Category Archives: Research

Ants on Stilts for Science

Ant on stilts

When Ants Go Marching, They Count Their Steps by Bjorn Carey

One is that they do it like honeybees and remember visual cues, but experiments revealed ants can navigate in the dark and even blindfolded. Another disproved hypothesis was that because ants scurry at a steady pace, they could time how long it took them to get to and fro. Other studies have shown that once ants find a good source of food, they teach other ants how to find it.

The ant “pedometer” technique was first proposed in 1904, but it remained untested until now.

Scientists trained desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, to walk along a straight path from their nest entrance to a feeder 30 feet away. If the nest or feeder was moved, the ants would break from their straight path after reaching the anticipated spot and search for their goal.

A simple example of the scientific process (another one posted yesterday about birds and global warming).
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Tour the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab

Robert Scoble videotaped his visit to the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab and posted the video to Microsoft’s channel 9 – which has quite a few interesting videos.

They have some of the coolest people I’ve ever met and the robotics might surprise you (two of the students were building soccer-playing robots on top of Segways, other students were building surgery tools, really great stuff).

More robotics webcasts from Channel 9.

Swimming Robot Aids Researchers

Swimming Robot

Swimming Robot Tests Theories About Locomotion in Existing and Extinct Animals

An underwater robot is helping scientists understand why four-flippered animals such as penguins, sea turtles and seals use only two of their limbs for propulsion, whereas their long-extinct ancestors seemed to have used all four.

Don’t miss the video of the robot swimming and an informative interview with professor, John H. Long, Jr., Ph.D., who is researching with the robot.

Open-Source Biotech

Open-Source Biotech:

Mr. Jefferson, the man credited with inventing one of the main tools used in plant genetic engineering, started his campaign in 1987 by doing what the big companies that dominate agricultural biotech rarely do: He shared his discovery of beta-glucuronidase gene (GUS), an indicator that tells where a gene is, how much it expresses, and when it acts.

GUS is widely credited for enabling many breakthroughs in plant biotech, including the development of one of Monsanto’s first and most profitable agricultural products, Roundup Ready soybeans. Mr. Jefferson first provided GUS and all the know-how to use it for free to hundreds of labs around the world.

When he secured his patents, he charged only what people could afford: Monsanto, he says, paid a substantial amount; academics and companies in the developing world, including those who wanted to use his work for commercial purposes, received it free of charge.

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Britain’s Royal Society Experiments with Open Access

Good news, the Royal Society tries open access by Stephen Pincock:

Britain’s Royal Society dipped a cautious toe into the waters of open access publishing this week, allowing authors whose papers are accepted by any of its seven journals to pay a fee and have their work made freely available on the web.

It seems to me most grants for scientific research should require open publication. I can imagine exceptions, but it seems to me that the expectation should be for open publication, in this day and age, and only allow non-open publication with a good reason.

For public funded research this open access expectation seems obvious. For private foundations in most cases I would think open access publication makes sense also. What business model is used to allow open access is not important, in my opinion. The important factor is open access, how that is accomplished is something that can be experimented with.
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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.

Two Butterfly Species Evolved Into Third

Butterfly photo

Two Butterfly Species Evolved Into Third, Study Finds by James Owen, National Geographic News:

Researchers say their creation reveals a process called hybrid speciation, in which the genes of two existing species combine to produce a third.

The study suggests hybridization may be more important to the evolution of new animals than had previously been thought.

Hybrids such as the mule, a cross between a donkey and a horse, are sterile. But the team says the butterfly hybrid brought together a combination of genes that allowed it to breed and there be considered a new species.

Biological Molecular Motors

bio

Image: The biomolecular portal motor of bacteriophage PHI-29 (yellow) compresses the coiled DNA into the viral capsid at 6,000 times its normal pressure. (courtesy the Bustamante group)

Start Your Protein Engines by David Pescovitz:

Oster and his research group investigate the physics and chemistry behind great engineering mysteries of the natural world, from protein motors to cell motility to how bacteria form thriving populations that aren’t so different from ant colonies, or even human societies.
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Working with UC Berkeley professor Carlos Bustamante, researchers have also studied the motor that packs a virus’s DNA so tightly that it can be injected into a hijacked cell at ten times the pressure of a cork shooting out of a champagne bottle. And they’ve modeled the donut-shaped molecular motors that move along DNA strands during replication.

In the closing paragraph Dr. Oster is quoted on the use of models, which reminds me a the quote from Dr. George Box: All models are wrong, some are useful.

Other articles from from the most recent ScienceMatters@Berkeley: The New New Math of String Theory and Molecular Rules Of Engagement. Also see previous article: The Cellular Mechanic.

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.
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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

Basic Science Research Funding

Excellent summary from the European Union.

National Basic Research Program of China

America’s economy is losing its competitive edge and Washington hasn’t noticed by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

For decades, the United States ranked first in the world in the percentage of its GDP devoted to scientific research; now, we’ve dropped behind Japan, Korea, Israel, Sweden, and Finland. The number of scientific papers published by Americans peaked in 1992 and has fallen 10 percent; a decade ago, the United States led the world in scientific publications, but now it trails Europe. For two centuries, a higher proportion of Americans had gone to university than have citizens of any other country; now several nations in Asia and Europe have caught up.

The Emergence of China as a Leading Nation in Science by Ping Zhoua and Loet Leydesdorff:

China has become the fifth leading nation in terms of its share of the world’s scientific publications. The citation rate of papers with a Chinese address for the corresponding author also exhibits exponential growth.