For comparison, the highest rates reported in humans are for athletes who can fuel up to 30% of their metabolism directly from power drinks,” they say.
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Small nectar-feeding bats have among the highest metabolic costs among mammals, and mostly eat a diet low in fat and protein but rich in sugars. Metabolising these sugars immediately they are consumed saves the costs of converting them to and from storage.”

In a second experiment, Voigt and Speakman measured how fast the bats used their meagre fat stores. “We found the bats depleted almost 60% of their fat stores each day, but even this phenomenal rate was still barely enough to sustain their metabolism when nectar was absent. This underlines how accurately these bats must balance their energy requirements every day and how vulnerable they are to ecological perturbations that might interrupt their fuel supply for even a short period,” they say.

Nectar-feeding bats live in south and central America and are among the smallest of all living mammals, weighing less than 10g. They feed at night and can ingest up to 150% of their body weight as nectar.

That really is amazing.

Bacteria Frozen for 8 Million Years In Polar Ice Resuscitated

Eight-million-year-old bug is alive and growing

Kay Bidle of Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, and his colleagues extracted DNA and bacteria from ice found between 3 and 5 metres beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. The ice gets older as it flows down the valleys and the researchers took five samples that were between 100,000 and 8 million years old.

They then attempted to resuscitate the organisms in the oldest and the youngest samples. “We tried to grow them in media, and the young stuff grew really fast. We could plate them and isolate colonies,” says Bidle. The cultures grown from organisms found in the 100,000-year-old ice doubled in size every 7 days on average.

Whereas the young ice contained a variety of microorganisms, the researchers found only one type of bacterium in the 8-million-year-old sample. It also grew in the laboratory but much more slowly, doubling only every 70 days.

Related: What is an Extremophile?

Harvard Course: Understanding Computers and the Internet

Harvard Extension School – Computer Science E-1: Understanding Computers and the Internet

This course is all about understanding: understanding what’s going on inside your computer when you flip on the switch, why tech support has you constantly rebooting your computer, how everything you do on the Internet can be watched by others, and how your computer can become infected with a worm just by turning it on. In this course we demystify computers and the Internet, along with their jargon, so that students understand not only what they can do with each but also how it all works and why. Students leave this course armed with a new vocabulary and equipped for further exploration of computers and the Internet. Topics include hardware, software, the Internet, multimedia, security, website development, programming, and dotcoms. This course is designed both for those with little, if any, computer experience and for those who use a computer every day.

Nice job. via: Learn How The Darn Thing Works … from Harvard