Category Archives: Podcast

Podcasts, webcasts, online video and audio on science and engineering topics.

Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity

Photo of solar sheet manufacturing

Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity by Kevin Bullis

This week, Nanosolar, a startup in Palo Alto, CA, announced plans to build a production facility with the capacity to make enough solar cells annually to generate 430 megawatts. This output would represent a substantial portion of the worldwide production of solar energy.

According to Nanosolar’s CEO Martin Roscheisen, the company will be able to produce solar cells much less expensively than is done with existing photovoltaics because its new method allows for the mass-production of the devices. In fact, maintains Roscheisen, the company’s technology will eventually make solar power cost-competitive with electricity on the power grid.

Nanosolar also announced this week more than $100 million in funding from various sources, including venture firms and government grants. The company was founded in 2001 and first received seed money in 2003 from Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Information on the nanotechnology involved from the Nanosolar site.

Bacterial Evolution in Yogurt

Adapting to Life in Yogurt by Carl Zimmer:

The analysis, based on the microbe’s newly sequenced genome, suggests that the bacteria descend from microbes that originally fed on plants. Some of them fell accidentally into some herder’s milk, it seems, and happened to clot it and kept it from spoiling. Since then, people have been transferring yogurt to fresh milk time and again, and the effect has been like running a long-term experiment on the evolution of bacteria.

Carl Zimmer provide much more detail in this podcast: evolution of bacteria in yogurt. Continue reading →

K-12 Engineering Outreach Programs

Interview, K12 Summer Outreach Programs Interview of Dr. Andrew Gerhart, author of K12 Summer Outreach Programs–Curriculum Comparisons Between Ages, Minorities, and Genders, by Sean Stickle.

I will point out that I, John Hunter, work for ASEE as an Information Technology Program Manager: my work on this blog is not associated with ASEE and the opinions I express are mine and not those of ASEE. This interview was done at the ASEE annual conference. The paper was an award winning paper from the ASEE conference last year. This paper and interview provide some good information for teachers interested in introducing engineering education to k-12 students.

Abstract of the paper:

Ensuring that the level of the material presented/used for a K-12 program is not too easy or too advanced can be a challenge to the instructor. Also ensuring that the material will be of interest to a variety of students (i.e., minorities, females, etc.) can be a challenge. Lawrence Technological University has two outreach programs each summer. One program, called the Summer Science Institute, is for high school juniors and seniors. The other program, called Summer Odyssey, is for middle school students.
Continue reading →

Robot Football (Soccer)

In addition to the World Cup another international football event is taking place in Germany this month: RoboCup 2006

Researcher Founds a Robot Soccer Dynasty (including video webcast):

RoboCup is an international project to foster advances in artificial intelligence and intelligent robotics research. The ultimate goal of RoboCup is to develop, by 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can beat the human world champion soccer team. Veloso and Carnegie Mellon have been participating since “pre-RoboCup” events in 1996 and the first official RoboCup games in 1997. Veloso was general chair of RoboCup 2001 in Seattle.

Science and Engineering Podcasts

Engines Of Our Ingenuity hosted by John Lienhard, University of Houston’s College of Engineering, (podcasts via NPR).

A complete history, with transcripts and audio of the over 2,000 episodes, is online – episodes include:

This is a great resource. “The Engines of Our Ingenuity tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity. he program uses the record of history to reveal the way art, technology, and ideas have shaped us.”

More NPR Technology podcasts

Recharge Batteries in Seconds

MIT researchers are working on battery technology based on capacitor technology and nanotechnology.

Super Battery (video also available):

Rechargable and disposable batteries use a chemical reaction to produce energy. “That’s an effective way to store a large amount of energy,” he says, “but the problem is that after many charges and discharges … the battery loses capacity to the point where the user has to discard it.”

But capacitors contain energy as an electric field of charged particles created by two metal electrodes. Capacitors charge faster and last longer than normal batteries. The problem is that storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the battery’s electrodes, so even today’s most powerful capacitors hold 25 times less energy than similarly sized standard chemical batteries.

The researchers solved this by covering the electrodes with millions of tiny filaments called nanotubes.
…
This technology has broad practical possibilities, affecting any device that requires a battery. Schindall says, “Small devices such as hearing aids that could be more quickly recharged where the batteries wouldn’t wear out; up to larger devices such as automobiles where you could regeneratively re-use the energy of motion and therefore improve the energy efficiency and fuel economy.”

Previous post: MIT Energy Storage Using Carbon Nanotubes

Art of Science 2006

Seahorse

2006 Art of Science exhibition from Princeton University has many amazing images.

Image: “created in Photoshop to illustrate the vertebral column of the genus Hippocampus. While most fish have scales, seahorses have bony plates over which a thin layer of skin is stretched. Seahorses are vertebrates and thus have a vertebral column that runs through the center of their body and the center of their prehensile tail.” – larger view

National Spherical Torus Experiment

Photo: The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) is an innovative magnetic fusion device that was constructed by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Columbia University, and the University of Washington at Seattle. This image is of the interior of the experiment showing the protective carbon tiles and the central column. Various diagnostics are mounted at the midplane. larger view

See the full gallery of images and movies. Previous post: Art of Science at Princeton.

Ocean Life – photos and videos

k-12 Engineering Education

Presentation by Ioannis Miaoulis, President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston on k-12 Engineering Education.

Massachusetts was the first state in the nation to include Engineering as a topic in its Learning Standards.

Public schools from pre-kindergarten to high school are now including engineering as a new discipline. Dr. Miaoulis describes the value of including Engineering in the formal curriculum content for elementary, middle school and high school level. He also discusses the necessary partnerships between the state Department of Education, federal government, school districts, teacher groups, colleges, universities and museums and industry that are supporting this effort and the evolution of the program.

Google: Artificial Intelligence

Google A.I. a Twinkle in Larry Page’s Eye

He finished his AI thoughts on a promising note. Explaining that he has learned that technology has a tendency to change faster than expected, and that an AI could be a reality in just a few years. Those are very strong words coming from the mouth of one of the founders of a company with the wealth and vision of Google. Words to mark in the years ahead.

That quote is based on a response by Larry Page in: Google vision – Q and A webcast (30 minutes). Artificial Intelligence seems to keep frustrating those that see a near term future for it.

via: When You’re Worth More Than Ten Billion

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