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.

Summer Health Tips

Summer health tips from Google

Taraneh Razavi, M.D., has kindly provided a few tips on coping with such summer challenges as tick bites, thunderstorms, and heat exhaustion. She’s also blogged about insect repellents and sunscreen. But as she reminds us, summer also means – there’s ice cream. Stay healthy and cool, people, and have fun this and every weekend.

Other posts include: Who is Living Longer and Avoiding Nursing Homes.

NASA Robotics Academy

The NASA Robotics Academy is an intensive resident summer program of higher learning for college undergraduate and graduate students interested in pursuing professional and leadership careers in robotics-related fields.

Besides attending lectures and workshops with experts in their field, the Robotics Academy students are involved in supervised research in GSFC laboratories, private companies, and universities, and will participate in visits to other NASA Centers, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a number of robotics-related academic laboratories and industries.

Projects this year include: Conformal Gripping System for Space Robots and Cooperative Team-diagnosis in Multi-robot Systems

NSF Undergraduate Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

NSF Undergraduate Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM)

program details from NSF (web site for schools)

This program makes grants to institutions of higher education to support scholarships for academically talented, financially needy students, enabling them to enter the workforce following completion of an associate, baccalaureate, or graduate level degree in science and engineering disciplines. Grantee institutions are responsible for selecting scholarship recipients, reporting demographic information about student scholars, and managing the S-STEM project at the institution.

The program does not make scholarship awards directly to students; students should contact their institution’s Office of Financial Aid for this and other scholarship opportunities.

Thanks to Marisa Dorazio, Edmonds Community College, for mentioning this. Apply for the scholarships available from Edmonds Community College. The deadline to apply is Friday, August 18. The application form has contact information in case you have any questions.

How do antibiotics kill bacteria?

How do antibiotics kill bacterial cells but not human cells? (pointy haired bosses (phb) at Scientific American broke the link so I removed it – see links in comments below that are not broken by phb behavior)

Most bacteria produce a cell wall that is composed partly of a macromolecule called peptidoglycan, itself made up of amino sugars and short peptides. Human cells do not make or need peptidoglycan. Penicillin, one of the first antibiotics to be used widely, prevents the final cross-linking step, or transpeptidation, in assembly of this macromolecule. The result is a very fragile cell wall that bursts, killing the bacterium.

Read more blog posts on antibiotics and on health care.

Reducing Risk of Diabetes Through Exercise

A Diabetic Battle of the Bulge by Diane Garcia

Diabetes appears to be written into some people’s genes, but with the right diet and exercise, the disease may never surface, according to a new study.
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In the lifestyle modification group, however, even individuals with two copies of the variant were no more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than participants without the variant, the team reports 20 July in the New England Journal of Medicine

Update – AAAS broke the link so I removed the link. I hope those responsible for web sites eventually take the time to learn what that responsibility entails: Web Pages Must Live Forever. I find these failures to follow the most basic web usability practices displayed most often in organizations where burocrates that don’t understand technology make decisions on how web sites should work instead of allowing those that have the necessary understanding of the technology do so.

A plane You Can Print

A plane you can print by Paul Marks:

In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part – a wing strut, say – is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focused, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes.

Polecat is a new unmanned plane: “About 90 per cent of Polecat is made of composite materials with much of that material made by rapid prototyping.”

More information on 3d printing from a manufacturer of the printers. Not quite ready for in home printing of say a new can opener on demand but can that day really be far away?

A New Ocean?

Secrets of ocean birth laid bare:

Geologists say a crack that opened up last year may eventually reach the Red Sea, isolating much of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the rest of Africa.
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“We think if these processes continue, a new ocean will eventually form,” he told the BBC News website. “It will connect to the Red Sea and the ocean will flow in.”

When do they expect this? “in about a million years.” Just around the corner geologically speaking, though for me that still seems a long way off 🙂

A New Engineering Education

Engineering a new way by Amy Hetzner

The crux of Olin’s effort is a “do-learn” model that stresses teaching students through projects and a student-focused environment aimed at heading off the high dropout rates at other engineering schools around the country, said Sherra Kerns, Olin’s vice president for innovation and research.

See our previous posts: Olin Engineering Education Experiment – Improving Engineering Education

UW has been able to turn around a dismal attrition rate in the early 1990s, when two-thirds of engineering students didn’t stick with the program. Today, close to 60% of engineering students graduate with a degree in the field, he said.

Wow, 33% of engineering students graduating sure wasn’t very impressive. Frankly I don’t think 60% is very good but I believe comparatively it is reasonably good. Overall that rate really needs to be improved. Olin College does have some advantages being small and providing a full scholarship: their first class graduated 66 of the 75 that started 4 years ago.