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.

Mistake Driven Engineering

Book Cover graphic - Success Through Failure

Engineering a Safer, More Beautiful World, One Failure at a Time by Cornelia Dean:

Success masks failure. The more a thing operates successfully, the more confidence we have in it. So we dismiss little failures — like the repeated loss of a space shuttle’s insulating tiles launchings — as trivial annoyances rather than preludes to catastrophe.

Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design by Henry Petroski – read a sample chapter (from Princeton University Press):

Sometimes, as when a part breaks in two, the focal point for the improvement is obvious. Other times, such as when a complex system runs disappointingly slowly, the way to speed it up may be far from clear. In all cases, however, the beginnings of a solution lay in isolating the cause of the failure and in focusing on how to avoid, obviate, remove, or circumvent it. Inventors, engineers, designers, and common users take up such problems all the time.

Related:

Wallaby Milk Cure

Fighting Superbugs with Milk

Cocks has found that the mother’s milk contains a molecule that is 100 times more effective against Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli than the most potent form of penicillin. The molecule, called AGG01, also kills four types of Gram-positive bacteria and one type of fungus. The work was presented at the US Biotechnology Industry Organization 2006 meeting in Chicago last week.

What’s so Exciting About Engineering?

What’s so exciting about engineering? by Leigh M. Chowdhary:

“I thought it was really great,” says Hannah M., an 8th grader at Sacred Heart Middle School. “I liked the experiments.”

A crew of 150 girls age 10 to 14 from four Chicago area schools were scientists for a day. Some kids used static electricity from balloons to move sticks through a racecourse. Others watched videos of female inventors–who created things such as smear-proof lipstick and Kevlar (a substance used in bullet-proof vests).

This article discusses a Wow! That’s Engineering event.

Previous post on Science for Kids – learning through action.

Women in engineering change the world around us for the better every day! Tell us in 100 words or less about a promotion that you would create to make the world a better place and you could win one of these prizes. Deadline is April 19th!

Feynman on Discovery

The pleasure of finding things out a video interview with Richard P Feynman (Google Video broke the link so I removed it).

A great mind expands upon our recent post: Science for Kids. He provides some good insight into learning.

Related book: Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character packaged with an hour-long audio CD of the 1978 “Los Alamos from Below” lecture.

Solar Eruption

photo of Solar Prominence

A Solar Prominence from SOHO – NASA photo of the day.

How can gas float above the Sun? Twisted magnetic fields arching from the solar surface can trap ionized gas, suspending it in huge looping structures. These majestic plasma arches are seen as prominences above the solar limb. In September 1999, this dramatic and detailed image was recorded by the EIT experiment on board the space-based SOHO observatory in the light emitted by ionized Helium.

It shows hot plasma escaping into space as a fiery prominence breaks free from magnetic confinement a hundred thousand kilometers above the Sun. These awesome events bear watching as they can affect communications and power systems over 100 million kilometers away on Planet Earth.

Previous post on solar storms and the affect on communications and power systems

10 Science Facts You Should Know

Why is the sky blue? Facts you should know (sadly phb’s broke the link so I removed it)

  • What is it that makes diseases caused by viruses and bacteria hard to treat?
  • Why do we put salt on sidewalks when it snows?
  • Why is the sky blue?
  • Did dinosaurs and humans ever exist at the same time?

Read answers to these questions (phb broken link), and others, by leading scientists. For example:

Influenza viruses and others continually change over time, usually by mutation. This change enables the virus to evade the immune system of its host so that people are susceptible to influenza virus infection throughout their lives. Bacteria mutate in the same way and can also become resistant if overtreated with antibiotics.

by Helle Gawrlewski, Johnson & Johnson (and the article author’s mother)

According to a recent National Science Board survey, 90 percent of Americans are interested in science, but only 15 percent consider themselves well-informed. In high schools, only 60 percent of students complete a general biology class, while only 40 percent complete a general chemistry class and a scant 27 percent complete a physics class, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Nanospheres Targeting Cancer at MIT

Nanospheres targeting cancer cells

Single-Shot Chemo – Nanospheres that target cancer cells and gradually release drugs could make treatment safer and more effective

Photo – Three prostate cancer cells have taken up fluorescently labeled nanoparticles (shown in red). The cells’ nuclei and cytoskeletons are stained blue and green, respectively. By Omid Farokhzad and Robert Langer at MIT.

A key to the nanoparticles’ effectiveness is the ability of their RNA strands to bind to a cancer cell membrane. The cell then pulls the particles inside. Having the particles inside the cell has two advantages: it gets the drug where it needs to be to kill the cells, and it decreases the concentration of the drug outside the cancer cells, thereby decreasing toxicity to healthy tissue. The fact that the polymer releases the drug gradually also helps — the drug is released over the hours or days it takes for the particles to be pulled into cells, where it continues to be released, killing the cells.
…
Eventually, the MIT-Harvard researchers hope to design nanoparticles that can be injected into the bloodstream, from which they could seek out cancer cells anywhere in the body, making it possible to treat late-stage metastasized cancer. “Even though this represents a small percentage of patients that actually have the disease, these are the ones that have no therapeutic option available to them,” Farokhzad says.

More life science related posts and medical related posts.

Science for Kids

‘Sciencing’ with kids by Prakash Rao:

Let us understand well that science is better learnt through activities, experiences, experiments and projects.

Children’s experiences need to be real, concrete and [tangible]. We should never get carried away by just contents and facts. Link experiences to children’s life. Then they will feel a desire to know.

Children are naturally inquisitive. Mainly we need to provide opportunities for them to do what they would do naturally. In previous posts we have highlighted many ways to give kids the chance to learn and figure out how things work.