Category Archives: Research

$1 Million Each for 20 Science Educators

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Names 20 New Million-Dollar Professors – Top Research Scientists Tapped for their Teaching Talent:

“The scientists whom we have selected are true pioneers—not only in their research, but in their creative approaches and dedication to teaching,” said Thomas R. Cech, HHMI president. “We are hopeful that their educational experiments will energize undergraduate science education throughout the nation.”

The Institute awarded $20 million to the first group of HHMI professors in 2002 to bring the excitement of scientific discovery to the undergraduate classroom.

The experiment worked so well that neurobiologist and HHMI professor Darcy Kelley convinced Columbia University to require every entering freshman to take a course on hot topics in science. Through Utpal Bannerjee’s HHMI program at the University of California, Los Angeles, 138 undergraduates were co-authors of a peer-reviewed article in a top scientific journal. At the University of Pittsburgh, HHMI professor Graham Hatfull’s undergraduates mentored curious high school students as they unearthed and analyzed more than 30 never-before-seen bacteriophages from yards and barnyards. And Isiah Warner, an award-winning chemist and HHMI professor at Louisiana State University, developed a “mentoring ladder,” a hierarchical model for integrating research, education, and peer mentoring, with a special emphasis on underrepresented minority students.

NASA Engineering Challenges

NASA has been increasing the use of challenges to encourage innovation along the lines they could use for their future missions. The NASA challenges now 9 open challenges including the: beam power challenge and the astronaut glove challenge.

These centennial challenges provide a small monetary award to encourage solutions to challenges.

By making awards based on actual achievements, instead of proposals, Centennial Challenges seeks novel solutions to NASA’s mission challenges from non-traditional sources of innovation in academia, industry and the public.

Previous post: NASA Telerobotic Competition

Like to Tinker? NASA’s Looking for You by Noah Shachtman

Many of NASA’s contests also center on robotics. The Telerobotic Construction Challenge, scheduled for August 2007, requires a team of machines to assemble items with minimal human supervision. The idea is to let robots, instead of astronauts, build shelters and machinery on the moon and Mars.

Organs Engineered in a Lab

Straight Out of Science Fiction: Organs Engineered in a Lab:

Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy.

It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality.

Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

UW-Madison Scientist Solves Bird Flu Puzzler

UW-Madison scientist solves bird flu puzzler by David Wahlberg:

Before the H5N1 virus can cause a human pandemic, the new findings suggest, it must mutate and become able to recognize human flu virus receptors, Kawaoka said.

The virus, which has led to the death or slaughter of millions of birds in Asia, Africa and Europe, has killed 103 of the 184 people known to be infected since 2003, nearly all of them thought to be sickened by birds.

If the virus starts spreading from person to person, health officials say, it could cause a pandemic like the one in 1918 that killed up to 50 million people worldwide.

Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge

Shift Bicycle photo

The History Channel and Invent Now, announced the 25 semi-finalists of the Modern Marvels Invent
Now Challenge, a national competition that provides an opportunity for independent inventors to be recognized and to influence the ever-changing face of invention.

The semi-finalists, who hail from 17 states across the U.S. and range in age from 19 to 80, were chosen from nearly 4,300 submissions entered, a number that confirms that the inventive spirit in America is alive
and well. This spring, the Challenge will ultimately name the invention of one of these 25 semi-finalists as the 2006 Modern Marvel of the Year during Modern Marvels: Great Inventions Week on The History Channel May 24-27th.

Innvetions include:

Matthew C. Grossman, Student, Austin, TX – Shift Bicycle (shown in photo): This bicycle is intended to help small children learn to balance on their own without the crutch of training wheels and the worry of skinned knees. The bicycle features two rear wheels that are spread apart at slow speeds to provide critical stability, and as the rider gains speed, the two rear wheels merge together to act as one wheel until the rider reduces speed and consequently returns the bicycle to the two wheel configuration. More information on the bike: new bike design for toddlers wins international competition

Russell D. Keller, Truck Driver, Oklahoma, OK – Drag Vent: An air diversion device captures a flow of air from above a roadway vehicle and forcibly diverts the captured air to the center of the low pressure area at the rear of the vehicle, thus reducing the amount of drag force applied to the vehicle and increasing the vehicles efficiency of operation.

Randal J. Kwapis, Computer Engineer, New Boston, MI – Typhoon: The Typhoon is an everyday manual wheelchair that utilizes shock-absorbing technology to make the chair easier to propel over rough terrain like grass and gravel.

Find more information on the semi-finalists and the Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge

via Make

GE’s Edison Desk Blog

photo of windmills

GE global research’s Edison Desk blog provides interesting posts on the scientific and engineering research at GE. They provide interesting reading and, as I am sure is part of GE’s plan, let GE present their company in a positive light (so far the text is a bit too heavy on public relations spin, in my opinion, but it is still interesting). For example, Reaching for A High Penetration of Renewable Energy in The Grid:

Many additional challenges exist. Technologies that ease the integration of renewable energy resources into the grid will have a large impact in driving continued growth for these industries. Technology needs range from advanced component design to renewable resource forecasting and all the way through to large-scale system designs which take into consideration the aggregation of diverse power generation technologies to form dispatchable entities (such as wind-hydro hybrids, for example)

and Your Movie Collection on a Single Disk:

However, the capacity of the discs is being increased just enough to put a single HDTV movie on one disc. The Holographic Storage technology that our team is working on leapfrogs these next generation formats enabling users to put over 40 HDTV movies or over 200 standard definition movies on a single disc.

UK Science and Innovation Grants

UK Science and Innovation Grants

The recipients of the second round of Science and Innovation Awards have been announced by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Funding has been awarded to build the UK’s research base in the areas of nanometrology, statistics, plasma physics and the Mathematics-Computer Science interface.

Professor John O’Reilly, Chief Executive of EPSRC, said: “A strong research base in engineering and the physical sciences is vital to the UK’s success as a knowledge economy. These latest awards underscore EPSRC’s commitment, working in partnership with the Funding Councils and the Department for Employment and Learning Northern Ireland, to address shortages of academics to lead research teams in some crucially important areas.”
Continue reading →

Nanofibers Knit Severed Neurons Together

Hamster Study Shows Nanofibers Knit Severed Neurons Together, Restore Vision by David Biello, Scientific American:

“We have healing of the brain, which we’ve never seen before. We have axons growing through the center of the cut, which we’ve never seen before, and we have axons connecting to the target tissue,” Rutledge notes. “If we could use something like this to mitigate the damage caused by cutting the brain with a knife, that would be great.” The research appears online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hottest Temperature on Earth

Record set for hottest temperature on Earth – Scientists produce gas more than 100 times hotter than the sun

Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit.

This is hotter than the interior of our sun, which is about 15 million degrees Kelvin, and also hotter than any previous temperature ever achieved on Earth, they say.

They don’t know how they did it.
…
Thermonuclear explosions are estimated to reach only tens to hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin; other nuclear fusion experiments have achieved temperatures of about 500 million degrees Kelvin, said a spokesperson at the lab.

Better Way To Desalinate Water

NJIT Professor Discovers Better Way To Desalinate Water – NJIT broke the link to their press release so I removed it 🙁 A university breaking news release web link, sigh. At least far fewer web sites are run by pointy haired bosses that don’t understand extremely basic rules like web pages must live forever.

Chemical engineer Kamalesh Sirkar, PhD, a distinguished professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and an expert in membrane separation technology, is leading a team of researchers to develop a breakthrough method to desalinate water. Sirkar, who holds more than 20 patents in the field of membrane separation, said that using his technology, engineers will be able to recover water from brines with the highest salt concentrations.