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.

UC-Berkeley Course Videos now on YouTube

About a year ago I posted that UC-Berkeley Course Videos were available on Google Video. Well now the
Berkeley YouTube site includes even more videos of Berkeley lectures. They include those listed on Google Video that I mentioned last year such as Physics for Future Presidents and Search Engines (by Sergey Brin) and more.

They currently have 201 videos posted. Hopefully they will add many more.

Does anyone else have the annoying delay on pages with YouTube videos? My entire browser locks up for probably 15 seconds on average now for any page that has an embedded YouTube video (not always but very often now). I find this very annoying.

Science and Engineering Fellowship Applications Open Now

Some of the science and engineering fellowship applications that are currently open:

2007 Nobel Prize in Physics

Nobel Prize in Physics 2007

This year’s physics prize is awarded for the technology that is used to read data on hard disks. It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players, for instance.

In 1988 the Frenchman Albert Fert and the German Peter GrÃ¼nberg each independently discovered a totally new physical effect – Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR. Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current. Soon researchers and engineers began work to enable use of the effect in read-out heads. In 1997 the first read-out head based on the GMR effect was launched and this soon became the standard technology. Even the most recent read-out techniques of today are further developments of GMR.

UW Concrete Canoe Team Victorious in the Netherlands

Concrete Canoe Team victorious in the Netherlands

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Concrete Canoe Team dominated the 30th annual Dutch Concrete Canoe Challenge Sept. 7–9 in the Netherlands. The team took first place overall, with victories in five out of the six race categories. The team’s 20-foot, 176-pound canoe, Descendent, also won the construction and innovation categories for its design and use of environmentally sound concrete.

Eight members of the UW-Madison team and their advisor, Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate Professor Chin H. Wu, traveled to Amsterdam for the competition, also known as the Beton Kano Race. The team was invited to compete after winning the U.S. national championship for the fifth consecutive time in June. The UW-Madison team was one of 12 participating teams, most of which hailed from the Netherlands or Germany.

The IT Job Market

The CS/IT job market quotes 3 articles from looking at the IT and computer science job markets in the USA, United Kingdom and Canada. IT Job Prospects and Salaries on the Rise (USA):

CRA reported that computer science graduates were among the highest paid of any major – an average offer of $53,051, which is about a 4.5 percent increase over 2007.
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Network World released a survey… The data shows that pay raises and bonuses for 2006 showed an 11.6% jump on average. Further, the average base salary grew by 5.6% to $86,700. Interestingly the survey noted that experts in security, storage and networking are wanted but hard to find.

See more posts on science and engineering careers and: What Graduates Should Know About an IT Career – Programming Grads Meet a Skills Gap in the Real World – High Pay for Computer Science Graduates (2007) – A Career in Computer Programming – S&P 500 CEOs – Again Engineering Graduates Lead – Science, Engineering and Technology Graduates Paid Well (Ireland)

2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2007 awarded to Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies for their discoveries of “principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells”

This year’s Nobel Laureates have made a series of ground-breaking discoveries concerning embryonic stem cells and DNA recombination in mammals. Their discoveries led to the creation of an immensely powerful technology referred to as gene targeting in mice. It is now being applied to virtually all areas of biomedicine – from basic research to the development of new therapies.

Gene targeting is often used to inactivate single genes. Such gene “knockout” experiments have elucidated the roles of numerous genes in embryonic development, adult physiology, aging and disease. To date, more than ten thousand mouse genes (approximately half of the genes in the mammalian genome) have been knocked out. Ongoing international efforts will make “knockout mice” for all genes available within the near future.

Mario R. Capecchi, born 1937 in Italy, US citizen, PhD in Biophysics 1967, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.

Sir Martin J. Evans, born 1941 in Great Britain, British citizen, PhD in Anatomy and Embryology 1969, University College, London, UK. Director of the School of Biosciences and Professor of Mammalian Genetics, Cardiff University, UK.

Oliver Smithies, born 1925 in Great Britain, US citizen, PhD in Biochemistry 1951, Oxford University, UK. Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

The USA gains 2 Nobel Laureates born elsewhere – the incidence of this happening 30 years from now will be less I believe than it has been recently.

Prayer Book Reveals Lost Archimedes Work Studying Ideas at Heart of Calculus

A Prayer for Archimedes by Julie J. Rehmeyer

The top layer of writing in this 700-year-old book describes Christian prayers. But underneath, almost obliterated, are the only surviving copies of many of the works of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes.
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An intensive research effort over the last nine years has led to the decoding of much of the almost-obliterated Greek text. The results were more revolutionary than anyone had expected. The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized.

Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes’ book off the shelf, cut the pages in half
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“The interesting breakthrough is that he is completely willing to operate with actual infinity,” Netz says, but he adds that “the argument is definitely not completely valid. He just had a strong intuition that it should work.” In this case, it did work, but it remained for Newton and Leibniz to figure out how to make the argument mathematically rigorous.

Engineering Education Future at Imperial College

Imperial outlines vision for new era in engineering education

“We want to ensure that the engineering graduate of the future is better equipped to take a leading role in identifying issues and designing solutions to local, national and global challenges affecting society and the world around us, without compromising their technical education,”
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Capitalising on these global issues could also have major financial benefits for UK industry claimed the Science and Innovation Minister, Ian Pearson. He said tackling climate change and the effects of population growth could generate at least GBP 700 billion globally by 2015. He said it was an opportunity that British engineers should capitalise on, while helping to mitigate the most damaging features of climate change.

Mammoth DNA Extracted from Hair

Mammoth DNA extracted from hair reveals ancient secrets

The woolly mammoth hair had been so well preserved that it provided the most accurate DNA sequencing of the extinct animals yet achieved. One of the animals used in the study dated back 50,000 years and its hairs allowed scientists to obtain the oldest complete sequence of mitochondrial DNA.

Three mammoths had been subjected previously to DNA sequencing, two with bone fragments and the third with a sample of muscle tissue.

Results from hair assessed using the sequencing-by-synthesis (SBS) technique were more detailed than bone and muscle samples. Importantly, said researchers, the SBS extraction technique required smaller quantities of ancient material and caused less damage to the preserved specimens.

Mammoths roamed the landscape for about six million years and their disappearance about 10,000 years ago – with a handful of dwarf mammoths surviving on remote Siberian islands until little more than 2,000 years ago – has remained a mystery.

WVU Physics Team Discovers New Phenomenon

WVU physics team discovers new phenomenon in universe

West Virginia University physics professors and an undergraduate student have discovered a new astronomical phenomenon.

Duncan Lorimer and Maura McLaughlin, assistant professors in the Department of Physics in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, and David Narkevic, a senior physics and political science student from Philippi, detected a powerful, short-lived burst of radio waves.

The findings of their study appear in today’s edition of the online journal Science Express.