Category Archives: Science

Shaw Laureates 2007

Image of the Shaw Prize Medal

The Shaw Prize awards $1 million in each of 3 areas: Astronomy, Life Science and Medicine, and Mathematical Sciences. The award was created in 2004 by Run Run Shaw who was born in China and made his money in the movie industry. According to wikipedia he has “donated billions of dollars to charity, schools and hospitals.” The prize is administered in Hong Kong and awards those “who have achieved significant breakthrough in academic and scientific research or application and whose work has resulted in a positive and profound impact on mankind.”

2007 Laureates:
Astronomy: Professor Peter Goldreich of the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Lee A. DuBridge Professor of Astrophysics and Planetary Physics at the California Institute of Technology, USA, in recognition of his lifetime achievements in theoretical astrophysics and planetary sciences.

Life Science and Medicine: Professor Robert Lefkowitz, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and a Professor of Biochemistry at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, USA, for his relentless elucidation of the major receptor system that mediates the response of cells and organs to drugs and hormones.

Mathematical Sciences: Professor Robert Langlands of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Professor Richard Taylor, Herchel Smith Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, USA, for initiating and developing a grand unifying vision of mathematics that connects prime numbers with symmetry.

Goldwater Science Scholarships

I have mentioned previously, I work for ASEE (the curious cat blog is not associated with ASEE). At ASEE, we have started a science and engineering fellowship blog. The latest post covers the Goldwater Science Scholarships – for undergraduate students in science and math. Approximately 300 are awarded each year.

For 2007, 28 mathematics majors, 223 science and related majors, 54 engineering majors, and 12 computer science majors received awards (many of the Scholars have dual majors in a variety of mathematics, science, engineering, and computer disciplines). The one and two year scholarships will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established by Public Law 99-661 on November 14, 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry M. Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. Applications will be available starting in September for next year. Schools nominate up to 4 students for the scholarship, see the web site for details on the application process.

Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration

Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs is part 2 of a study by Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and UC Berkeley. Some interesting points from the study:

52 percent of immigrant founders initially came to the United States primarily for higher education, 40 percent entered the country because of a job opportunity, 6 percent came for family reasons, and only 2 percent to start a business.
91 percent of Indian founders, 35 percent of Chinese and 97 percent of Taiwanese founders completed their undergraduate degrees in their home country
Indian and Chinese founders graduated from a diverse set of schools in their native countries, many of which are considered
second- or third-tier universities (only 15 percent of Indian founders were graduates of the IIT).
Immigrant founders of technology and engineering firms have strong backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. 75 percent had completed their highest degree in a STEM field.
Advanced education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is correlated with high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation. The U.S. economy depends upon these high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation to maintain its global edge.

High Resolution Darwin Documents

View high resolution scans of Darwin’s notes and review his thoughts and ideas. Speaking of Faith (American Public Media program) has teamed with Cambridge University Library to present a narrated tour of Darwin’s private notebooks and hand sketches with David Kohn.

Very interesting. I am not thrilled with the usability of the web application but the high resolution images are interesting and the narration is informative.

Self Healing Plastic

Plastic That Heals Itself

The first self-healing material was reported by the UIUC [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] researchers six years ago, and other research groups have created different versions of such materials since then, including polymers that mend themselves repeatedly when subject to heat or pressure. But this is the first time anyone has made a material that can repair itself multiple times without any external intervention, says Nancy Sottos, materials-science and engineering professor at UIUC and one of the researchers who led the work.
…
the researchers bend it and crack the polymer coating. The crack spreads down through the coating and reaches the underlying microchannel. This prompts the healing agent to “whip through the channels and into the crack,” Sottos says. There, it comes into contact with the catalyst and, in about 10 hours, becomes a polymer and fills in the crack. The system does not need any external pressure to push the healing agent into the crack. Instead, the liquid moves through the narrow channels just as water moves up a straw.

Life-patents

New Life, New Patent by Carl Zimmer:

ETC is right in suggesting Venter might become “Microbesoft”–controlling operating system for anyone who wants to build an organism from scratch. Other researchers, such as Keasling, are promoting a different way of doing synthetic biology–what they call open source biology. Scientists and their students are amassing an open inventory of parts that anyone can use to design organisms of their own. And it’s open source biology, these researchers argue, that will provide the best protection against any evil uses of synthetic biology. Instead of being hidden behind patents, the information about these parts would be available to everyone, and collectively solutions could be found. As this debate starts to unfold, I think open source biology will keep it from becoming nothing but deja vu.

I support keeping science open. Patents are a tax on society that the government grants inventors for their efforts, in order to benefit society, by encouraging the inventors to innovate. The end is benefiting society. The means is granting a right of the patent holder (a right they do not have without patent law) that will encourage them to make the effort to innovate. I support the proper use of patents, but we have perverted the patent process into something that harms society. The system needs to be fixed. And the whole area of patents on life I find very questionable.

Researchers Create Molecule-Sized Test Tubes

The test tubes are actually bubble-like nanocontainers that are porous to small molecules. Researchers can easily feed needed ions and other chemicals into the ultra-tiny reaction chambers.

Many scientists say that more can be learned about the dynamics of chemical reactions that power biological processes by studying the behavior of individual molecules rather than observing the collective behavior of many molecules, as scientists do now. But techniques for single-molecule studies are limited and often highly specialized. The new nanocontainers, however, will make single-molecule techniques both more accessible and more powerful
…
The researchers say their technique can be easily applied in other laboratories, to enable scientists to study individual molecular reactions free of the complications of analyzing reactions in bulk solution. The new approach also improves on other methods used for observing the behavior of single molecules. One of the most common methods required that single molecules be tethered to a surface. With nanocontainers, however, the vesicles themselves are attached to a surface, meaning the molecules inside do not have to be. This simplifies analysis, because the effects of the surface on the reaction do not have to be taken into account, the researchers said.

To bad I can’t find the article online: I. Cisse, B. Okumus, C. Joo, T. Ha, “Fueling protein-DNA interactions inside porous nanocontainers”, PNAS. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is doing great things: $600 Million for Basic Biomedical Research – $1 Million Each for 20 Science Educators

Reducing the Impact of a Flu Pandemic

Model for tracking flu progression could reduce flu pandemic’s peril – Engineer who survived pandemic of 1968 focuses on reducing influenza’s death toll:

Nearly 40 years ago, MIT Professor Richard Larson spent a week sick in bed with the worst illness he’d ever had–the particularly virulent strain of flu that swept the globe in 1968. “That was the sickest I’d ever been,” Larson recalled. “I really thought that was the end.” It took him two or three months to recover fully from the illness.

Known as the Hong Kong flu, the virus killed 750,000 people worldwide, the second worst influenza pandemic the world has seen since the infamous 1918-1919 epidemic of so-called Spanish flu.
…
The findings strongly suggest that influenza emergency plans should include measures to reduce social contact, such as encouraging people to work from home and avoid large gatherings, Larson said. This is especially important because it generally takes at least six months from the time of an outbreak to develop an effective vaccine.

Tuberculosis Risk

We have posted about the Tuberculosis risks previously: Extensively Drug-resistant Tuberculosis (XDR TB), May 2007 – Deadly TB Strain is Spreading, WHO Warns, Mar 2007 – Tuberculosis Pandemic Threat, Jan 2007 – ‘Virtually untreatable’ TB found, Sep 2006. One USA citizen, while infected with XDR TB, flying to Europe and then to Canada and driving back into the USA has created a huge amount of publicity on this topic in the last week.

The risks are well known, given the extreme mobility in the world today, for TB, and other communicable diseases, becoming more troublesome, costly and deadly – often due to improper antibiotic use. But we continue to avoid giving this risk near the level of attention it seems to deserve. Deaths due to these diseases is likely to be very high in the next 20 years.

In fact there were 1.6 million TB deaths in 2005 (see WHO fact sheet below). Even if you only care about deaths in the USA (I am not advocating such a position, but even for those that hold such a position…) failing to address these issues will greatly increase the odds of large numbers of deaths in the USA (for TB and other diseases that become difficult or impossible to treat with antibiotics).

The current news will do little in my opinion (though it will help raise awareness). It will take a significant number of deaths in the USA, for significant policy changes to be implemented. Luckily scientists and policy makers have been giving these risks thought and so possible actions are already fairly well know. Unfortunately we seem very inclined to ignore problems for those out of sight (either continents away, or in the future) so until the consequences of the current action forces people to confront this issue little has been done (well actually good action is being taken, but much more is left to do).

One huge issue is quarantine. Personally, I try to use as a guide that people have the right to do what doesn’t infringe upon others rights. This allows plenty of room for debate about what level of trade-off is acceptable but I find it a useful guide to shape my thoughts. People don’t have the right to drive drunk and endanger others. People don’t have the right to pollute the air of others by smoking (or polluting the air with dangerous chemicals, CO2…). People don’t have the right to expose others to dangerous communicable diseases. Doctor’s don’t have the right to proscribe antibiotics when not medically justified (creating risks to those in the future)… But how society decides to define the social contract that everyone must agree to (rather that a way I find useful to help me analyze what is reasonable) is in need of some increased clarity in the light of health care issues today.

World Health Organization fact sheet on Tuberculosis:
Continue reading →

BumpZee Science and Engineering Communities

Bumpzee communities provide topic focused blog feeds, tools for blogs and more. I have created communities for science and for engineering. They offer some of the common tools such as highlighting posts community members have voted up (bumped). Blog owners can add there blogs to bumpzee and the communities. Bumpzee offers tools to track blog statistics (others offer similar things, of course, for example: mybloglog, google analytics, feedburner) with interactive features (like showing what Bumpzee members are viewing the blog, most popular posts on your blog, most poplular posts in your community…).