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.

Editorial: Engineers of the Future

Engineers of the future:

Technology education programs at all grade levels seek to afford students opportunities to tinker, to discover how things work, and to explore the designed world. At the elementary school level, students may learn about simple machines designed for specific tasks or about the basics of electricity by actually building simple circuits. In middle school, students may explore concepts in more detail, perhaps by designing and building a model of a bridge or a gliding aircraft. In high school, students may have opportunities to design an affordable home, take something apart to see how it works, or design and build a robot that would be used for a rescue mission or some other specific purpose. All of these experiences are related to the processes of engineering.

This is the type of learning that can enhance a future engineer’s experience, but also the type that cannot be included in the typical upper grade level math or science classroom for one main reason: math and science teachers generally do not have the time and may not have the interest or expertise needed for in-depth study of technology.

The editorial makes a good point. As import and primary science and math education are they are not enough. Effort to create an environment where students can experiment and use their hands and minds to solve problems is incredibly valuable. Teaching in this way is not as simple as it might seem, see example below for some ideas and resources that can help create these type of learning institutions.

Examples: Middle School Engineers – k-12 Engineering Education – Engineering is Elementary – Colorado Science Teacher of the Year – Building minds by building robots – Leadership Initiatives for Teaching and Technology – Engineering Education Program for k-12 – Project Lead The Way – k-12 science and engineering posts

Tracking Changes in Individual Molecules

Watching a Biological Jigsaw Puzzle Come Together

Scientists have recorded the action involved in assembling telomerase, an enzyme used by cells to protect their genes during the potentially dangerous process of DNA replication. Using a sophisticated technique for tracking structural changes in individual molecules in real time, they have revealed how three of the protein and RNA components of the enzyme come together, altering their shapes along the way to ensure that the next piece will fit.
…
In these more complicated systems, it’s much harder to guess what is going on in the assembly process. But by directly watching things as they happen, this sort of powerful approach will give a lot of new insights.

Very cool stuff. It just keeps coming doesn’t it?

Asimo Robot: Running and Climbing Stairs

ASIMO Brings Engineering to Life at the Dream Factory:

The Dream Factory is an educational initiative organized by Honda of the UK Manufacturing Ltd (HUM) in association with The Science Museum to provide inspiration and a greater excitement about the subject of engineering. Aimed at Key Stage 3 students (ages 11-13 years), each workshop has been specifically designed to explain a basic engineering principle and show how this is then used in Honda’s leading edge technology. ASIMO joins Punk Science presenters from Discovery Channel’s Scientific Show and the HUM team to help inspire over 500 local school children.

Saving Mankind

Hollywood got it wrong, this is how you stop an apocalyptic asteroid:

Rather than Hollywood’s preferred option, engineers are trying to develop unmanned rockets that can land on space rocks and use the asteroids’ own material to propel them into a safer orbit.
…
“It is like throwing rocks out of a rowing boat on a lake. The rocks go in one direction and the boat is slowly pushed in the other under the laws of physics,” said John Olds, the chief executive of SpaceWorks, the firm behind the scheme. “Over several months we think we can make the difference between a hit and a miss.” Astronomers fear that a 400-yard wide asteroid will pass dangerously close to the Earth within 30 years. Typically, one the size of a football pitch strikes every 100 years or so, and it is also almost 100 years since the last major impact which caused an explosion equivalent to a 15 megaton nuclear bomb in Tunguska, Siberia on June 30, 1908.

Fighting Elephant Poaching With Science

DNA Technology Leads Scientists to Locations of Elephant Poaching:

The illegal trade in elephant ivory continues unabated despite the fact that it was banned by international convention in 1989. In an effort to hunt down poachers who slaughter thousands of elephants a year for the animals’ tusks, scientists have turned to DNA technology to narrow the search.
…
But to pinpoint the precise origin of the tusks can tell authorities where elephants are being slaughtered and which routes are being used to transport the illegal tusks. Armed with this information, the enforcement authorities would find it easier to track down poachers.
…
Wasser led a group of researchers who performed a DNA analysis on 67 tusks confiscated in the 2002 Singapore seizure. The genetic material was compared to an existing database of elephant DNA. The researchers determined with near “100 percent accuracy” that the poached elephants came from the savanna within a narrow band of Southern Africa — possibly extending from Mozambique to Angola — with Zambia at its center.

Excellent use of science to gain knowledge which can help determine where best to put effort to counteract poaching.

Correlation is Not Causation

Why so much medical research is rot:

People born under the astrological sign of Leo are 15% more likely to be admitted to hospital with gastric bleeding than those born under the other 11 signs. Sagittarians are 38% more likely than others to land up there because of a broken arm. Those are the conclusions that many medical researchers would be forced to make from a set of data presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Peter Austin of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto. At least, they would be forced to draw them if they applied the lax statistical methods of their own work to the records of hospital admissions in Ontario, Canada, used by Dr Austin.

Dr Austin, of course, does not draw those conclusions. His point was to shock medical researchers into using better statistics, because the ones they routinely employ today run the risk of identifying relationships when, in fact, there are none. He also wanted to explain why so many health claims that look important when they are first made are not substantiated in later studies.

As I said in, Seeing Patterns Where None Exists: “Page 8 of Statistics for Experimenters by George Box, William Hunter (my father) and Stu Hunter (no relation) shows a graph of the population (of people) versus the number of storks which shows a high correlation. “Although in this example few would be led to hypothesize that the increase in the number of storks caused the observed increase in population, investigators are sometimes guilty of this kind of mistake in other contexts.'”

Nanoparticles to Battle Cancer

photo of Todd Harris, Sangeeta Bhatia and Geoffrey von Maltzahn

Team develops nanoparticles to battle cancer:

One solution already under way involves using nanoparticles for cancer imaging. By slipping through tiny gaps that exist in fast-growing tumor blood vessels and then sticking together, the particles create masses with enough of a magnetic signal to be detectable by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. “This might allow for noninvasive imaging of fast-growing cancer ‘hot spots’ in tumors,” said Bhatia. The team will continue this research by testing the imaging capabilities in animal models.

Another solution, described in the Jan. 16 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a novel “homing” nanoparticle that mimics blood platelets. Platelets flow freely in the blood and act only when needed, by keying in on injured blood vessels and accumulating there to form clots. Similarly, these new nanoparticles key in on a unique feature of tumor blood vessels.

Ruoslahti had identified that the lining of tumor vessels contains a meshwork of clotted plasma proteins not found in other tissues. He also identified a peptide that binds to this meshwork. By attaching this peptide to nanoparticles, the team created a particle that targets tumors but not other tissues. When injected into the bloodstream of mice with tumors, the peptide sticks to the tumor’s clotted mesh.

Photo by Donna Coveney, from related press release: MIT nanoparticles may help detect, treat tumors

Micro RNA Editing

What separates us from the worms by Tom Avril (bozos broke the link, poor usability, so I removed it):

RNA editing is thought to be just one way that humans get more out of their 30,000 genes than, say, a fruit fly does with 13,600 or a roundworm does with 19,100. Those creatures have more primitive editing machinery, said the paper’s senior author, Kazuko Nishikura of Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute.

And they have much less of what is sometimes misleadingly called “junk” DNA – a region of the genome that does not produce proteins but nevertheless appears to play a key role in the diversity of life. The new paper is one of numerous recent finds in the booming field of RNA research. In the early days of genetic study, RNA was seen basically as a messenger for its cousin, DNA, carrying instructions to direct the manufacture of proteins.

But other kinds of RNA have since been discovered, including some that regulate or turn off certain genes, playing a role in embryonic development and – when things go awry – in diseases such as cancer. Last year’s Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to scientists who pioneered a related field called RNA interference. And RNA is now thought to be even older than DNA, with some saying it served as the genetic blueprint for the earliest forms of life.

Communication Emergence in Robots

Evolving Robotspeak by Carl Zimmer:

At first the robots just flashed their lights at random. But over time things changed. In the trials with relatives undergoing colony selection, twelve out of the twenty lines began to turn on the blue light when they reached the food. The light attracted the other robots, bringing them quickly to the food. The other eight lines evolved the opposite strategy. They turned blue when they hit the poison, and the other robots responded to the light by heading away.

Two separate communication systems had evolved, each benefiting the entire colony. By communicating, the robots also raised their score by 14%. Here’s a movie showing six of these chit-chatting robots finding a meal.

Related: The original paper, Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Communication in Robots (pdf) by Dario Floreano, Sara Mitri, Stephane Magnenat and Laurent Keller – more robot related posts

Car Elevator (for parking)

Interesting photos of a NYC parking garage with elevators and the looks of a fancy mall not a garage. Cars are driven onto a palet and then the automated systems take it from there. Parking as a Destination:

The project is the work of AutoMotion Parking Systems, the American subsidiary of Stolzer Parkhaus of Strassburg, Germany. Stolzer Parkhaus has built 28 automated garages in 11 countries since its first, in Kronach, Germany, in 1996. The software and hardware that moves the cars around in the garages were adapted from systems that store materials in warehouses.
…
“Lasers check that the car is aligned,” Mr. Milstein said, and determines that it is not one of the trucks or S.U.V.’s too big for the garage. The driver locks the car, takes the keys and picks up an electronic card from a nearby machine. A large door closes behind the car; motion detectors ensure that no children or pets are left behind.

Then the pallet holding the car slides below ground level, into two subterranean floors of storage. “It’s simple — park, swipe and leave,” Mr. Milstein said. The returning driver pays — using a credit card at a machine, or handing cash to the human “parking concierge” in a booth. The machinery retrieves the pallet holding the car, which rises to ground level, pointing toward the exit. You unlock the doors and drive away.

“You get your car in under three minutes,” Mr. Milstein promises. “It’s as easy as an A.T.M. or E-ZPass.” Rates will be comparable to conventional parking in Manhattan, he said, about $400 a month. For the driver, the advantages of an automated system go beyond convenience and speed. The car remains untouched and unopened, and with the parking area ostensibly off limits.

Engineering is cool. Related: The High Cost of Free Parking