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.

Arctic Seed Vault Design

‘Doomsday’ vault design unveiled

he Svalbard International Seed Vault will be built into a mountainside on a remote island near the North Pole. The vault aims to safeguard the world’s agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change. Construction begins in March, and the seed bank is scheduled to open in 2008. The Norwegian government is paying the $5m (Â£2.5m) construction costs of the vault, which will have enough space to house three million seed samples.

Dr Fowler said Svalbard, 1,000km (621 miles) north of mainland Norway, was chosen as the location for the vault because it was very remote and it also offered the level of stability required for the long-term project. “We looked very far into the future. We looked at radiation levels inside the mountain, and we looked at the area’s geological structure,” he told BBC News. “We also modelled climate change in a drastic form 200 years into future, which included the melting of ice sheets at the North and South Poles, and Greenland, to make sure that this site was above the resulting water level.”

Declining Science and Maths Degrees in UK

Report: Core science and mathematics degree courses in the UK 1998-2007

In the decade to 2007, there has been a 10% reduction in the number of core, ie single honours, science and maths degree courses offered by UK higher education institutions.

8 Year Old Math Prodigy Corrects Science Exhibit

Math prodigy corrects Discovery Place (Phb broke the link so I removed it):

The exhibit had traveled to eight cities in four years. “And no one found this mistake — I just couldn’t believe it,” Briere said. The equations were developed at the Ontario Science Center, a museum similar to Discovery Place. The Canada museum will likely mail a new display for the pyramid to Charlotte by the end of the month, Briere said.

Find the Error…

A jelly bean has a volume of about 1 cubic cm.This container is half a pyramid.
Its base measures 46 cm by 23 cm and its height is 72 cm.
Here’s the formula to find the volume: 1/3 x base area x height.
Now divide your answer by 2 since this is half a pyramid.
Now multiply your answer by 0.9 to account for spaces between the jelly beans.
The answer should be 22,853.

Did you find the error? (it would be better with a photo but I can’t find one.

International Linear Collider

Price of Next Big Thing in Physics: $6.7 Billion

At a news conference in Beijing an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.
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Physicists acknowledge it could be years before the world commits to building the ILC, although jockeying for the costly privilege of hosting the giant machine has already begun. For its purposes, the committee priced three different sites: near CERN in Switzerland, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill, and in the mountains of Japan, and found that the so-called site-specific costs, like digging tunnels and shafts and supplying water and electricity, were nearly the same in each case, about $1.8 billion.

The host country would be expected to shoulder these costs, the design collaboration said, while the remaining $4.9 billion, which covers high-tech things like magnets and control rooms, would be split among all the participants. Extras like auditoriums, cafeterias and living space for scientists were not included in the cost estimate, since at some places like Fermilab they already exist.

World’s Largest Dry-Transport Ship

Blue Marlin world’s largest dry-transport vessel:

For widening the beam of the Blue Marlin from 42 to 63 meter, 130 block steel sections were produced, which started on 2 May 2003 and finished at the end of October. The total weight was approx. 8,300 tons. The blocks were pre-assembled to bigger blocks before installation and the total number of blocks ready for installation in drydock was reduced to 58 blocks. The erection of the blocks in the drydocks started on 1 September 2003. The starboard blocks first. The middle blocks of each side were assembled in three units of each approx. 35 meter long. Each unit with a total weight of 800 to 1000 tons.

More sea giant photos – Photo – credit and larger image – Flying Luxury Hotel – 60 Acre (24 hectare) Spider Web – Giant Wasp Nests – Solar Tower Power Generation

Chinese Stem Cell Therapies

Stem-Cell Refugees

Good or bad, China’s clinical work is already cutting-edge. More than 100 Chinese hospitals are currently performing stem cell procedures, according to Jon Hakim, a Minnesota native who has been appointed director of the foreign patient services department at Beike, helping Nanshan Hospital recruit patients. Since opening up to foreigners about a year ago, Beike has treated 170 of them from 29 countries. Like Melton, most of them find out about Beike from the Internet, and many write their own blogs in China and after they return home. In addition to spinal cord injuries, doctors treat multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and ataxia, a genetic disease that leads to deterioration of muscle function. While undergoing stem cell treatment, patients may also receive physical therapy, acupuncture, massage, drugs, and electrical stimulation. The average price tag: $17,000, plus airfare.

Educational Institutions Economic Impact

I believe investing in creating an environment where science and engineering endeavors will flourish will greatly benefit the economy. Some previous posts discussing these ideas include: Great Engineering Schools and Entrepreneurism, Engineering Future Economic Success, Science Research and the Economy and China’s Economic Science Experiment.

Wisconsin’s effort is hardly unique, but I grew up in Madison and my father taught Chemical Engineering, Statistics, and more at the UW so I pay attention to the efforts in Madison. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has been one of the most successful attempts to take academic work and create successful business efforts to benefit the university, the professors and the economy overall. Their mission: “Moving inventions arising from the university’s laboratories to the marketplace for the benefit of the university, the inventors and society.”

Building Wisconsin’s Economy illustrates how the University of Wisconsin at Madison attempts to focus on creating economic benefit, which I think is a good idea. Economic benefit is not the only purpose, but it is worthy of focus.

Continue reading →

Meteorite, Older than the Sun, Found in Canada

Older than the sun, the meteorite scientists call ‘the real time machine’

The Tagish Lake meteorite was already regarded as exceptional because its mineral composition linked it to the earliest days of the formation of the solar system, more than 4.5bn years ago. The fragments of meteorite that still exist are among the most pristine in the world, as they were protected from contamination when they became wedged in blocks of lake ice. The latest research shows that peppered throughout the meteorite are grains that formed even earlier, in a frigid cloud of molecules, possibly at the edge of the swirling disc of dust that ultimately collapsed to form the sun and all the planets of the solar system.

The discovery suggests that while the first light from the sun fell on the fledgling Earth, as the dinosaurs rose and died out and humans gained dominance, the meteorite was hurtling around the heavens on a billions-of-years-long journey destined to terminate with a thud in Yukon territory. Researchers at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston examined a two gram fragment of the meteorite and focused on tiny, hollow, carbon spheres embedded within it. Each “globule” measured just a few thousandths of a millimetre across.

Interesting stuff.

Zero Ink Printing

Zink – zero ink printing:

Dye crystals are embedded in the ZINK paper and are activated by heat from a ZINK printer. The crystals then colorize, producing high quality, long-lasting, durable, and affordable images.
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The ZINK printing technology will enable a new mobile printing market. Later this year, ZINK Imaging’s partners will launch the first products using ZINK technology. These products are designed to take printing where it has never before been possible – into the pocket of every camera phone and digital camera user.

This is from a company press release but it sounds interesting. A digital son of Polaroid:

The Zink technology also uses heat, but the dyes are embedded into the paper itself — hence the company’s name, which stands for zero ink. Bonded inside the paper are three dye layers, colored yellow, magenta, and cyan, a shade of blue. Properly mixed, these three colors can produce the entire spectrum. Each of the dyes is in crystalline form, and each is formulated to melt into liquid at a certain temperature.

A Zink printer pulls the special paper under a thermal print head. This device has hundreds of heating elements that can each heat a tiny portion of the paper. The Zink software controls the print head, so that its heat pulses activate the correct dye colors and produce the finished photograph. A single photo can be cranked out in about a minute, at a cost of about 25 cents.

Over 100 Dinosaur Eggs Discovered

Over 100 fossilised eggs of dinosaur found in Madhya Pradesh, India

three amateur explorers have stumbled upon more than 100 fossilised eggs of dinosaurs in Madhya Pradesh. The eggs, belonging to the Cretaceous Era (approximately 144 to 65 million years ago), have been discovered in Kukshi-Bagh area of Dhar district, some 150 kms south-west of Indore. The rare find is a significant step in the study of pre-historic life in the Narmada Valley.

“All the eggs were discovered from a single nesting site in a start to end exploration for 18 hours at the site in Kukshi-Bagh area, 40 kms from Manavar. As many as 6-8 eggs were found per nests,” an excited Vishal Verma of the Mangal Panchayatan Parishad, a group of amateur explorers, told Hindustan Times from near the site.

“The eggs are from upper cretaceous era… These eggs can be categorised in three types of soropaud dinosaurs, which were herbivorous. These animals used to come from far away areas to lay eggs on the sandy banks of the rivers in this area, identified scientifically as Lameta bed,” Verma said. The dinosaurs were 40-90 feet in length, he added.

via: More than 100 Dinosaur Eggs Discovered in a Remote Area of India