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.

Green Energy Projects in the Developing World

5 Huge Green-Tech Projects in the Developing World: Leyte Geothermal Field, Leyte, Philippines with a current capacity of 708.5 megawatts

Suzlon Wind Farm
Location: Near Dhule, India
Current capacity: 650 megawatts
Planned capacity: 1,000 megawatts
Estimated completion date: 2010
Built by Suzlon, a homegrown Indian energy compay, the Suzlon wind farm near Dhule will be the world’s largest when it’s completed in 2010. Already, it’s creeping up on Florida Light and Power’s Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center, which has a capacity of 735 megawatts.
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Acme Solar Thermal Plants
Location: Haryana, India
Current capacity: 0 megawatts
Planned capacity: 1,000 megawatts
Estimated completion date: 2019
Acme, an Indian technology conglomerate, announced its intentions to build up to 1,000 megawatts of solar thermal power Tuesday. The company providing the technology, eSolar, makes 46-megawatt modular power plants that concentrate the sun’s rays onto a central boiler to generate steam to drive a turbine. ESolar’s Rob Rogan said that the companies would break ground on the first 100 megawatts of solar power within the year.

Qaidam Basin Solar PV Installaton
Location: Qinghai Province, China
Current capacity: 0 megawatts
Planned capacity: 1,000 megawatts
Estimated completion date: ?
Two local Chinese firms announced their intentions to install up to 1,000 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels in northwestern China in January. The China Technology Development Group Corporation and Qinghai New Energy Company will start with a more modest 30 megawatts. They expect to break ground during 2009.

Home Engineering: Gaping Hole Costume

photo of gaping hole Halloween costume by Evan Booth, 2006

This great Halloween costume by Evan Booth shows what a bit of imagination and engineering can do. A projection screen over his stomach displays a live video image of a camera on his back giving the illusion of a gaping hole. Photos via flickr. Very cool.

Cactus Eating Bull Saving Kenyan Drylands

Cactus eating bull saves Kenyan drylands

Cows are playing an important role in land restoration in Baringo by eating up the invasive prickly pear cactus a nasty invasive plant that is destroying the drylands. It’s not obvious at all for cows to eat this thorny cactus, but Murry Roberts and his wife Elizabeth Meyerhoff told me about an amazing project that their organization, RAE (Rehabilitation of Arid Environments) has been working on. A few years ago they discovered that a local farmer had a bull that not only ate the nasty exotic thorny ugly, plant, but also taught other cows to go for it too.
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During the drought of 1999 – 2000 grassy fields were reduced to bare earth and cows had nothing left to eat were dying of starvation leading to widespread famine. The story goes that one farmer persuaded his bull to eat the leaves after he had burned off the thorns. Opuntia are 80% water and if one can get past the thorns, the plant is quite nutritious . The other starving cows watched the bull and then followed suit thus saving the herd and the farmer who has never looked back. The thorns are burnt off using wood from another nasty invasive species, Prosopis juliflora – making this an eco-friendly project all round.

Ozone Pollution Taking Toll on American Lives

Ozone Pollution Taking Toll on American Lives by Amanda Gardner

Thousands of Americans are dying each year from lung disease caused by atmospheric ozone, a new study finds.

The greatest risk may for those living be in hot, dry cities such as Los Angeles, which has one of the highest concentrations of ozone. Residents of Los Angeles may face a 25 percent to 30 percent higher annual risk of dying from a respiratory ailment versus people in low-ozone areas such as the Great Plains, the researchers said.
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An estimated 240,000 people in the United States and 7.7 million people worldwide die of respiratory disease each year, according to data from the World Health Organization. Efforts to reduce ground-level ozone have stalled in recent years, Jarrett said, and now one in three Americans lives in an area that exceeds the national standard for ozone levels.
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Ozone is also a powerful greenhouse gas, Jerrett said, so measures to improve health might have the added benefit of slowing climate change.

Very Cool Wearable Computing Gadget from MIT

Pattie Maes presentation at TED shows a very cool prototype for wearable, useful computing spearheaded by Pranav Mistry (who received a standing ovation at TED). It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment.

The prototype of the system cost only $350. The software, created by them, obviously is the key, but how amazing is that, $350 for the hardware used in the prototype! There is a useful web site on the Sixth Sense project.

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.

The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.

Scientists Target Bacteria Where They Live

Scientists Learning to Target Bacteria Where They Live

Scientists have learned that bacteria that are vulnerable when floating around as individual cells in what is known as their “planktonic state” are much tougher to combat once they get established in a suitable place — whether the hull of a ship or inside the lungs — and come together in tightly bound biofilms. In that state, they can activate mechanisms like tiny pumps to expel antibiotics, share genes that confer protection against drugs, slow down their metabolism or become dormant, making them harder to kill.

The answer, say researchers, is to find substances that will break up biofilms.
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Melander said “a throwaway sentence in an obscure journal” — the Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan — gave them another clue. They isolated a compound from the sponge that disperses biofilms and figured out how to synthesize it quickly and cheaply.
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But dispersing biofilms without understanding all the ramifications could be a “double-edged sword,” Romeo warned, because some bacteria in a biofilm could wreak worse havoc once they disperse.

“Simply inducing biofilm dispersion without understanding exactly how it will impact the bacterium and host could be very dangerous, as it might lead to spread of a more damaging acute infection,” he said.

First Flowers of Spring

The first flowers of Spring in my yard.

Eric Schmidt on Google, Education and Economics

Eric Schmidt, March 6th, 2009 interview by Charlie Rose:

“From our perspective, I think the YouTube acquisition and the Doubleclick acquisition, which are the two large acquisitions we did last year, and the year before, have been phenomenally successful.”
He also mentioned the idea of teachers today creating online hubs of information on educational areas, as well as lesson plans. See our Education Resources for Science and Engineering
And Flu Trends
“We needed the stimulus package, because the stimulus package had, among other things, $20 billion for science and education funding… Real wealth is created by businesses, not by financial engineering, and by businesses that provide new products that solve new problems.”
Why do you assume the best students in the world are going to come to America? “Because they choose to come here right now… 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.“
Technologists as a group tend to be more analytical, more data driven, more personally liberal (more willing to tolerate the differences among people, more global in their focus… [technologists] as a group believe you can literally change the world from technology.”

Resurrection of the Human IRGM Gene

Interesting open access paper on Death and Resurrection of the Human IRGM Gene. Author summary:

The IRG gene family plays an important role in defense against intracellular bacteria, and genome-wide association studies have implicated structural variants of the single-copy human IRGM locus as a risk factor for Crohn’s disease. We reconstruct the evolutionary history of this region among primates and show that the ancestral tandem gene family contracted to a single pseudogene within the ancestral lineage of apes and monkeys.

Phylogenetic analyses support a model where the gene has been “dead” for at least 25 million years of human primate evolution but whose ORF became restored in all human and great ape lineages. We suggest that the rebirth or restoration of the gene coincided with the insertion of an endogenous retrovirus, which now serves as the functional promoter driving human gene expression. We suggest that either the gene is not functional in humans or this represents one of the first documented examples of gene death and rebirth.

Electrolyzed Water Replacing Toxic Cleaning Substances

Simple elixir called a ‘miracle liquid’

The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water
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Used as a sanitizer for decades in Russia and Japan, it’s slowly winning acceptance in the United States. A New York poultry processor uses it to kill salmonella on chicken carcasses. Minnesota grocery clerks spray sticky conveyors in the checkout lanes. Michigan jailers mop with electrolyzed water to keep potentially lethal cleaners out of the hands of inmates.

In Santa Monica, the once-skeptical Sheraton housekeeping staff has ditched skin-chapping bleach and pungent ammonia for spray bottles filled with electrolyzed water to clean toilets and sinks. “I didn’t believe in it at first because it didn’t have foam or any scent,” said housekeeper Flor Corona. “But I can tell you it works. My rooms are clean.”
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It turns out that zapping salt water with low-voltage electricity creates a couple of powerful yet nontoxic cleaning agents. Sodium ions are converted into sodium hydroxide, an alkaline liquid that cleans and degreases like detergent, but without the scrubbing bubbles. Chloride ions become hypochlorous acid, a potent disinfectant known as acid water.

“It’s 10 times more effective than bleach in killing bacteria,” said Yen-Con Hung, a professor of food science at the University of Georgia-Griffin, who has been researching electrolyzed water for more than a decade. “And it’s safe.”

There are drawbacks. Electrolyzed water loses its potency fairly quickly, so it can’t be stored long. Machines are pricey and geared mainly for industrial use. The process also needs to be monitored frequently for the right strength.

Very cool use of science: providing a green cleaning agent that is effective.