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.

Lean Enterprise Value Student Publication Prize

I received an email on the Lean Enterprise Value Student Publication Prize, I don’t see the announcement online, so I’ll include the information I was sent below. For more information on lean thinking see our Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: lean manufacturing posts.

Lean Enterprise Value Foundation, Inc. Student Publication Prize Call for Submissions

The Prize will consist of $500 and an engraved memento to be presented at the Lean Aerospace Initiative Plenary Conference in Cambridge, Maryland on April 17–19, 2007

Eligibility
Author: Any student at a US university. There may be co-authors and co-researchers but the entrant should be the principal author.
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Personal Water Wheel Power

Personal Water Wheel

Scots inventor cracks centuries-old puzzle

Ian Gilmartin, 60, has invented a mini water wheel capable of supplying enough electricity to power a house – for free. The contraption is designed to be used in small rivers or streams – ideal for potentially thousands of homes across Britain. It is the first off-the-shelf water-wheel system that can generate a good supply of electricity from as little as an eight-inch water fall.
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The water wheel produces one to two kilowatts of power and generates at least 24kw hours of sustainable green energy in a day – just under the average household’s daily consumption of about 28kw hours. It will cost some Â£2,000 to fully install – and pay for itself inside two years.
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A “high head”, such as a traditional water wheel, is large, expensive and needs civil engineering. But with low heads of under 18 inches, no-one had invented a method of successfully recovering the energy generated – until now. A conventional water wheel allows the water to escape prematurely as the wheel rotates, but the Beck Mickle hydro generator contains the water for the full drop of the device, converting about 70 per cent of the energy into electricity.

Related: Cheap energy hope from waterwheel (photo from BBC) “Mr Gilmartin is an electrician by trade, but does not own a TV and has never lived in a house with electricity.” – Electricity Savings – Engineers Save Energy – Wind Power – Safe Water Through Play

Scientists Knock-out Prion Gene in Cows

Scientists Announce Mad Cow Breakthrough by Rick Weiss

Scientists said yesterday that they have used genetic engineering techniques to produce the first cattle that may be biologically incapable of getting mad cow disease. The animals, which lack a gene that is crucial to the disease’s progression, were not designed for use as food. They were created so that human pharmaceuticals can be made in their blood without the danger that those products might get contaminated with the infectious agent that causes mad cow.

That agent, a protein known as a prion (pronounced PREE-on), can cause a fatal human ailment, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, if it gets into the body. More generally, scientists said, the animals will facilitate studies of prions, which are among the strangest of all known infectious agents because they do not contain any genetic material.
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Prions remain poorly understood, but experiments suggest that it takes just one bad one to ruin a brain. That’s because a badly folded prion in the brain can strong-arm normal, nearby prions, turning good prions bad.

Antibiotic resistance: How do antibiotics kill bacteria?

Many, if not most, antibiotics act by inhibiting the events necessary for bacterial growth. Some inhibit DNA replication, some, transcription, some antibiotics prevent bacteria from making proteins, some prevent the synthesis of cell walls, and so on. In general, antibiotics keep bacteria from building the parts that are needed for growth.
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It seems funny to think that not growing can be a mechanism for survival. But if you’re a bacteria, and you can hang around long enough in an inactive, non-growing state, eventually your human host will stop taking antibiotics, they will disappear from your environment and you can go back to growing.

Bald Eagle Carry a Fish Over Manhattan

Famed NYC hawk sees bald eagle soar by (page deleted by AP)

A bald eagle carries a fish in its talons over New York City’s Central Park, Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2006. The eagles flight didn’t go unnoticed by Pale Male, the famed red-tailed hawk of Central Park, who was perched on the 22nd floor of the Beresford apartment building as the eagle flew by. “Pale Male usually sits there sort of relaxed, but he sat up straight when he saw the bald eagle,” said Lincoln Karim

via: AP: Bald eagle, dangling a big fish in its talons, over NY City

Northwest FIRST Robotics Competition

photo of FIRST robots competition

The Pacific Northwest FIRST Robotics Competition challenges teams of young people and their mentors to solve a common problem in a six-week timeframe using a standard “kit of parts” and a common set of rules.

Newport High students look to future with robotics venture by Terry Dillman:

Founded in 1989 to “inspire young people’s interest and participation in science and technology,” the not-for-profit, New Hampshire-based FIRST designs “accessible, innovative programs” to encourage students to pursue education and career opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math, while simultaneously building self-confidence, knowledge, and life skills.
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Teams build their robots using the parts kit for the basics, and procuring other parts as needed to augment the kit and make the robot do what’s required in competition.

Brain Research on Sea Slugs

How many genes does it take to learn? Lessons from sea slugs

“In the human brain there are a hundred billion neurons, each expressing at least 18,000 genes, and the level of expression of each gene is different,” said Moroz, who is affiliated with UF’s Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute and the UF Genetics Institute. “Understanding individual genes or proteins is important, but this is a sort of molecular alphabet. This helps us learn the molecular grammar, or a set of rules that can control orchestrated activity of multiple genes. If we are going to understand memory or neurological disease at the cellular level, we need to understand the rules.”

Scientists also analyzed 146 human genes implicated in 168 neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, and genes controlling aging and stem-cell differentiation. They found 104 counterpart genes in Aplysia, suggesting it will be a valuable tool for developing treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

Robot Heading for Antarctic Dive

Robot heading for Antarctic dive, BBC News:

Isis, the UK’s first deep-diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV), will be combing the sea-bed in the region in its inaugural science mission. Researchers hope to uncover more about the effects of glaciers on the ocean floor, and also find out about the animals that inhabit these waters. The mission begins in mid-January and will last for about three weeks. While the scientists and engineers begin their long journey to the Antarctic at the start of January, Isis left the UK shores in November and has only just arrived at its destination.
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Ten kilometres of cable connect it to its “mother ship”, allowing scientists to control the vehicle and receive the data it collects in real-time. On the ROV, Mr Mason said, were lights, cameras to produce high-quality video and still pictures, sonars for acoustic navigation and imaging, and two remotely controlled manipulator arms to collect samples or place scientific instruments on the sea-bed.
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“We are hoping to see a whole bunch of large creatures such as star fish, sea cucumbers, sea fans, sea pens, etc, that inhabit the deep shelf slope and abyssal depths.” He added: “Essentially no-one has explored Antarctica using a ROV at these depths.”

Delaying the Flow of Light on a Silicon Chip

IBM Milestone Demonstrates Optical Device to Advance Computer Performance

IBM today announced its researchers have built a device capable of delaying the flow of light on a silicon chip, a requirement to one day allow computers to use optical communications to achieve better performance.
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“Today’s more powerful microprocessors are capable of performing much more work if we can only find a way to increase the flow of information within a computer,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president of Science and Technology for IBM Research. “As more and more data is capable of being processed on a chip, we believe optical communications is the way to eliminate these bottlenecks. As a result, the focus in high-performance computing is shifting from improvements in computation to those in communication within the system.”

Additional information on silicon nanophotonics

Engineering Education Advocate

Jolly Good Fellow by Thomas K. Grose

He thinks one reason for the decline is the way engineering is taught in the United Kingdom, with a heavy, early emphasis on theory and math. “Kids come in and they want to design and build cars, but instead they’re fed theory and hard math. And they say, ‘What the heck is this?’” Degree programs should be made more palatable and exciting early on, Sharkey says, with more hands-on learning to go along with the theoretical so students can more easily see how it relates to real-life applications. “We need to get out the idea that engineering can be creative—and then make it so. Somehow, we need to teach innovation.”

But Sharkey also realizes that few schools have either the time or the money to reshape their curricula. “So we could use a government initiative.”Sharkey also takes a more long-term view toward revitalizing engineering enrollments, noting that it’s best to capture the imagination of budding engineers when they’re as young as 10 or 11. Toward that goal, and with EPSRC funding, he runs a series of robot-control and construction competitions for children and young adults. A recent one was in Rotherham, a hardscrabble area outside Sheffield. About 2,000 inner-city kids made and took home simple cardboard robots from kits he devised that use a photoelectric sensor. Many of these kids are considered unteachable, “but to me, they seemed happy to learn. They didn’t see me as a teacher.” Moreover, constructing robots engages and entertains youngsters, which makes learning easier.