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.

Time’s Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2007

Time’s Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2007 – I don’t really agree with these but a couple are interesting:

#1. Stem Cell Breakthroughs
In November, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and molecular biologist James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin reported that they had reprogrammed regular skin cells to behave just like embryonic stem cells. The breakthrough may someday allow scientists to create stem cells without destroying embryos
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#4. Hundreds of New Species
…700 new species of organisms — including carnivorous sponges and giant sea spiders — some 2,300 ft. to 19,700 ft. (700 m to 6,000 m) down in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica. Scientists also reported the identification of 24 new species in an isolated area of Suriname, where the exploration for bauxite, which is used to make aluminum, led to the discovery of 12 dung beetles, an ant species, six species of fish and five new frogs, including one with fluorescent purple markings. Other fauna finds include a legless amphibian near Goa, India; 11 new species of plants and animals in central Vietnam’s tropical “green” corridor; a new monkey in Uganda; a sucker-footed bat in Madagascar; a clouded leopard in Sumatra and Borneo, and a sea cucumber off the coast of Taiwan, nicknamed “Little Strawberry.”

Roachbot: Cockroach Controlled Robot

“Roaches are gross. Robots are good. But — cockroach-controlled robots?” Nice quote 🙂 The video shows roboticist Garnet Hertz’s large robot moved by a cockroach on a pingpong ball (a cockroach trackball).

Scientists Cure Mice Of Sickle Cell Using Stem Cell Technique

Using a recently developed technique for turning skin cells into stem cells, scientists have cured mice of sickle cell anemia — the first direct proof that the easily obtained cells can reverse an inherited, potentially fatal disease.
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researchers also cautioned that aspects of the new approach will have to be changed before it can be tried in human patients. Most important, the technique depends on the use of gene-altered viruses that have the potential to trigger tumor growth. “The big issue is how to replace these viruses,” said Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., who led the new work with co-worker Jacob Hanna and Tim M. Townes of the University of Alabama Schools of Medicine and Dentistry in Birmingham.
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The researchers converted those skin cells into iPS cells by infecting them with viruses engineered to change the cells’ gene activity so they would resemble embryonic cells. Using DNA splicing techniques in those cells, the researchers then snipped out the small mutated stretches of DNA that cause sickle cell disease and filled those gaps with bits of DNA bearing the proper genetic code.

Next, the researchers treated the corrected iPS cells with another kind of virus — this time one designed to induce a genetic change that encouraged the cells to mature into bone marrow cells.

Finally, each mouse that gave up a few skin cells at the beginning of the experiment was given an infusion with the corrected marrow cells created from its own skin cells. Those cells set up permanent residence in the animals’ bones and began producing blood cells — the major function of marrow cells — and releasing them by the millions into the circulatory system.

But now the blood cells being produced were free of the sickle cell mutation.

Ebola Outbreak in Uganda

Ebola is a truly scary virus. Read more on Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever at the CDC and WHO:

Ebola haemorrhagic fever (EHF) is one of the most virulent viral diseases known to humankind, causing death in 50-90% of all clinically ill cases. Several different species of Ebola virus have been identified. The Ebola virus is transmitted by direct contact with the blood, body fluids and tissues of infected persons. Transmission of the Ebola virus has also occurred by handling ill or dead infected chimpanzees.

Panic spreads as Uganda reports 101 Ebola cases:

Uganda has 101 suspected cases of Ebola fever and hundreds more people being closely monitored, officials said on Friday, as fear grew in Uganda and neighboring countries that the deadly virus might spread. Twenty two people have so far died of the fever
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The outbreak, which started in August, has sparked panic amongst officials, health workers and the public, with the medical union calling on staff to refuse looking after patients unless they are issued proper protective gear. The affected region borders Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose Ebola river gave the virus its name after some of the first cases were recorded in its valley in 1976. The independent Daily Monitor said Congo had sealed its border with the district. Congolese officials denied this.
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The last Ebola outbreak in Uganda was in 2000, when 425 people caught it and more than half died. Meanwhile, north of the Ebola-hit district, a separate epidemic of bubonic plague has infected 160 people and killed 19 since July, Health Ministry spokesman Paul Kabwa said.

I happen to be reading The Hot Zone right now. It is a non-fiction book which explores several Ebola virus outbreaks from 1967 to 1993 including one at surburban Washington, DC laboratory in 1989.

Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter

Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter:

The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.

“Influenza virus is more likely to be transmitted during winter on the way to the subway than in a warm room,” said Peter Palese, a flu researcher who is professor and chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the lead author of the flu study. Dr. Palese published details of his findings in the Oct. 19 issue of PLoS Pathogens.

Reading a paper published in 1919 in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the flu epidemic at Camp Cody in New Mexico, he came upon a key passage: “It is interesting to note that very soon after the epidemic of influenza reached this camp, our laboratory guinea pigs began to die.”
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Dr. Palese bought some guinea pigs and exposed them to the flu virus. Just as the paper suggested, they got the flu and spread it among themselves. So Dr. Palese and his colleagues began their experiments. By varying air temperature and humidity in the guinea pigs’ quarters, they discovered that transmission was excellent at 41 degrees. It declined as the temperature rose until, by 86 degrees, the virus was not transmitted at all.

The virus was transmitted best at a low humidity, 20 percent, and not transmitted at all when the humidity reached 80 percent. The animals also released viruses nearly two days longer at 41 degrees than at a typical room temperature of 68 degrees.

Very interesting and you can read the actual paper since it is open access: Influenza Virus Transmission Is Dependent on Relative Humidity and Temperature.

Robo-One Grand Championship in Tokyo

Two-legged robots battle for supremacy at the the Robo-One Convention in Tokyo. Very fun video. The robots has to be built from scratch by amateurs. Also see ROBO-ONE: Grand Championship Competition @ IREX (with full video of final match).

Playing Dice and Children’s Numeracy

My father, Willaim Hunter, a professor of statistics and of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, was a guest speaker for my second grade class (I think it was 2nd) to teach us about numbers – using dice. He gave every kid a die. I remember he asked all the kids what number do you think will show up when you roll the die. 6 was the answer from about 80% of them (which I knew was wrong – so I was feeling very smart).

Then he had the kids roll the die and he stood up at the front to create a frequency distribution of what was actually rolled. He was all ready for them to see how wrong they were and learn it was just as likely for any of the numbers on the die to be rolled. But as he asked each kid about what they rolled something like 5 out of the first 6 said they rolled a 6. He then modified the exercise a bit and had the kid come up to the front and roll the die on the teachers desk. Then my Dad read the number off the die and wrote on the chart 🙂

This nice blog post, reminded me of that story: Kids’ misconceptions about numbers — and how they fix them

in the real study, conducted by John Opfer and Rober Siegler, the kids used lines with just 0 and 1000 labeled. They were then given numbers within that range and asked to draw a vertical line through the number line where each number fell (they used a new, blank number line each time). The figure above represents (in red) the average results for a few of the numbers used in the study. As you can see, the second graders are way off, especially for lower numbers. They typically placed the number 150 almost halfway across the number line! Fourth graders perform nearly as well as adults on the task, putting all the numbers in just about the right spot.

But there’s a pattern to the second-graders’ responses. Nearly all the kids (93 were tested) understood that 750 was a larger number than 366; they just squeezed too many large numbers on the far-right side of the number line. In fact, their results show more of a logarithmic pattern than the proper linear pattern.

Backyard Wildlife: Raptor

This bird of prey was eating some unfortunate animal in my yard today. You can see some remains if you look very closely at the birds feet in the photo. The bird in the picture is surprisingly small; other raptors I have seen have all been much larger. Anyone know what type of bird it is? Please add a comment.

Other wildlife I have spotted in my backyard include: humming bird, raccoon, chipmunks, fox, possum, rabbits, turtle, many birds including hawks and/or falcons, cardinals, doves, butterflies, bats, lightning bugs, all sorts of bees, squirrels, praying mantis and ants. I also see several cats prowl the yard frequently.

Girls Sweep Top Honors at Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology

Girls Make History by Sweeping Top Honors at a Science Contest

Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize – a $100,000 scholarship – in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria.

Isha Himani Jain, 16, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., placed first in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish, whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones do. She will get a $100,000 scholarship.
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Three-quarters of the finalists have a parent who is a scientist. The parents of Alicia Darnell, who won second place, are medical researchers at Rockefeller University, and her maternal grandparents were scientists, too. Isha Himani Jain, who took home the top individual prize, published her first research paper with her father, a professor at Lehigh University, when she was 10 or 11; her mother is a doctor.

Read about projects by the finalists.

Dinosaur Remains Found with Intact Skin and Tissue

Hadrosaur Dinasaur

“Dinosaur Mummy” Found; Has Intact Skin, Tissue by John Roach, National Geographic News:

Scientists today announced the discovery of an extraordinarily preserved “dinosaur mummy” with much of its tissues and bones still encased in an uncollapsed envelope of skin. Preliminary studies of the 67-million-year-old hadrosaur, named Dakota, are already altering theories of what the ancient creatures’ skin looked like and how quickly they moved, project researchers say
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The hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, was discovered in 1999 by then-teenage paleontologist Tyler Lyson on his family’s North Dakota property.
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Plant-eating hadrosaurs are often called the “cows of the Cretaceous”—the geologic period that spanned 145 million to 65 million years ago—Manning said. They had horny, toothless beaks but hundreds of teeth in their cheeks and a long, stiff tail that was likely used for balance. Preliminary studies are revealing a surprising side to these reptiles, suggesting that Dakota—even though roughly 35 feet (12 meters) long and weighing some 35 tons—was no slowpoke.
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The preliminary calculations suggest Dakota could run 28 miles (45 kilometers) an hour. Tyrannosaurus rex tops out at about 20 miles (32 kilometers) an hour, according to the model

The dig and subsequent scanning are the subjects of Dino Autopsy, a National Geographic Channel special airing on December 9th.

Amazing find of dinosaur ‘mummy’, BBC:

this hadrosaur came complete with fossilised skin, ligaments, tendons and possibly some internal organs, according to researchers. “It’s unbelievable when you look at it for the first time,” said palaeontologist Phillip Manning from the University of Manchester, UK. “There is depth and structure to the skin. The level of detail expressed in the skin is just breathtaking.”