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.

Google Summer of Code 2008

Over the last three years Google Summer of Code has provided 1500 students from 90 countries the chance to work on open source projects. It also has provide some great software and software enhancements to the open source community. Google has increased their funding by another $1 million. Each participant will receive $4,500 as a stipend.

I don’t understand why they have such a short window of opportunity to apply – but this is how they do it every year. They are accepting applications from open source projects, to act as mentoring organizations, through March 13th. Student applications will be accepted from March 24th to March 31st. See Google’s announcement.

externs.com offers listings of science internships and engineering internships.

Laws of Physics May Need a Revision

Something seems wrong with the laws of physics

Einstein’s general theory of relativity swept Newton away by showing that gravity operates by distorting space itself.

Even Einstein, however, may not have got it right. Modern instruments have shown a departure from his predictions, too. In 1990 mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which operates America’s unmanned interplanetary space probes, noticed something odd happen to a Jupiter-bound craft, called Galileo. As it was flung around the Earth in what is known as a slingshot manoeuvre (designed to speed it on its way to the outer solar system), Galileo picked up more velocity than expected. Not much. Four millimetres a second, to be precise. But well within the range that can reliably be detected.
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Altogether, John Anderson and his colleagues analysed six slingshots involving five different spacecraft. Their paper on the matter is about to be published in Physical Review Letters. Crucially for the idea that there really is a systematic flaw in the laws of physics as they are understood today, their data can be described by a simple formula. It is therefore possible to predict what should happen on future occasions.

That is what Dr Anderson and his team have now done. They have worked out the exact amount of extra speed that should be observed when they analyse the data from a slingshot last November, which involved a craft called Rosetta. If their prediction is correct, it will confirm that the phenomenon is real and that their formula is capturing its essence. Although the cause would remain unknown, a likely explanation is that something in the laws of gravity needs radical revision.

An interesting puzzle that illustrates how scientists attempt to confirm our understanding and real world results. And those efforts include uncertainty and confusion. Too often, I think, people think science is only about absolute truth and facts without any room for questions. We understand gravity well, but that does not mean we have no mysteries yet to solve about gravity.

Research paper: The Anomalous Trajectories of the Pioneer Spacecraft

Vaccine For Strep Infections

Engineered Protein Shows Potential as a Strep Vaccine

A University of California, San Diego-led research team has demonstrated that immunization with a stabilized version of a protein found on Streptococcus bacteria can provide protection against Strep infections, which afflict more than 600 million people each year and kill 400,000.
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Group A Streptococcus (GAS). GAS causes a wide variety of human diseases including strep throat, rheumatic fever, and the life-threatening “flesh-eating” syndrome called necrotizing fasciitis. Studies were performed using M1 protein, which represents the version of M protein present on the most common disease-associated GAS strains.
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“We created a modified version of M1 with a more stable structure, and found that it is just as effective at eliciting an immune reaction, but safer than the original version of M1, which has serious drawbacks to its use in a vaccine.”

Honda Engineering

Inside Honda’s brain by Alex Taylor III

why is Honda playing with robots? Or, for that matter, airplanes? Honda is building a factory in North Carolina to manufacture the Hondajet, a sporty twin-engine runabout that carries six passengers. Or solar energy? Honda has established a subsidiary to make and market thin-film solar-power cells. Or soybeans? Honda grows soybeans in Ohio so that it can fill up cargo containers being shipped back to Japan. The list goes on. All this sounds irrelevant to a company that built some 24 million engines last year and stuffed them into everything from cars to weed whackers.
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On fuel cells, Honda is literally years ahead of the competition. The FCX Clarity will go on sale in California this summer. It is powered by a fuel cell that uses no gasoline and emits only water vapor. Though mass production is at least a decade away, the Clarity is no mere test mule. Elegant and efficient, its hydrogen-powered fuel-cell stack is small enough to fit in the center tunnel – a significant improvement over other, bulkier power packs – and robust enough for a range of 270 miles.

The wellspring of Honda’s creative juices is Honda R&D, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honda Motor. Based in Saitama, west of Tokyo, R&D engineers create every product that Honda makes – from lawn mowers to motorcycles and automobiles – and pursue projects like Asimo and Hondajet on the side. Defiantly individualistic, R&D insists on devising its own solutions and shuns outside alliances. On paper it reports to Honda Motor, but it is powerful enough to have produced every CEO since the company was founded in 1948.
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The engineer in Fukui [Honda’s president and CEO] cannot help but be intrigued by what his former colleagues are up to, and his office is only a few steps away from Kato’s. But even with the CEO just down the hall, says Kato, “We want to look down the road. We do not want to be influenced by the business.”
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Honda allows its engineers wide latitude in interpreting its corporate mission. “We’ve been known to study the movement of cockroaches and bumblebees to better understand mobility,” says Frank Paluch, a vice president of automotive design. Honda R&D gets about 5% of Honda’s annual revenues. Most of the money goes to vehicle development, not cockroach studies
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mistakes like the Insight are also the exception. R&D has provided Honda with a long list of engineering firsts that consumers liked, including the motorcycle airbag, the low-polluting four-stroke marine engine, and ultralow-emission cars.

Antarctic Fish “Hibernate” in Winter

This is the first time fish have been seen actively becoming torpid—a state similar to hibernation in land animals—as part of an annual cycle. “A lot of freshwater fish go [unexpectedly] dormant in winter because a drop in temperature lowers their metabolism,” said study co-author Hamish Campbell, a zoologist at the University of Queensland, Australia.

“By contrast, these Antarctic fish actively reduce their ‘cost of living,'” he said… “The fish became 20 times less active in winter compared to summer,”… About every week or so the cod wake up and swim around for a few hours, the team observed. “This is quite similar to ‘denning’ in bears, where the hibernation isn’t so deep and the animals can be disturbed, then spend some time awake before going back to bed,” Fraser said.

Full paper: Hibernation in an Antarctic Fish: On Ice for Winter – Arctic Sharks – Antarctic Robo-sub

Phun Physics

Coolest science toy ever

Phun is without question the greatest computer toy in the history of the universe, if this had been around when I was a kid I would be a frickin genius by now. You don’t need things any more. It’s extremely easy to use. As a starter tip, turn gravity off when you’re attaching stuff to the background (right click after selecting “affix” tool).

Very cool. Get your Phun (2D physics software) for free. Phun is a Master of Science Theises by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt.

Some other very cool stuff: Cool Mechanical Simulation System – Scratch from MIT – What Kids can Learn – Lego Autopilot First Flight – Awesome Cat Cam

Flint and Steel: What Causes the Sparks?

What many people do not realize is that iron is a pyrophoric material; in the presence of oxygen, iron catches on fire automatically! It just starts burning. “But how can this be?” you may ask. “I can hold a chunk of iron in my hand and it does not burn me”.

The answer lays in the fact that the portion of the iron object in contact with the air and your skin is not pure iron. Rather it has developed a thin coating of iron oxide, or rust, immediately upon contact with the oxygen in the air. This serves to seal off the iron inside from exposure to the air and reduces the rate of further rusting.

Iron, whether man-made objects or naturally occurring in rocks, will rust upon exposure to oxygen in the air. The act of rusting is actually an exothermic reaction called “oxidation”, which is a fancy way of saying when iron touches the oxygen in the air a reaction occurs; the iron rusts (turns into iron oxide) and gives off heat. In other words, it burns. The simplified chemical reaction can be expressed as:

Fe2 + O2 = Fe2O3 + heat

Or in English:

Iron + Oxygen = Rust + Heat

BlimpBot Foiled by Air Conditioning

TED BlimpBot Report: Foiled by Air Conditioning!

I had a three-minute slot to show how the prototype works. This was a pretty high-stake demo, since not only would there be 2,000 of the most influential people in the technology, entertainment and design (TED) worlds watching, but they included Al Gore in the FRONT ROW, Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page and movie stars such as John Cusack and Goldie Hawn.

The bot worked great in the hotel room, and then we took it the the auditorium during a break to test it on the main stage. Yikes. We were getting IR interference from everything, from LCD screens to the bright stage lights, and our reception range dropped to something around three feet. Even worse, the air currents were overcoming the blimp’s ability to fight them. So we gave up on the idea of a fixed IR beacon on the ground, and I decided to hold it in my hand to keep it near the blimp. Even then, the motors couldn’t fight the currents well enough.
So we rushed back to our staging area (my hotel room) and Jordi updated the firmware to give more power to the motors even at the cost of battery life (this demo only had to run three minutes) . We tested it again in the hotel room, it worked fine, and then it was time to go.
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It turns out that one big thing had changed since our test run in the auditorium: 600 people had arrived. All that body heat had raised the temperature of the room, kicking in the air conditioning, which came out of huge ducts right over the stage. Basically I was under a raging waterfall of cold air, and the poor blimp sank right to the floor, its little vertical thruster completely overcome.

Exercise to Reduce Fatigue

Low-Intensity Exercise Edges Out Fatigue — Without Requiring Lots of Sweat

If fatigue hounds your days, a little exercise may shoo it away without leaving you drenched with sweat. So say University of Georgia researchers. In a new study, they report that healthy young adults who say they’re tired all the time got an energy boost from a low-intensity workout plan.

Here’s all it took: three sessions per week of pedaling a stationary bicycle at a mild pace. They didn’t need to train every day, and they didn’t push themselves too far — just far enough to shake their fatigue

As I have said before, I have found exercise reduces fatigue myself.

Clouds Alive With Bacteria

Clouds above the Mesa Trail by John Hunter

Earth’s Clouds Alive With Bacteria

Clouds are alive with tiny bacteria that grab up water vapor in the atmosphere to make cloud droplets, especially at warmer temperatures, a new study shows.

The water droplets and ice crystals that make up clouds don’t usually form spontaneously in the atmosphere – they need a solid or liquid surface to collect on. Tiny particles of dust, soot and airplane exhaust – and even bacteria – are known to provide these surfaces, becoming what atmospheric scientists call cloud condensation nuclei (CCN).
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These microbes could be carried into the atmosphere from an infected plant by winds, strong updrafts or the dust clouds that follow tractors harvesting a field. Christner and others suspect that becoming cloud nuclei is a strategy for the pathogen to get from plant to plant, since it can be carried for long distances in the atmosphere and come down with a cloud’s rain.

The next step in determining how big a role biological particles play in cloud droplet formation is to directly sample the clouds themselves, Christner says.