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.

Mind controls body in extreme experiments

Mind controls body in extreme experiments by William J. Cromie, Harvard University Gazette:

During visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.

The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. “It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result,” Benson exclaims.

To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation.

In my opinion, much more evidence is needed to take these claims seriously but still it is interesting.

Bed Bugs, Science and the Media

Media Criticism – the bed bug story

Since I discovered that I have bed bugs I have been touring around the internet doing research right from day one and what I have discovered is that the media is doing a terrible job of covering the bed bug story, and as a result many of the bed bug blogs I have read are full of misinformation which echoes this bad reporting in the media. One of the most common themes in the media stories you will read if you do a search for news articles on bed bugs is that we have bed bugs because DDT was banned, thus forcing us to use ‘weak chemicals’ against bed bugs. This is false. Bed bugs developed resistance to DDT in the 1940s
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I recommend tenting your bed, because you see a bed bug is not a super bug, the bug of steel, it is just a bug, and it is a bug that is used to being foiled by humans who do all the thinking in that symbiotic relationship, which is why bed bugs have evolved to be so damned sneaky in the hopes of getting away with all that biting.

I like the idea of avoiding pesticides, but I am not sure this is sufficient. Still I like the idea of presenting alternative ideas to pesticides as the first option. Extension services at many universities have great information, on a wide variety of topics, and in general are not overly biased toward commercial solutions (like business may be). They often have applied scientific thinking, run experiments and examined existing research on the topics for which they provide information.

How Do Wii Game Controllers Work?

How Do Motion-Sensing Video Game Controllers Work?:

The new Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3 gaming systems, just released for the holidays, both include motion-sensing controllers.
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But how are the controllers able to precisely and accurately measure physical movement? At the heart of the controller technology are tiny accelerometers. Inside these chips, silicon springs anchor a silicon wafer to the rigid controller. As you wave the controller through the air at an attacking enemy, the wafer presses onto the springs, just as you are pressed against the seat of a car when you stomp on the gas pedal. The faster the controller accelerates, the more the wafer moves relative to the rest of the chip.
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But accelerometers alone cannot provide complete control, because small positional errors add up over time, like when you need to re-center your mouse on a mousepad. Nintendo addressed this problem by including a sensor bar that can be placed above or below the television. Each end of the bar emits a beam of infrared light like a television remote, which is monitored by a sensor on the controller that works like a digital camera: by seeing where the two spots of light fall on its grid of more than 750,000 pixels, the sensor can determine where the controller is pointing and translate it to a position on the television screen.

Arteriovenous Malformation Explanation

What Happened to the Senator’s Brain?

What is arteriovenous malformation (AVM)?

An AVM is a cluster of abnormally formed blood vessels. In medical images, it looks like a tangle of arteries and veins. About 300,000 people in the U.S. have these malformations, but most AVMs never cause any symptoms. The malformations can occur in various places around the body, however, those in the brain or spinal cord can cause the most widespread damage, because they affect the central nervous system.

AVMs disrupt the normal system used to provide oxygen to the brain. Ordinarily, arteries deliver oxygenated blood to the brain and veins return it to the heart and lungs. But in an AVM, blood that should be in an artery can flow through a vein. When that happens, part of the brain may not get enough oxygen. Also, veins are not meant to handle the high pressures and fast blood flow of arteries. So they may expand or even rupture, causing bleeding in the brain.

Google Patent Search Fun

Google search for patents: the display of the patents found is very nice – Google provides a standard template listing information on the inventors, claims and linking to referenced patents. Example: Method for node ranking in a linked database – update. It seems to me the search could be improved. Still it is interesting: Patent searches for Thomas A. Edison – 3d hologram television –

It also is obvious there are way too many patent applications for obvious things. Two simple examples, of many: Method of concealing partial baldness – making a sandwich.

Diabetes Breakthrough

Diabetes breakthrough by Tom Blackwell:

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease
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The researchers caution they have yet to confirm their findings in people, but say they expect results from human studies within a year or so. Any treatment that may emerge to help at least some patients would likely be years away from hitting the market.

More: Canadian scientists reverse diabetes in mice – Type 1 Diabetes May Be Caused By Disruption of Link Between Nerve Cells and Beta Cells

Sea Slug Photo Gallery

Nudibranchia Gallery:

Nudibranchs belong to sea slugs. As all other gastropods, they are slow moving bottom dwellers. They have soft bodies and most of them lack an external protective shell. Their secondary gills are exposed outside, as reflected by their neo-latin/greek name “nudibranch” meaning “nude/naked gills”… To protect themselves from predators many developed toxic or bad tasting glands in the skin, and their bright colors warn predators of their horrible taste.

Baseball Pitch Designed in the Lab

Pitch Perfect

Five years ago, computer scientist Ryutaro Himeno was testing super-computers by modeling the fluid dynamics of airflow around baseballs. Himeno’s deconstruction of existing pitches led to a strange new one—whirling clockwise as it flew forward, the virtual ball curved as abruptly as its closest relative, the slider, but without sinking. Himeno met with Kazushi Tezuka, who runs baseball training centers in Tokyo and Osaka, and they ironed out the pitch’s mechanics.

As detailed in the books the pair has since authored, a gyroball calls for a complex flip of the fingers during release, ending with the thumb pointed down. At its most effective, the pitch breaks horizontally as it nears the batter, as though shrugging off gravity.

Gravity-Defying Baseball Pitch Ready for U.S. – an update on the article above. Details from the scientist (pdf)

The Magnetic Fridge

A cool new idea from British scientists: the magnetic fridge by Michael Pollitt:

Your kitchen fridge has a compressor, which turns a gas into a liquid, releasing heat (which you’ll feel at the back of the fridge). The liquid is then pumped round the inside walls of the fridge, where it draws heat from the contents; that turns it into a gas, which is pumped on to the compressor.
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A magnetic fridge works like this. Powdered gadolinium (with coarse grains for good heat transfer qualities) is put into a magnetic field. It heats up as the randomly ordered magnetic moments – the electrons with spin – are aligned, or “ordered”, by the field. The newly-acquired heat – a boost of between 2-5C, depending on the gadolinium’s original temperature – is removed by a circulating fluid, like a conventional fridge.

The magnetic field is removed and the gadolinium cools below its starting temperature as the electrons resume their previously disordered state. Heat from the system to be cooled – your fridge interior – can then be transferred to the now cooler metal. Then all you do is endlessly repeat. But unlike conventional fridges, which need very toxic chemicals, the only liquid needed for heat transfer is water, alcohol or, more likely, antifreeze.

40% energy savings are predicted.

The A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science

The United States government bears great responsibility for keeping our environment clean and Americans healthy and safe. And while science is rarely the only factor in public policy decisions, this input should be objective and impartial.

In recent years, however, scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information. To document this abuse, the Union of Concerned Scientists has created the A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science.
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In 2004, 62 renowned scientists and science advisors signed a scientist statement on scientific integrity, denouncing political interference in science and calling for reform. On December 9, 2006, UCS released the names of more than 10,000 scientists of all backgrounds from all 50 states—including 52 Nobel Laureates—who have since joined their colleagues on this statement.

It is important for the public to have access to type of information. There will always be areas of intersection between science and politics. And there is a role for politicians in science policy. However, covering up data and attempts to promote unscientific conclusions from data, in order to serve political ends, is something that should be condemned. Certainly many will seek to turn political disagreements into condemnation of the opposition, so the mere accusation is not the important factor – the important factor is the evidence of wrongdoing. Then the facts should be debated.
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