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.

MIT Faculty Open Access to Their Scholarly Articles

MIT faculty open access to their scholarly articles

In a move aimed at broadening access to MIT’s research and scholarship, faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the Web.

The new policy, which was approved unanimously at an MIT faculty meeting on Wednesday, March 18 and took immediate effect, emphasizes MIT’s commitment to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.
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Under the new policy, faculty authors give MIT nonexclusive permission to disseminate their journal articles for open access through DSpace, an open-source software platform developed by the MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard and launched in 2002. The policy gives MIT and its faculty the right to use and share the articles for any purpose other than to make a profit. Authors may opt out on a paper-by-paper basis.

MIT’s policy is the first faculty-driven, university-wide initiative of its kind in the United States. While Harvard and Stanford universities have implemented open access mandates at some of their schools, MIT is the first to fully implement the policy university-wide as a result of a faculty vote. MIT’s resolution is built on similar language adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences in 2008.

It is good to see scientists putting advancing science above outdated journal business models. It is a bit of a shame that we have to be happy for such a small thing but given the state of those fighting against open science it is good to see those in favor of open access to science make progress.

Google Summer of Code 2009

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Google funds the program with $4,500 for each student (and pays the mentor organization $500). Google works with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects over a three month period.

Since its inception in 2005, the program has provided opportunities for nearly 2500 students, from nearly 100 countries. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Google funded approximately 400 student projects in 2005, 600 in 2006, 900 in 2007 and 1125 in 2008 and will be funding approximately 1,000 student projects in 2009.

Applying for the program is only allowed from March 23rd through April 3rd. Still a short period of time but in previous years they have only taken them for one week. Organizations hosting students include: Creative Commons, MySQL, Debian, The Electronic Frontier Foundation/The Tor Project, haskell.org, Grameen Foundation USA, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Ruby on Rails, Wikimedia Foundation and WordPress. See the full list of organizations and link to descriptions of the projects each organization offers.

See the externs.com internship directory (another curiouscat.com ltd. site) for more opportunities including those in science and engineering.

Why People Often Get Sicker When They’re Stressed

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center identified a receptor, known as QseE, which resides in a diarrhea-causing strain of E coli. The receptor senses stress cues from the bacterium’s host and helps the pathogen make the host ill. A receptor is a molecule on the surface of a cell that docks with other molecules, often signaling the cell to carry out a specific function.

Dr. Vanessa Sperandio, associate professor of microbiology at UT Southwestern and the study’’ senior author, said QseE is an important player in disease development because the stress cues it senses from a host, chiefly epinephrine and phosphate, are generally associated with blood poisoning, or sepsis.

“Patients with high levels of phosphate in the intestine have a much higher probability of developing sepsis due to systemic infection by intestinal bacteria,” Dr. Sperandio said. “If we can find out how bacteria sense these cues, then we can try to interfere in the process and prevent infection.”

Millions of potentially harmful bacteria exist in the human body, awaiting a signal from their host that it’s time to release their toxins. Without those signals, the bacteria pass through the digestive tract without infecting cells. What hasn’t been identified is how to prevent the release of those toxins.

“There’s obviously a lot of chemical signaling between host and bacteria going on, and we have very little information about which bacteria receptors recognize the host and vice versa,” Dr. Sperandio said. “We’re scratching at the tip of the iceberg on our knowledge of this.”

“When people are stressed they have more epinephrine and norepinephrine being released. Both of these human hormones activate the receptors QseC and QseE, which in turn trigger virulence. Hence, if you are stressed, you activate bacterial virulence.” Dr. Sperandio said the findings also suggest that there may be more going on at the genetic level in stress-induced illness than previously thought.

“The problem may not only be that the stress signals are weakening your immune system, but that you’re also priming some pathogens at the same time,” she said. “Then it’s a double-edged sword. You have a weakened immune system and pathogens exploiting it.”

Previous research by Dr. Sperandio found that phentolamine, an alpha blocker drug used to treat hypertension, and a new drug called LED209 prevent QseC from expressing its virulence genes in cells. Next she will test whether phentolamine has the same effect on QseE.

Full press release: Researchers probe mechanisms of infection

Friday Cat Fun #14: Scuba Cat

The video was removed 🙁

Scuba cat with pal – scuba dog. What does scuba stand for? Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

USA Losing Scientists and Engineers Educated in the USA

The USA continues to lose ground, in retaining the relative science and engineering strength it has retained for the last 50 plus years. As I have said before this trend is nearly inevitable – the challenge for the USA is to reduce the speed of their decline in relative position.

A new open access report, Losing the World’s Best and Brightest, explores the minds of current foreign science and engineering students that are studying in the USA. This is another in the list of reports on similar topics by Vivek Wadhwa and Richard Freeman. And again they point out the long term economic losses the USA is setting up by failing to retain the talent trained at our universities. It is a problem for the USA and a great benefit for countries like India and China.

“Foreign students receive nearly 60% of all engineering doctorates and more than half of all mathematics, computer sciences, physics and economics doctorates awarded in the United States. These foreign nationals end up making jobs, not taking jobs,” said Wadhwa. “They bring insights into growing global markets and fresh ideas. Research has shown that they even end up boosting innovation by U.S. inventors. Losing them is an economic tragedy.”

According to the study’s findings, very few foreign students would like to stay in the United States permanently—only 6% of Indian, 10 percent of Chinese and 15% of Europeans. And fewer foreign students than the historical norm expressed interest in staying in the United States after they graduate. Only 58% of Indian, 54% of Chinese and 40% of European students wish to stay for several years after graduation. Previous National Science Foundation research has shown 68% of foreigners who received science and engineering doctorates stayed for extended periods of time, including 73% of those who studied computer science. The five-year minimum stay rate was 92% for Chinese students and 85% for Indian students.

The vast majority of foreign student and 85% of Indians and Chinese and 72% of Europeans are concerned about obtaining work visas. 74% of Indians, 76% of Chinese, and 58% of Europeans are also worried about obtaining jobs in their fields. Students appear to be less concerned about getting permanent-resident visas than they are about short-term jobs. Only 38% of Indian students, 55% of Chinese, and 53% of Europeans expressed concerns about obtaining permanent residency in the USA.

On the tonight show yesterday, President Obama said

we need young people, instead of — a smart kid coming out of school, instead of wanting to be an investment banker, we need them to decide they want to be an engineer, they want to be a scientist, they want to be a doctor or a teacher.

And if we’re rewarding those kinds of things that actually contribute to making things and making people’s lives better, that’s going to put our economy on solid footing. We won’t have this kind of bubble-and-bust economy that we’ve gotten so caught up in for the last several years.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, recently expressed his frustration with the policies discouraging science and engineering graduates staying in the USA after they complete their education.

That is a brilliant [actually not brilliant at all] strategy take the best people hire them in American universities and then kick them out” It happens. “Its shocking.” It happens. “I know we are fighting against it.” “We America remain, by far the place of choice for education, particularly higher education.”

Nearly Half of Adults in the USA Don’t Know How Long it Takes the Earth to Circle the Sun

Questions:

How long does it take for the Earth to revolve around the Sun?
Did the earliest humans and dinosaurs live on the earth at the same time?
What percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water?

According to the national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences: only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun; only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time; only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water. Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly. I sure hope readers of this blog do much better than that.

Despite the fact that access to fresh water is likely to be one of the most pressing environmental issues over the coming years, less than 1% of U.S. adults know what percent of the planet’s water is fresh (the correct answer is 3%).

Answers: Continue reading →

Pi Ice Cube Trays

Pi ice cubes

Liven up a drink with Pi shaped Ice “cubes” from Think Geek:

But how about ice? You were planning to use that standard vaguely cubical stuff?… or worse the boring half-moon shape your fridge churns out? Well fear not intrepid nerdy party planner! ThinkGeek is here with the geekiest ice you’ll ever find… Pi ice! Yep these stylish silicone ice trays cast frozen H2O into the symbol for your favorite irrational number.

Mobile users at risk of ID theft

Security experts say that password protection and, where possible, data encryption, is essential. The advent of smartphones has seen the types of information that pass through handsets proliferate and it is now much more common to store sensitive information and work-related details on handsets.
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But the storage of increasingly personal information is also on the rise; the survey found that 16% of people store their bank details on their phones and nearly a quarter store PIN numbers and passwords.

Security experts agree that the storage of such crucial details is ill-advised, and advise users to take advantage of the available security features of a phone.

The Amazing Rusting Aluminum

when aluminum rusts, it forms aluminum oxide, an entirely different animal. In crystal form, aluminum oxide is called corundum, sapphire or ruby (depending on the color), and it is among the hardest substances known. If you wanted to design a strong, scratchproof coating to put on a metal, few things other than diamond would be better than aluminum oxide.

By rusting, aluminum is forming a protective coating that’s chemically identical to sapphire—transparent, impervious to air and many chemicals, and able to protect the surface from further rusting: As soon as a microscopically thin layer has formed, the rusting stops. (“Anodized” aluminum has been treated with acid and electricity to force it to grow an extra-thick layer of rust, because the more you have on the surface, the stronger and more scratch-resistant it is.)

This invisible barrier forms so quickly that aluminum seems, even in molten form, to be an inert metal. But this illusion can be shattered with aluminum’s archenemy, mercury. Applied to aluminum’s surface, mercury will infiltrate the metal and disrupt its protective coating, allowing it to “rust” (in the more destructive sense) continuously by preventing a new layer of oxide from forming.

Continuing Bee Colony Collapse Disorder

Photo of a bee

‘I do everything… the bees still die’

The use of the term colony collapse disorder has been criticised by some scientists and other experts who say that it’s often an excuse for poor beekeeping. David sighs heavily.

“Well… I don’t abuse my bees, I kinda take offence at that, when we transport them we take great pains to make sure they arrive safely, to make sure they have water. It’s totally unexplained.

“That’s the frustrating part. There’s no reason that these bees here should be in this shape, just three months ago they were beautiful bees, they were large thriving colonies, and to have them dwindle down to one or two or frames of bees is beyond comprehension as far as I’m concerned.”

But despite the disappearance of his bees, and the lack of clarity about what’s causing it, David remains an optimist. He points to a small discreet emblem on the side of his pickup truck, a hieroglyph of an ancient bee.

“That little hieroglyph there is Egyptian it stands for a beekeeper or bees. It’s an ancient craft; it’s been around a long time. The bees will endure.”

Photo by Justin Hunter