Category Archives: Science

Magnetic Misfit Bacteria

Magnetic Misfits: South Seeking Bacteria in the Northern Hemisphere

Magnetotactic bacteria contain chains of magnetic iron minerals that allow them to orient in the earth’s magnetic field much like living compass needles. These bacteria have long been observed to respond to high oxygen levels in the lab by swimming towards geomagnetic north in the Northern Hemisphere and geomagnetic south in the Southern Hemisphere. In either hemisphere, this behavior would also lead them downward in the water column into areas with their preferred oxygen level. But an unusual bacterium in New England has been found doing just the opposite, a magnetic misfit of sorts.
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Simmons, a graduate student in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, received some additional support for her study from a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Edwards is her advisor.

Santa Fe Institute High School Internship

The Santa Fe Institute, located in Santa Fe New Mexico, has devoted itself to the creation of a new kind of scientific research community pursuing emerging syntheses in science.

The institute offers High School Internships:

The Santa Fe Institute Summer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program gives high school students the opportunity to come to SFI to actively participate in its research-based curriculum, enjoy stimulating guest lectures, and contribute to a scientific effort as part of a multi-generational research team. This six week “SIM experience” broadens students’ scientific horizons, and accelerates academic and personal development by immersing them in a supportive community of scholars. At the conclusion of the summer internship, students will present their work and, if appropriate, develop a plan for continuation throughout the school year. Students completing the summer program will receive a modest stipend.

Applications must be postmarked no later than Friday, April 15.

Diversity in Science and Engineering

Diversity in Science & Engineering: Reflecting on the Summers Hypothesis by David Keyes. More discussion of possible causes for the under-representation of certain demographic groups in science and engineering community and possible changes that could improve the situation should be encouraged.

China graduates about 600,000 bachelor’s-level engineers per year, compared to 70,000 for the US, and it costs about one-fifth as much to employ an engineer in China. India graduates 350,000 engineers per year, and employs them for one-eleventh as much. In the past, the US counted on importing the best of foreign trained engineering bachelor’s holders, who now make up 65 percent of the doctoral degree candidates in engineering at US universities. Today, fewer foreign-born US Ph.D. holders can be expected to remain in the US, now that their native infrastructures for S&E research and education are improving.

I encourage people to explore Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate by Dr. Gary Gereffi and Vivek Wadhwa. I find the report compelling. Still, I would like some confirmation (or compelling arguments detailing what is wrong with the study) that the numbers in Duke’s report are more relevant than those quoted above, and elsewhere.

Also, in this context wouldn’t looking at the diversity of the engineers in China and India be interesting?

There are many ways of slicing demographic data, but by any metric, the US is failing to train a competitive number of domestic scientists and engineers. It produces only about 5.5 S&E bachelor’s degrees per 100 24-year-olds overall, according to 2004 NSF data. Raising the participation of women in S&E in their 24-year-old cohort (currently 4.5 per 100) to that of men (currently 7 per 100 in theirs) is one strategy. Raising the participation of African Americans (currently 3 per 100) and Hispanics (currently 2.5 per 100) is another, particularly as the latter population base grows relative to Caucasians (with 6 per 100). Meanwhile, Asians and Pacific Islanders in the US account for 14.5 S&E bachelor’s degrees per 100 24-year-olds in their cohort.

I believe there is no one cause for the current demographic makeup of various slices of the science and engineering community and there will be no one change that will bring dramatic results. Many good things have been done and progress has been made. There is still room for many more improvements, but I think the future will be made better by hundreds and thousands of relatively small incremental improvements.

Women in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon has several papers online discussing some of the discoveries made while improving female representation at the University.


Transforming the Culture of Computing at Carnegie Mellon, by Lenore Blum:

In 1995, the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) began an effort to bring more women into its undergraduate computer science (CS) program.
At that time, just 7% (7 out of 96) of entering freshman computer science majors at
Carnegie Mellon were women. Five years later, in 1999, the percentage of women in the
entering class had increased fivefold to about 38% (50 out of 130).

Related posts:

Africa Scientific

Africa Scientific by Dr. Mohamed H.A. Hassan, Seed:

in Nigeria, the malaria group at the University of Ibadan is conducting research on a local disease problem, as is the Federal University of Technology-Minna, which has developed a typhoid vaccine for their own population. Makerere University’s Medical Biotechnology Laboratories in Kampala, Uganda, has an extensive molecular biology research and training program; among its most noteworthy efforts are studies of alternative treatments of river blindness, a fly-borne parasitic disease that just a decade ago afflicted one out of every three villagers in parts of Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria and other nations.

I lived in Nigeria for a year, when I was a child, while my father taught chemical engineering as a Fulbright scholar. I still remember visiting factories, that I believe he was consulting for, as we traveled around West Africa. I returned to Africa in the 1990s to revisit Kenya and visit Egypt. See my travel photos from Kenya and a travel photo essay from Egypt.

John Hunter

Children’s view of Scientists in England

Science ‘not for normal people’, BBC News

The Science Learning Centre in London asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists.

Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as “normal young and attractive men and women”.

For those, like me, that believe our future will be better with more scientists and engineers some of the findings are less than ideal:

Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: “Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family”, and “because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female”.

Some of the findings were positive:

They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did “very important work” and 70% thought they worked “creatively and imaginatively”.

A related article from BBC News provides another look at the views of students: Science seen under the right conditions by Dr Daniel Glaser.

Another article on the BBC site talks about one way to encourage more student interest in science, Science ‘must teach experiments’. To interest students in learning about science it is important to have them engaged in physical experiments. We also need to continue to show the connection between science and engineering and the students lives. Providing examples of scientists and engineer that the student relate to (and can see as a friend or a future self) would also help.

The Naval Research Enterprise Intern Program

The Naval Research Enterprise Intern Program (NREIP), provides students the opportunity to participate in research at a Department of Navy (DoN) laboratory during summer breaks. Apply for NREIP online; the application deadline is 17 February 2006.

The goals of the NREIP are to encourage participating students to pursue science and engineering careers, to further education via mentoring by laboratory personnel and their participation in research, and to make them aware of DoN research and technology efforts, which can lead to employment within the DoN.

NREIP provides competitive research internships to approximately 230 college students (175 undergraduate students and 55 graduate students) each year. Participating students typically spend ten weeks during the summer doing research at approximately 12 DoN laboratories. To participate, a student must be enrolled at an eligible college/university (comprising approximately 160 institutions; eligibility is determined by the Office of Naval Research) and have completed at least their sophomore year before beginning the internship.

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Microbes

photo of T4 bacteriophage

Photo: T4 bacteriophage, middle, is a virus that invades bacterial cells. Courtesy of the MicrobeLibrary.org

The MicrobeWorld web site includes an introduction to microbes – Microbes: what they are and what they do:

Microbes are single-cell organisms so tiny that millions can fit into the eye of a needle.

They are the oldest form of life on earth. Microbe fossils date back more than 3.5 billion years to a time when the Earth was covered with oceans that regularly reached the boiling point, hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Microbes types:

Archaea
These bacteria look-alikes are living fossils that are providing clues to the earliest forms of life on Earth.

Bacteria
Often dismissed as “germs” that cause illness, bacteria help us do an amazing array of useful things, like make vitamins, break down some types of garbage, and maintain our atmosphere.

Fungi
From a single-celled yeast to a 3.5-mile-wide mushroom, fungi do everything from helping to bake bread to recycling to decomposing waste.

Protista
Plant-like algae produce much of the oxygen we breathe; animal-like protozoa (including the famous amoeba) help maintain the balance of microbial life.

Viruses
Unable to do much of anything on their own, viruses go into host cells to reproduce, often wreaking havoc and causing disease. Their ability to move genetic information from one cell to another makes them useful for cloning DNA and could provide a way to deliver gene therapy.

Benjamin Franklin 300

Benjamin Franklin portrait

Benjamin Franklin was born 300 years ago today. In his life he took on many rolls: scientist, politician, businessman, publisher, author and diplomat. He was one of only two to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

Scientist, Diplomat And Wit: Franklin’s Birth Merits a Toast by Hillel Italie, Washington Post:

Herschbach, a Harvard University professor who has lectured frequently on Franklin, says: “Franklin’s scientific curiosity extended far beyond his adventures with electricity. He made important discoveries and observations concerning the motion of storms, heat conduction, the path of the Gulf Stream, bioluminescence, the spreading of oil films, and also advanced prescient ideas about conservation of matter and the wave nature of light.”

A look at what made Franklin tick by Polly Ross Hughes, Houston Chronicle:

Franklin actually benefited from having so little formal schooling. He had to educate himself. For precisely this reason, he didn’t know what he didn’t have to know, so he assumed he needed to know everything. He was incessantly curious. He simply wanted to know how the world works. He was formulating questions in his own mind about natural phenomena like lightning, like waves in the ocean or the Gulf Stream. I don’t know if most people know that Franklin was responsible for the lightning rod. Franklin’s bifocals have made life a lot easier for all sorts of people of middle age and older.

Benjamin Franklin and Lightning Rods by E. Philip Krider, Physics Today:

Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Benjamin Franklin was truly an amazing individual.

Building Nanotechnological Structures

New Nanotechnological Structures Reported for the First Time by Alex Lyda, Columbia News:

“You can think of nanocrystals as building blocks like the toy Lego, in which a larger structure can be assembled by locking in the pieces according to their shape and the way they prefer to join to each other,” O’Brien says. “Except all of this is on an incredibly small lengthscale — billionths of a meter.”

The Columbia/IBM team has borrowed ideas from the natural world, in which the right conditions can stimulate the slow growth of highly uniform structures out of miniature building blocks. Opals are an example of this phenomenon: opals consist of tiny spherical building blocks of silica packed into an ordered structure. In this new research, the materials used as building blocks are a variety of man-made nanocrystals with known useful magnetic or electronic properties.

“This work may lead to the development of an entirely new class of multifunctional materials in which there are cooperative interactions between the nanocrystal components,” says MRSEC director Irving P. Herman, also a professor of applied physics. “Moreover, the properties of these nanocrystals can be tailored during synthesis, and they can be deposited to form the desired ordered array by controlling particle charge and other properties. O’Brien’s study also demonstrates the value of vibrant collaborations between universities and industry.”

Video: Magnetic and Semiconducting Nanocrystals Can Self-Assemble, Says Stephen O’Brien, Columbia University

Intel Science Talent Search Semifinalists

Intel Science Talent Search Semifinalists Named

300 teens have been named semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS). The Intel STS is America’s oldest, most highly regarded pre-college science competition and heir to more than six decades of science excellence. View a list of the semifinalists.

The Intel Foundation will award $1,000 to each semifinalist with a matching amount going to their schools. Intel implemented the school award in 2000 and since then has contributed more than $2 million to help improve math and science in U.S. high schools.

Over the past 65 years, STS alumni have received more than 100 of the world’s most coveted science and math honors including six Nobel Prizes, three National Medals of Science, 10 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, and two Fields Medals.

This year’s semifinalists were selected from 1,558 entrants representing 486 high schools in 44 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and an overseas school. Their research projects cover all disciplines of science including biochemistry, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, behavioral science and medicine and health. Students range in age from 15 to 18 with females representing 53 percent of the total entrants.

More than 100 top scientists from a variety of disciplines review and judge all Intel STS entries and examine each individual’s research ability, scientific originality and creative thinking. From these 300 semifinalists, 40 finalists will be announced on Jan. 25. These students will take an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the Intel Science Talent Institute. There they will participate in final judging and compete for college scholarships totaling more than $500,000. Winners will be selected based on rigorous judging sessions and announced at a black-tie banquet on March 14.

Science Service is the nonprofit organization which has administered the Science Talent Search since its inception in 1942. The mission of Science Service is to advance the understanding and appreciation of science. In addition to its education programs, Science Service publishes the weekly magazine Science News.