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.

Biomolecules in Motion

Biomolecules in Motion by Kathleen M. Wong:

Proteins are the parts that make living engines run. They supply cells with energy, build muscle and bone, and catalyze countless other reactions that let the spark of life burn bright. To do their jobs, proteins must curl around substrate molecules, stretch to let their substrates go, travel around cells and assemble into work crews.
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Scientists have long believed that when an enzyme is empty, it gapes open like a hungry alligator, and that after it has caught its substrate, it remains closed until the reaction has been completed. Yang’s single-molecule microscopy studies have turned this notion upside-down. “Even when it has substrate, it doesn’t just bind the substrate tightly and stop moving. It’s still flapping,” he says. This constant motion makes perfect sense, considering how fast enzymes operate; some can process a million substrate molecules per minute. “Like a door, it has to be able to swing even without me going in and out.

Wakamaru Robot Blog

Wakamaru Robot

The Wakamaru Robot Blog is only in published in Japanese (and infrequently updated). You can get the site translated to english but I have a feeling the translation is not that great, the start of the last post:

Recently, the daughter inside (1st it is elementary schools grade, still), “0 your [tsu] [te], [ero] it was and” with it reached the point where you say.ã€€
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As for Suzuki of the father generation, already the @ (*) the @ (the ear is intention of [danbo]). By the way, method of catching suitable the [tsu] [te] which is different informing by the country it increased the yellow which is the color of wakamaru?

At the end of each post it has a nice note on comments: “< Note > As for the comment which deviates from the gist of this plan, it is not possible to publish. Please acknowledge beforehand.”

Seeing Patterns Where None Exists

I call data dredge studies the “Rorschach tests” of epidemiology, because researchers can pull out characteristics about people in almost unlimited combinations to find all sorts of correlations and conclude just about anything they set out to find. Just like the Rorschach test, seeing patterns where none exists, finding connections that are there but not as strongly as believed, and seeing what one expects to see, are common.

Page 8 of Statistics for Experiments by George Box, Willliam 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.” And some might make it in this context 🙂

Page: Marketing Science

Google’s Page urges scientists to market themselves:

And that was his main advice to the scientists in the room: take their scientific studies, market them better and make them readily accessible to the world. That way, the world might have a better chance at solving problems like energy consumption, poverty and global climate change.

“Virtually all economic growth (in the world) was due to technological progress. I think as a society we’re not really paying attention to that,” Page said. “Science has a real marketing problem. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem.”

To that end, Page urged the group to take on more leadership roles in society, i.e., politics, so that they could control more funding for research and development. He also said that scientists should get in the habit of investing part of their scientific grant money to marketing budgets, in order to get the word out to the media about their research.

Entrepreneurialism should also be more ingrained in university culture, Page said, much like it is at his alma mater Stanford University and Google’s home-base, Silicon Valley. Finally, he called on the scientists to make more of their research available digitally. Even though Google Scholar tries to open access to scientific work, it still falls short.

Leading Causes of Death

The leading causes of death, Chart showing the odd of death in the USA:

Heart Disease – 20% then Cancer – 14% then Stroke – 4%
also (Motor Vehicle accident – 1% Suicide – 1% Falling – .5% Gun shot – .3%)

CDC’s report on the leading causes of death in the USA in 2004: Heart Disease 27%, Cancer 23%, Strokes 6%, Chronic lower respiratory diseases (emphysema…) 5%, accidents 4.5%, Diabetes 3%, Alzheimer’s 2.7%, Influenza and pneumonia 2.5%… (FYI, homicide is .7% the 16th leading cause, or very close to it)

What are the odds of dying? provides details on deaths due to injuries and includes a sensible disclaimer:

The odds given below are statistical averages over the whole U.S. population and do not necessarily reflect the chances of death for a particular person from a particular external cause. Any individual’s odds of dying from various external causes are affected by the activities in which they participate, where they live and drive, what kind of work they do, and other factors.

Himalayas Geology

Mystery of the Himalayas Solved:

The mystery of why the Himalaya mountains and the Tibetan plateau are the highest in the world has at last been answered, with the discovery of a gigantic chunk of rock slowly sinking towards the centre of the Earth. When the massive slab – up to eight times the area of the UK and as thick as a dozen Everests on top of each other – dropped off, the lighter crust above it rebounded upwards like a cork released under water, geophysicists say. This “sudden uplift” would have raised the Himalayas by as much as 2km (1.24 miles) to their present height.

If not for the surge, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay might have found themselves reaching the “roof of the world” by conquering Aconcagua (6,962m) in Argentina while Everest languished at a mere 6,848m above sea level, 2,000m below its actual peak. The discovery of the missing mantle – the cold, heavy rock beneath the crust – was revealed last week by Professor Wang-Ping Chen at the University of Illinois, whose team used more than 200 super-sensitive seismometers strung across the Himalayas, from India deep into Tibet.
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But some scientists remain sceptical. One geologist at Cambridge, who wanted to remain anonymous because he hadn’t yet read Professor Chen’s paper, suggested that the slab could be the remains of the Tethys Ocean plate. Professor England counters that both the Asian and Indian plates have moved north since then

Iowa Grapples with Engineer Shortage

State grapples with engineer shortage:

“In the past four years or so, it’s become increasingly difficult to fill positions, especially for people who have experience and can come in with a good skill set,” Dougherty said. “In some instances, you simply go without filling those jobs for a long time.”

Loren Zachary, an assistant dean at the ISU College of Engineering, said enrollment has been mostly in a downward trend over the past six years. In 2001, the college had 1,556 new freshmen; in the fall of 2006, freshman enrollment was 1,213, which was up slightly from 2005’s enrollment of 1,155. Of the 800 or so students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree in engineering from ISU each year, more than 60 percent leave the state for employment, according to Hanneman’s figures.

“Certainly you have a lot of engineering students who are leaving the state,” said the IES’s Scott. “You’ll always have that because the universities attract many out-of-state students.” Zachary said ISU has only a small number of engineering students who are women or minorities. For the current academic year, 14.5 percent of undergraduate engineering students are female. These are two demographics the university is targeting to boost enrollment. “We need more females in engineering,” Zachary said. “It’s an untapped market for us.”

The article mentions several programs for primary and secondary school students we have mentioned previously: Project Lead the Way, Math Counts and FIRST LEGO League

VirtuSphere

The VirtuSphere platform consists of a large hollow sphere that sits on top of a base and allows the sphere to rotate 360 degrees. Wearing a wireless, head-mounted display, users can step inside the sphere to fully interact in immersive virtual environments. The VirtuSphere enables 6 degrees of freedom – one can move in any direction; walk, jump, roll, crawl, run over virtually unlimited distances without encountering real-world physical obstacles.

VirtuSphere systems are made to client specifications and typically include an easy-to- assemble sphere, a base platform that enables it to rotate, a head-mounted display, 3D sensors, sphere rotation trackers, a computer, device drivers and 3D software applications.

See videos of the sphere in action

Digital Pen

Cool gadget –Logitech io2 Digital Pen. Take notes on paper and then dock the pen in your computer and have the notes captured in your computer. It can convert your handwriting to digital text as though you typed it in. You can also import drawings and sketches from the pen as jpg, gif, png etc. files. It seems the pen only works with their paper which seems like a bad design for customers, but those interested in gadgets might like it.

Aussies Look to Finnish Innovation Model

Aussies look to Finnish Innovation Model:

Australian policy makers are looking to Finland for inspiration in their drive to bring the nation closer to the dream of thriving technological innovation. The country’s president and other Finnish representatives are in Sydney to share with Australian researchers the strides the nation has made in the past three decades. Home of companies such as Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, Finland has captured the attention of governments looking to shift their economic base away from traditional industries towards a more innovative focus.

Finland’s research and development spend accounts for 3.5 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP), a higher percentage than that of most European Union nations. It intends to lift this percentage to four per cent by 2010. Australia’s spending on research in comparison was 1.8 per cent of GDP in 2004/05, below the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 2.3 per cent.