Category Archives: Science

$60 Million for Science Teaching at Liberal Arts Colleges

HHMI Awards $60 Million to Invigorate Science Teaching at Liberal Arts Colleges

A year ago, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute issued a challenge to 224 undergraduate colleges nationwide: identify creative new ways to engage your students in the biological sciences.

Now 48 of the nation’s best undergraduate institutions will receive $60 million to help them usher in a new era of science education. This includes the largest number of new grantees in more than a decade; more than a quarter have never received an HHMI grant before.

Colleges in 21 states and Puerto Rico will receive $700,000 to $1.6 million over the next four years to revitalize their life sciences undergraduate instruction. HHMI has challenged colleges to create more engaging science classes, bring real-world research experiences to students, and increase the diversity of students who study science.
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Creating interdisciplinary science classes and incorporating more mathematics into the biology curriculum were among the major themes proposed by the schools. Many schools will also allow more students to experience research through classroom-based courses and summer laboratory programs.
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HHMI is the nation’s largest private supporter of science education. It has invested more than $1.2 billion in grants to reinvigorate life science education at both research universities and liberal arts colleges and to engage the nation’s leading scientists in teaching. In 2007, it launched the Science Education Alliance, which will serve as a national resource for the development and distribution of innovative science education materials and methods.

Viruses Eating Bacteria

All the World’s a Phage by John Travis:

“Believe it or not, nobody had looked before,” says Suttle. “On average, there are 50 million viruses per milliliter in seawater. The question is, What the heck they’re doing there?” Microbiologists then documented similar, and even higher, concentrations of phages in soil samples. This led to estimates of 10³¹ bacteriophages worldwide, a staggeringly large number that many scientists initially dismissed. “We can’t wrap our brains around it,” says Pedulla. “If phages were the size of a beetle, they would cover the Earth and be many miles deep.”
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According to estimates put forth by Suttle, phages destroy up to 40 percent of the bacteria in Earth’s oceans each day.
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The students collected soil from barnyards, gardens, and even the monkey pit at the Bronx Zoo. The scientists then taught the students how to isolate a bacteriophage from the soil by growing the viruses in Mycobacterium smegmatis, a harmless bacterial relative of the microbe that causes tuberculosis. “We guarantee them that the bacteriophage they find will never have been discovered before. We know that because the diversity is so high, and we’ve never isolated the same bacteriophage twice,” says Hatfull.

In the April 18 Cell, Hatfull and his professional and teenage collaborators describe the genomes of 10 soil-dwelling bacteriophages that they had isolated. Of the more than 1,600 genes that the team identified, about half are novel, that is, they don’t match any previously described genes in any other organism.

Science is full of amazing new frontiers. Some other amazing stuff: Thinking Slime Moulds – Tracking the Ecosystem Within Us – Retroviruses – Energy Efficiency of Digestion – One Species’ DNA Discovered Inside Another’s

Wabash Valley, Illinois Earthquakes

USGS on the recent earthquakes occurred in the Wabash Valley Seismic

These earthquakes occurred in the Wabash Valley Seismic zone. The earthquakes in this zone are scattered over a large area of southeastern Illinois and southwest Indiana. The zone had at least eight prehistoric earthquakes over the past 20,000 years with estimated magnitudes ranging from about 6.5 to 7.5, based on geologic evidence. Earthquakes of the size of the recent quake (Mw 5.2) can produce smaller aftershocks over the following days. A few might be large enough to be felt. Typically, earthquakes of this size (Mw 5.2) can cause light damage within a few tens of miles from the epicenter. Central and eastern US earthquakes generally shake areas about 10 times as large as those that occur in California. It is not surprising that this earthquake was felt as far south as Florida.

The Wabash Valley Seismic zone is adjacent to the more seismically active New Madrid seismic zone on the seismic zone’s north and west. The recent earthquake is also within the Illinois basin – Ozark dome region that covers parts of Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas and stretches from Indianapolis and St. Louis to Memphis. Moderately frequent earthquakes occur at irregular intervals throughout the region. The largest historical earthquake in the Illinois Basin region (magnitude 5.4) damaged southern Illinois in 1968. Moderately damaging earthquakes strike somewhere in the region each decade or two, and smaller earthquakes are felt about once or twice a year.

Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S., although less frequent than in the western U.S., are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast.

Medical Study Integrity (or Lack Thereof)

Merck wrote drug studies for doctors

The drug maker Merck drafted dozens of research studies for a best-selling drug, then lined up prestigious doctors to put their names on the reports before publication, according to an article to be published Wednesday in a leading medical journal.

The article, based on documents unearthed in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx, provides a rare, detailed look in the industry practice of ghostwriting medical research studies that are then published in academic journals.
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“It almost calls into question all legitimate research that’s been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician,” said Ross, whose article, written with colleagues, was published Wednesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and posted Tuesday on the journal’s Web site.

Merck acknowledged Tuesday that it sometimes hired outside medical writers to draft research reports before handing them over to the doctors whose names eventually appear on the publication. But the company disputed the article’s conclusion that the authors do little of the actual research or analysis.

It is sad that the integrity of journals and scientists is so weak that they leave them open to such charges. The significant presence of the corrupting influence of too much money leaves doubt in my mind that the best science is the goal. Which is very sad. In, Funding Medical Research, I discussed my concern that universities are acting more like profit motivated organizations than science motivated organizations. I am in favor of profit motivated organization (those getting the micro-financing in this link, for example) but those organization should not be trusted to provide honest and balanced opinions they should be expected to provide biased opinions.

If universities (and scientists branding themselves as … at X university) want to be seen as honest brokers of science they can’t behave as though raising money, getting patents… are their main objectives. Many want to be able to get the money and retain the sense of an organization focused on the pursuit of science above all else. Sorry, you can’t have it both ways. You can, and probably should, try stake out some ground in the middle. And for me right now, partially because they fail to acknowledge the extent to which money seems to drive decisions I don’t believe they are trying to be open and honest, instead I get the impression they are leaning more toward trying to market and sell.
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The Last Lecture Book

We wrote about this last August: CMU Professor Gives His Last Lesson on Life. If you haven’t seen the lecture I encourage you to do so now. Now there is a book by Dr. Randy Pausch called The Last Lecture where he expands on his lecture with “many more stories from my life and the attendant lessons I hope my kids can take from them.”

Like any teacher, my students are my biggest professional legacy. I’d like to think that the people I’ve crossed paths with have learned something from me, and I know I learned a great deal from them, for which I am very grateful. Certainly, I’ve dedicated a lot of my teaching to helping young folks realize how they need to be able to work with other people–especially other people who are very different from themselves.

Is Computer Science a Science?

Is computer science a science?

Most people seem to apply a certain litmus test of sorts to determine if something is a science. Something is a science if

(1) it uses the scientific method (i.e., empirical research and observation)
(2) it involves studying “fundamental principles” of the natural or physical world

(1) is, I think, a bit easier to address. I use the scientific method all the time in my work: I form hypotheses about how a particular system or algorithm should behave, develop experiments to test the hypothesis, gather data, analyze, etc. Several commenters to the first post in the series discuss the same thing. Joe, for instance, says this about his work: “One of the things I’ve noticed as a developer/engineer for the last 20 years is that I use the techniques of science all the time, only I’m not studying “nature” (be it the physics world, chemicals, biology, or people). I’m applying the disciplines and the scientific process to stuff that other people have done.” (I’ll get back to this point in a minute.)

Bikini Atoll 50 Years Later

Nuked coral reef bounces back

Three islands of Bikini Atoll were vapourised by the Bravo hydrogen bomb in 1954, which shook islands 200 kilometres away. Instead of finding a bare underwater moonscape, ecologists who have dived it have given the 2-kilometre-wide crater a clean bill of health.

“It was fascinating – I’ve never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands,” says Zoe Richards of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia. Richards and colleagues report a thriving ecosystem of 183 species of coral, some of which were 8 metres high. They estimate that the diversity of species represents about 65% of what was present before the atomic tests. The ecologists think the nearby Rongelap Atoll is seeding the Bikini Atoll, and the lack of human disturbance is helping its recovery.
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“When I put the Geiger counter near a coconut, which accumulates radioactive material from the soil, it went berserk,” says Beger.

Scientists Witness the Birth of a Brain Cell

The Birth of a Brain Cell: Scientists Witness Neurogenesis

For the first time, researchers have developed a way to view stem cells in the brains of living animals, including humans—a finding that allows scientists to follow the process neurogenesis (the birth of neurons). The discovery comes just months after scientists confirmed that such cells are generated in adult as well as developing brains.
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The key ingredient in this process is a substance unique to immature cells that is neither found in mature neurons nor in glia, the brain’s nonneuronal support cells. Maletic-Savatic and her colleagues collected samples of each of the three cell types from rat brains (stem cells from embryonic animals, the others from adults) and cultured the varieties separately in the lab. They were able to determine the chemical makeup of each variety – and isolate the compound unique to stem cells – with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. (NMR helps to determine a molecule’s structure by measuring the magnetic properties of its subatomic particles.) Although the NMR could identify the biomarker, but not its makeup, Maletic-Savatic speculates it is a blend of fatty acids in a lipid (fat) or lipid protein.

Vega Science Lectures: Feynman and More

Vega Science Lectures

Vega is building a collection of classic lectures by eminent scientists, both from its own source material and donations from universities and other independent groups such as the Feynman family.
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A set of four priceless archival recordings from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) of the outstanding Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman – arguably the greatest science lecturer ever. Although the recording is of modest technical quality the exceptional personal style and unique delivery shine through.

Great content. Enjoy.

‘Refrigerator’ Without Electricity

photo of pot in pot

2000 Rolex award to Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria for the Pot in Pot Cooling System:

Ingenious technique that requires no external energy supply to preserve fruit, vegetables and other perishables in hot, arid climates. The pot-in-pot cooling system, a kind of “desert refrigerator”, helps subsistence farmers by reducing food spoilage and waste and thus increasing their income and limiting the health hazards of decaying foods. Abba says he developed the pot-in-pot “to help the rural poor in a cost-effective, participatory and sustainable way”.

The pot-in-pot consists of two earthenware pots of different diameters, one placed inside the other. The space between the two pots is filled with wet sand that is kept constantly moist, thereby keeping both pots damp. Fruit, vegetables and other items such as soft drinks are put in the smaller inner pot, which is covered with a damp cloth. The phenomenon that occurs is based on a simple principle of physics: the water contained in the sand between the two pots evaporates towards the outer surface of the larger pot where the drier outside air is circulating. By virtue of the laws of thermodynamics, the evaporation process automatically causes a drop in temperature of several degrees, cooling the inner container, destroying harmful micro-organisms and preserving the perishable foods inside.

He also received the 2001 Shell Award for Sustainable Development. Great stuff:

Born in 1964 into a family of pot makers and raised in the rural north, Mohammed Bah Abba was familiar from an early age with the various practical and symbolic uses of traditional clay pots, and learned as a child the rudiments of pottery. Subsequently studying biology, chemistry and geology at school, he unravelled the technical puzzle that led him years later to develop the “pot-in-pot preservation/cooling system”.