Category Archives: Science

Richard Palmer on Engineering and Innovation

Palmer: d3o is a soft, flexible material that combines properties associated with liquids and enables them in solids. Normally the study of mechanics of materials in solids is entirely different to the study of fluids and what I have done is combine the two. The fluid properties that are incorporated in d3o allow it to be stretchable, soft, to flow and to feel comfortable. But in an impact, that fluid turns into an elastomer and everything locks together to dissipate, spread and absorb the impact.

CNN: Can you go into the applications of that?
Palmer: You can use d3o in sportswear where you want freedom of movement and dexterity but also want some impact absorption. It’s in footwear, headwear, gloves, clothing and boots.

It means people can get on with their sport without being confounded by pieces of bulky, rigid plastic and cumbersome, stiff foams. It’s the difference between Robocop and Spiderman. Robocop is built with protection around him like a shield; d3o is more like Spiderman, where the protection and the athlete are integrated together. It’s a discrete, small and totally unrestricted layer of protection in the areas where you need it that wouldn’t previously have been possible.

CNN: What advice would you give someone who wanted to become an innovator?
Palmer: Open your eyes to both creative and analytical thinking. Scientists aren’t just boffins; creatives aren’t just mad lunatics. There’s a huge opportunity to dovetail the two. And follow something you believe in.

Five Scientists Who Made the Modern World

Interesting post by John Hawks: Five scientists who made the modern world

If you were to make a list of the top five scientists who ever lived, who would you choose? People are asking the question (also, here, here). So far, it hasn’t been all that interesting. All the lists have two or three names in common, and throw in two or three unexpected names for balance…
But once your list includes Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell, and then you throw in Galileo, well there’s not much room for anything else. None at all if you take Darwin as a given.
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So I decided to do something a little different: What five scientists have had the greatest impact on human life?
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1. R. A. Fisher. His work in population genetics laid the foundations for the vast productivity increases of twentieth-century agriculture. He was far from alone in this, but he stood apart from his contemporaries by inventing many of the statistical methods that would come to define scientific hypothesis testing. Without Fisher’s innovations in statistics, large-scale medical research studies would be meaningless. All this after he established the basis for Mendelian inheritance of continuous characters.
2. Louis Pasteur…
3. Leo SzilÃ¡rd…
4. John von Neumann…
5. This one is for you. Who else belongs on this list?

How about Norman Borlaug? Related: 20 Scientists Who Have Helped Shape Our World. I must admit I am biased – I am a big fan of Sir R.A. Fisher (this link has a number of resources with more information on his work). Partially because he did great stuff but also because I am somewhat connected to him. George Box was R.A. Fisher’s student and married Joan Box. My father was George Box’s student and then colleague. So seeing R.A. Fisher ranked #1 feels nice (even if actual ranking makes little sense… but it can be interesting).

YouTube+ for Science from PLoS

SciVee is a new site by the great people at PLoS, with support from NSF and San Diego Supercomputer Center. It is very early in the launch of this effort but it looks very promising.

SciVee allows scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of their published article. Other scientists can freely view uploaded presentations and engage in virtual discussions with the author and other viewers. SciVee also facilitates the creation of communities around specific articles and keywords. Use this medium to meet peers and future collaborators that share your particular research interests.

Of course plenty of great videos are already online but this looks like another great effort at helping improve communication of scientific ideas by the Public Library of Science. And there are advantages to a community lead by scientists that not only posts videos but encourages scientific discussion on the related matters. I am hopeful (and confident) this will become a great resource.

Related: Science and Engineering Webcast Directory – Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Public Lectures – Google Engineering and Technology Webcasts
Originally I posted this to my employers blog: Engineering and…. It turns out it was made public prematurely – SciVee update.

One Species’ Genome Discovered Inside Another’s

Video describing genome inside genome Watch video of Professor Werren describing the genome-in-a-genome at the University of Rochester.

More incredible gene research. Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species. The research, reported in today’s Science, also shows that lateral gene transfer—the movement of genes between unrelated species—may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution.

Such large-scale heritable gene transfers may allow species to acquire new genes and functions extremely quickly, says Jack Werren, a principle investigator of the study. If such genes provide new abilities in species that cause or transmit disease, they could provide new targets for fighting these diseases.

The results also have serious repercussions for genome-sequencing projects. Bacterial DNA is routinely discarded when scientists are assembling invertebrate genomes, yet these genes may very well be part of the organism’s genome, and might even be responsible for functioning traits.

“This study establishes the widespread occurrence and high frequency of a process that we would have dismissed as science fiction until just a few years ago,” says W. Ford Doolittle, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Microbial Genomics at Dalhousie University, who is not connected to the study. “This is stunning evidence for increased frequency of gene transfer.”

Continue reading →

Displaying Data Well

Data is often displayed poorly leaving it difficult to see what is important. By displaying data well the important facts should leap off the page and into the viewers mind. Edward Tufte is an expert on the topic and has published great books. I strongly recommend reading at least one (and if you do I think the odds are good you will read more): Beautiful Evidence, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations.

Smashing magazine has some nice examples of good display techniques in Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. I don’t like all the examples they show but it does provide some help by showing some creative ways to display data.

Mars Rovers Getting Ready for Another Adventure

Mars Rover

Mars rovers begin to stir as dust storms recede

NASA’s twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity are starting to move again after being immobilised for six weeks by severe dust storms. The storms hit in late June, just as Opportunity was poised to enter the 800-metre-wide Victoria crater, which may contain crucial geological records of past conditions on Mars.

Lofting dust high in the atmosphere, the storms blocked precious sunlight needed for the rover solar panels to generate power. Both rovers had to stop driving, and Opportunity was so starved of power that its handlers worried it might freeze to death during the cold Martian night. Now, the storms have finally receded and both rovers are about to start driving towards much-anticipated targets.
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Opportunity is getting about 300 watt-hours of energy per day, more than twice the level it was getting during the worst part of the storms. But it is still not enough to start the descent into the crater, Arvidson says: “We want to make sure if we have some mobility problems that there’s energy to spare to get out of the problem areas.”

These rovers just keep going. From a NASA press release last October: “NASA’s long-lived Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will finish its 1,000th Martian day Thursday, continuing a successful mission originally planned for 90 Martian days.”

Image credit: NASA/JPL Artist’s concept of the Mars Exploration Rover on Mars.High Resolution Image

Science Journal Publishers Stay Stupid

Science publishers get even stupider by Andrew Leonard:

The American Association of Publishers and everyone associated with it should be ashamed of trying to protect their profit margins by slandering the open access movement as government intervention and censorship. Research paid for with government funds should be freely accessible to the general public.

I wish it was amazing that these people have so little grasp of what has been going on in the world the last 5 years (but I must say such failure to adapt seems to be a common trait in too many organizations). Previously I have posted on the importance of continuing the scientific tradition of open debate and open access. In the past there have been distribution complexities that made paid journals an acceptable compromise. That people working at journals don’t see that the internet changes that is going to lead to their rapid irrelevance. They had to figure this out a couple of years ago. Given they still haven’t, I must say that they really don’t seem to have much understanding of science or modern communication methods. Given their industry that is sad. It is time for the scientific community to give up on these journals and start looking to move to work with new organizations that will encourage scientific communication and advancement (PLoS – arXiv.org – Open Access Engineering Journals) and leave those that seek to keep outdated practices to go out of business.

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” Dr. W. Edwards Deming

I do object to scientific knowledge being kept out of the scientific and public community. The ability to use the internet to more effectively communicate new knowledge should not be sacrificed to protect the old model journals had for sustaining themselves. They should find a way to fund themselves and make their material available for free on the internet (I think some delay for free public access would be fine – the shorter the delay the better). Or they should be replaced by others that do so.

Studying Martian Soil for Evidence of Microbial Life

Study: Martian soil may contain life

The search for life on Mars appeared to hit a dead end in 1976 when Viking landers touched down on the red planet and failed to detect biological activity. But Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said on Friday the spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface.

His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin. That is roughly comparable to biomass levels found in some Antarctic permafrost, home to a range of hardy bacteria and lichen. “It is interesting because one part per thousand is not a small amount,” Houtkooper said in a telephone interview.

“We will have to find confirmatory evidence and see what kind of microbes these are and whether they are related to terrestrial microbes. It is a possibility that life has been transported from Earth to Mars or vice versa a long time ago.”

Interesting, certainly far from convincing evidence but still fun speculation. Claim of Martian Life Called ‘Bogus’:

Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, is skeptical of the new claims. “It sounds bogus to me,” Pace told SPACE.com. “I don’t consider the chemical results to be particularly credible in light of the harsh conditions that Mars offers.”

Mining the Moon

Mining the Moon by Mark Williams:

At the 21st century’s start, few would have predicted that by 2007, a second race for the moon would be under way. Yet the signs are that this is now the case. Furthermore, in today’s moon race, unlike the one that took place between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s, a full roster of 21st-century global powers, including China and India, are competing.

Even more surprising is that one reason for much of the interest appears to be plans to mine helium-3–purportedly an ideal fuel for fusion reactors but almost unavailable on Earth–from the moon’s surface
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But a serious critic has charged that in reality, He3-based fusion isn’t even a feasible option. In the August issue of Physics World, theoretical physicist Frank Close, at Oxford in the UK, has published an article called “Fears Over Factoids” in which, among other things, he summarizes some claims of the “helium aficionados,” then dismisses those claims as essentially fantasy.

As I stated in January in Helium-3 Fusion Reactor: “This sounds pretty incredible to me and I find the claims of using fuel from the Moon economically to power our needs on Earth. Still it is interesting and just because it sounds fantastic does not mean it can’t be true. But I am skeptical.”

Textbook Revolution

Textbook Revolution is a resource on free textbooks and free related course materials. In general, I must say the prices of textbooks seem crazy. This is another tool great open access resource.

At Textbook Revolution, you’ll find links to textbooks and select educational resources of all kinds. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable only online as e-books. Most books are aimed at undergraduates, but there are at least a few resources at every level, from kindergarten to post-doc. All of the books are offered for free by their respective copyright holders for online viewing. Beyond that, each book is as individual as the author behind it.

Some examples: The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing by Steven W. Smith; Light and Matter by Benjamin Crowell; A First Course in Linear Algebra by Robert A Beeze; Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide by
Dave Thomas and Introduction to Statistical Thought by Michael Lavine.

While on the subject of textbooks, I will plug my father’s book: Statistics for Experimenters – it is my blog so I get to do what I want 🙂