Category Archives: Science

North American Fish Threatened

Nearly 40 percent of fish species in North America are imperiled, according to a new survey by fish experts, the U. S. Geological Survey, and the American Fisheries Society, up 92 percent from the last survey done in 1989.
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No single cause explains the ongoing fish losses, Taylor and others agree. Habitat loss, invasive species, diseases, dams, and water contaminants all contribute.

“Fish are kind of canaries in the coal mine,” said Howard Jelks of the USGS and lead author of the report, published in Fisheries. “If you change the water to something that’s not able to support these fish, it’s also not going to be as high quality for recreating, for eating the fish out of these streams, for drawing water that’s ultimately used for drinking, or for other things.”

Friday Fun – CERN Version

Enjoy. Ok, you might not want to go download this groups other tracks (if you do there aren’t any, by the way) but it is a fun LHC adventure. By Katherine McAlpine and others at CERN.

Symptom of America’s Decline in Particle Physics

Land Of Big Science

Probing more deeply than ever before into the stuff of the universe requires some big hardware. It also requires the political will to lavish money on a project that has no predictable practical return, other than prestige and leadership in the branch of science that delivered just about every major technology of the past hundred years.

Those advances came, in large measure, from the United States. The coming decades may be different.
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A third of the scientists working at the LHC hail from outside the 20 states that control CERN. America has contributed 1,000 or so researchers, the largest single contingent from any non-CERN nation.
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The U.S. contribution amounts to $500 million—barely 5 percent of the bill. The big bucks have come from the Europeans. Germany is picking up 20 percent of the tab, the British are contributing 17 percent, and the French are giving 14 percent.
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The most worrying prospect is that scientists from other countries, who used to flock to the United States to be where the action is, are now heading to Europe instead.

This is a point I have made before. The economic benefits of investing in science are real. The economic benefits of having science and engineering centers of excellence in your country are real. That doesn’t mean you automatically gain economic benefit but it is a huge advantage and opportunity if you act intelligently to make it pay off.

Best Research University Rankings – 2008

The annual ranking of research Universities are available from Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University. The methodology values publications and faculty awards which provides a better ranking of research (rather than teaching). Results from the 2008 rankings of Top 500 Universities worldwide, country representation of the top schools:

location	Top 100	% of World Population	% of World GDP	% of top 500
USA	54	4.6%	27.2%	31.6%
United Kingdom	11	0.9	4.9	8.3
Germany	6	1.3	6.0	8.0
Japan	4	2.0	9.0	6.2
Canada	4	0.5	2.6	4.2
Sweden	4	0.1	0.8	2.2
France	3	0.8	4.6	4.6
Switzerland	3	0.1	0.8	1.6
Australia	3	0.3	1.6	3.0
Netherlands	2	0.2	1.4	2.4
Denmark	2	0.1	0.6	0.8
Finland	1	0.1	0.4	1.2
Norway	1	0.1	0.7	0.8
Israel	1	0.1	0.3	1.2
Russia	1	2.2	2.0	0.4
China		20.5	6.6	6.0
India		17.0	1.9	0.4

There is little change in most of the data from last year, which I think is a good sign, it wouldn’t make much sense to have radical shifts over a year in these rankings. Japan lost 2 schools in the top 100, France lost 1. Denmark (Aarhus University) and Australia (University of Sydney) gained 1. Last year there was a tie so there were 101 schools in the top 100.

The most dramatic data I noticed is China’s number of top 500 schools went from 14 to 30, which made me a bit skeptical of what caused that quick change. Looking more closely last year they reported the China top 500 totals as (China 14, China-Taiwan 6 and China-Hong Kong 5). That still gives them an impressive gain of 5 schools.

Singapore has 1 in the 102-151 range. Taiwan has 1 ranked in the 152-200 range, as do Mexico, Korea and Brazil. China has 9 in the 201-302 range (including 3 in Hong Kong). India has 2 in the 303-401 range.

University of Wisconsin – Madison is 17th again 🙂 My father taught there while I grew up.
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10 Most Beautiful Physics Experiments

Science’s 10 Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson

Galileo’s experiment on falling objects

In the late 1500’s, everyone knew that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. After all, Aristotle had said so. That an ancient Greek scholar still held such sway was a sign of how far science had declined during the dark ages.

Galileo Galilei, who held a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa, was impudent enough to question the common knowledge. The story has become part of the folklore of science: he is reputed to have dropped two different weights from the town’s Leaning Tower showing that they landed at the same time. His challenges to Aristotle may have cost Galileo his job, but he had demonstrated the importance of taking nature, not human authority, as the final arbiter in matters of science.
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Young’s double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons

Though it is not simply made of particles, neither can it be described purely as a wave. In the first five years of the 20th century, Max Planck and then Albert Einstein showed, respectively, that light is emitted and absorbed in packets — called photons. But other experiments continued to verify that light is also wavelike.

It took quantum theory, developed over the next few decades, to reconcile how both ideas could be true: photons and other subatomic particles — electrons, protons, and so forth — exhibit two complementary qualities; they are, as one physicist put it, ”wavicles.”

Eratosthenes’ measurement of the Earth’s circumference -the librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C. estimated the circumference of the planet

Assuming the earth is spherical, its circumference spans 360 degrees. So if the two cities are seven degrees apart, that would constitute seven-360ths of the full circle — about one-fiftieth. Estimating from travel time that the towns were 5,000 ”stadia” apart, Eratosthenes concluded that the earth must be 50 times that size — 250,000 stadia in girth.

Related: Book, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson (not the same experiments) – Home Experiments: Quantum Erasing – Particles and Waves – theory of knowledge – scientific experiments

Kids on Scientists: Before and After

Fermilab offers some drawing of scientists [updated to archive.org link since the USA government purged this content from their website] by seventh graders before and after a visit to Fermilab. Wonderful visuals.

Before	After

I think of a scientist as very dedicated to his work. He is kind of crazy, talking always quickly. He constantly is getting new ideas. He is always asking questions and can be annoying. He listens to others’ ideas and questions them.	I know scientists are just normal people with a not so normal job. . . . Scientists lead a normal life outside of being a scientist. They are interested in dancing, pottery, jogging and even racquetball. Being a scientist is just another job which can be much more exciting.
by Amy

This is one of the more extreme ones but there are lots of other great comparisons. Very reminiscent of: Children’s view of Scientists in England.

NASA’s Carl Sagan Fellowships

NASA Exoplanet Science Institute announces the introduction of the Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowship

The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute announces the introduction of the Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and solicits applications for fellowships to begin in the fall of 2009.

The Sagan Fellowships support outstanding recent postdoctoral scientists to conduct independent research that is broadly related to the science goals of the NASA Exoplanet Exploration area. The primary goal of missions within this program is to discover and characterize planetary systems and Earth-like planets around nearby stars.

The proposed research may be theoretical, observational, or instrumental. This program is open to applicants of any nationality who have earned (or will have earned) their doctoral degrees on or after January 1, 2006, in astronomy, physics, or related disciplines. The fellowships are tenable at U.S. host institutions of the fellows’ choice, subject to a maximum of one new fellow per host institution per year. The duration of the fellowship is up to three years: an initial one-year appointment and two annual renewals contingent on satisfactory performance and availability of NASA funds.

We anticipate awarding 3 – 4 fellowships in 2009. Please note that these are postdoctoral Fellowships only. Previous Michelson Fellowship holders are fully eligible to apply.

MythBuster: 3 Ways to Fix USA Science Education

MythBuster Adam Savage: 3 Ways to Fix U.S. Science Education

Let students get their hands dirty.
It’s really difficult to absorb things just by being told about them—I know I don’t learn well that way. If students could get their hands dirty in science class they’d be more likely to internalize information. You can lecture about the surface tension of water, but it’s not as effective as conducting an experiment with a needle and a single beam balance. Jamie and I are in touch with a lot of teachers from industrial engineering programs, and one of them told us he thinks our show has helped shift the emphasis from the strictly theoretical to a more hands-on approach.

2. Yes, spend more money on science.
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3. Celebrate mistakes.
A good scientist will tell you that being wrong can be just as interesting as being right. The same holds for our show. We love hearing from fans who challenge our conclusions—especially kids.

Alumni Return to Redesign High School Engineering Classes

Prince George’s County High School Alumni Return to Redesign Classes

Cressman joined nine fellow graduates of the elite science and technology magnet program every day for six weeks to create top-flight engineering courses for high school students. The class at the Greenbelt, Maryland, school will teach the latest in computer programming and drafting with software used by college professors and professional engineers. And since engineering teachers can be hard to find, the curriculum is designed to be taught by a non-expert.
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All freshman in the science and technology magnet program are already required to take two introductory engineering classes, but the curricula for those classes were originally designed in 1976. “There has been some revamping through the years, but we knew we needed a major overhaul. Things have changed so much,” explains Jane Hemelt, coordinator of the science and technology program, which serves about 900 of the school’s 2,700 students. The problem was that there wasn’t an easy way to get the expertise to fix it.

Hemelt talked about the problem with Rocco Mennella, a mathematics professor at Prince George’s Community College and Catholic University who teaches science and math at Roosevelt. For several years, Mennella had been recruiting Roosevelt graduates as tutors for his summer precalculus class, and he told Hemelt that his recruits—who were science, math, and engineering majors—might serve double duty by redesigning the engineering curriculum.

Mennella’s college recruits came from Caltech, MIT, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech, and the University of Maryland, where they have been exposed to some of the best science and engineering teachers in the country. In addition, Cressman contacted about 80 engineering professors at universities and colleges around the country to find out what they would like their incoming students to know; almost 50 responded.
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For example, all agreed that the classes should focus on the practical aspects of engineering, including computer-aided design and computer programming, while exposing the high school students to electrical, civil, and mechanical engineering. But the curriculum designers also wanted their younger peers to have fun while learning, so they put in many hours on computers creating lessons that would challenge students to redesign the Taj Mahal, build an SUV, or guide a robot.
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Eleanor Roosevelt High School will test some of the modules as part of other classes this fall, which will reach 30 students or more, and the team hopes to roll out the other classes full time in coming years. The Prince George’s school district’s other two science magnet schools, Oxon Hill and Charles Flowers, also plan to use the curriculum. But Mennella and Hemelt hope it will spread even wider, including to schools that don’t specialize in science and math. Those schools might just use parts of the curriculum, or spread a semester-long class out over a year. “Who knows, this could become a model for the state and maybe a model for the country,” Hemelt says.

I am looking into how people can see the curricula, and any other material that may be available.

General Biology Berkeley Course Webcast

General Biology Course at University of California – Berkeley, Fall 2007. Instructors John Forte, R Fischer and R Malkin. “General introduction to cell structure and function, molecular and organism genetics, animal development, form and function. Intended for biological sciences majors, but open to all qualified students.” A great service from Berkeley with video and audio… Topics include: Macromolecules structure and function, How cells function-an introduction to cellular metabolism and biological catalysts, Microbes – Viruses, Bacteria, Plasmids, Transposons and Homeostasis: The body’s defenses.