Category Archives: Science

Electric Cars

The March NSF Cafe Scientifique meeting was about Electric Cars. The presenters were from the Electric Vehicle Association of DC (that site has quite a few links on this topic). In the talk the presenters mentioned Ford had produced electric cars in the 1920’s. PBS on Timeline on Electric Car History:

1893 – A handful of different makes and models of electric cars are exhibited in Chicago.
1897 – The first electric taxis hit the streets of New York City early in the year. The Pope Manufacturing Company of Connecticut becomes the first large-scale American electric automobile manufacturer.
1899 – Believing that electricity will run autos in the future, Thomas Alva Edison begins his mission to create a long-lasting, powerful battery for commercial automobiles. Though his research yields some improvements to the alkaline battery, he ultimately abandons his quest a decade later.
1900 – The electric automobile is in its heyday. Of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States 28 percent are powered by electricity, and electric autos represent about one-third of all cars found on the roads of New York City, Boston, and Chicago.

1893 was the famous Chicago World’s fair where the first Ferris Wheel was constructed and the American Society for Engineering Education was formed (I work for ASEE now). Photo by John Hunter shows a partial view of the meeting space, which is held inside the NSF headquarters.

When Galaxies Collide

When Galaxies Collide by Kathleen M. Wong:

When two galaxies collide, what transpires is very different from, say, one billiard ball smacking into another. Instead of ricocheting away in opposite directions, galaxies are much more likely to meld together. After all, Ma points out, “Galaxies are mostly empty, so the stars and dark matter mostly just pass each other by. The chances of two stars hitting each other is tiny.” In fact, only one percent of the masses of these galaxies consists of matter we can see, such as stars and gases. The rest consists of dark matter-material we can’t see but astronomers have inferred from many observations must exist.

Actual galaxy mergers are hard to find and even harder to view. So Ma is doing the next best thing – simulating galaxy collisions using computer models. This way, she can specify the types of mergers she wants to analyze head-ons versus glancing blows; galaxies of different masses and shapes; even the occasional threesome – and analyze their fates with mathematical precision.

Engineering a Better Blood Alcohol Sensor

Scott McCain - Duke Student

Scott McCain Aims for Better Blood Alcohol Sensor:

If third-year engineering graduate student Scott McCain gets his way, the fight against drunk driving may soon be waged with a new, non-invasive blood alcohol sensor that could make standard blood or breath sample tests obsolete. The St. Louis native’s interdisciplinary research – a combination of engineering, physics and computer science – aims to build a small and inexpensive optical device capable of using harmless light to pass through skin and directly determine blood alcohol concentration.

“The device uses light at wavelengths at which skin essentially becomes transparent,” McCain said. “We shine a laser through tissue where it interacts with blood. By analyzing the scattered light that comes back out, we can determine much about the blood’s chemical content.”
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Similar devices hold promise for determining other constituents of blood. For example, they could measure cholesterol or blood sugar in a matter of minutes, McCain said. Ultimately, the goal is to have a sensor that could report a medical reading in less than 10 seconds.
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“We don’t yet know if our blood alcohol sensor will really work,” said McCain. “It wouldn’t be research if we knew what it was all about.”

Science and Engineering Internships

Externs.com is another curious cat web site: an internship directory. It is getting late to try and find an internship for the summer but if you are still looking you can find science internships and engineering internships via that site.

The list of companies includes: Google, Intel, NASA, Dell, NIST, Scripps Research Institute, US Navy, National Cancer Institute, Microsoft and the International Crane Foundation. If you have any internship positions you would like included you may suggest an addition.

NSF Cafe Scientifique: Arlington, Virgina

Cafe Scientifique NSF. Where: The Front Page, 4201 Wilson Blvd, Arlington, Virginia (Ballston Metro stop). 6:30PM-8:00PM presentation, followed by Q&A: The “Shocking” Science Behind Electric Cars:

Science makes many things possible, including alternative fuels and modes of personal transportation… Goldstein and Garlow are the President and VP of the DC area Electric Vehicle Association. They will discuss the science behind electric cars, such as fuel cells and battery technology, and some of the issues surrounding their use and acceptance. And, they will bring actual cars to touch and explore, including the MIT entry into the 1994 Tour de Sol, an electric car that is solar-powered, and an all-electric Toyota RAV4.
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Cafe Scientifique flourished first in the U.K. as a way for the public and scientists to mingle and discuss science issues in an informal setting. At least 35 cafÃ©s now exist in the U.S.

I hope to make it this month.

Engineering Activities: for 9-12 Year Olds

Design Squad Activity page:

Unleash your kids’ ingenuity and get them thinking like engineers with these 10 DESIGN SQUAD challenges. Designed for 9-12 year olds, each challenge has step-by-step instructions and age-appropriate explanations of the main idea.

Basic Concepts: List of Posts

Basic Concepts in Science: A list collects posts on basic science concepts. This is a great collection of posts, including:

Force, Energy and Fields
Genes and Prions
Correlation, Algorithm and Sets

Take some time to look through this interesting, educational and growing list of concepts explained by science bloggers.

Related: Science and Engineering Blogs

European Innovation Scoreboard

European Innovation Scoreboard (pdf)

The US and Japan are still ahead of the EU25 in terms of innovation performance, but the innovation gap between the EU25 and Japan, and in particular with the US is decreasing (see Figure II). The EU25 has improved its relative performance compared to the US in S&E graduates, tertiary education, business R&D, early-stage venture capital, medium-high and high-tech manufacturing employment, EPO patents, USPTO patents and community trademarks. The EU has improved its relative performance compared to Japan mostly in S&E graduates and broadband penetration rate.
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Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Japan and Germany are the innovation leaders, with SII scores well above that of the EU25 and the other countries…
The US, UK, Iceland, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Ireland are the innovation followers, with SII scores below those of the innovation leaders but above that of the EU25 and the other countries.

NSF Summer Institute on Nano Mechanics and Materials

NSF Summer Institute on Nano Mechanics and Materials is offering short courses this summer, one at Northwestern and one at UCLA. NSF fellowships are available to professors, high-school science teachers, post-docs and Ph.D. candidates from US universities. The fellowship consists of full tuition plus a travel allowance, if applicable. Apply by April 1, 2007. I really like that the NSF provides funds to help people attend this type of thing.

The objectives of the NSF Summer Institute on Nano Mechanics and Materials are:

* To identify and promote important areas of nanotechnology, and to create new areas o focus which will augment current nanotechnology research and development by universities, industries and government.
* To train future and practicing engineers, scientists and educators in the emerging areas of nanotechnology, nano-mechanics, and nano-materials.
* To exchange new ideas, disseminate knowledge and provide valuable networking opportunities for researchers and leaders in the field.

The short courses offered by the Institute provide fundamentals and recent new developments in selected areas of nanotechnology. The material is presented at a level accessible to BS graduates of science and engineering programs. Emphasis is on techniques and theory recently developed that are not available in texts or standard university courses.

How to Deal with False Research Findings

The Science of Getting It Wrong: How to Deal with False Research Findings by JR Minkel adds to our recent spate of posts on drawing faulty conclutions from data (such as: Correlation is Not Causation, Cancer Deaths – Declining Trend?, Seeing Patterns Where None Exists, Karl Popper Webcast).

In his widely read 2005 PLoS Medicine paper, Ioannidis, a clinical and molecular epidemiologist, attempted to explain why medical researchers must frequently repeal past claims. In the past few years alone, researchers have had to backtrack on the health benefits of low-fat, high-fiber diets and the value and safety of hormone replacement therapy as well as the arthritis drug Vioxx, which was pulled from the market after being found to cause heart attacks and strokes in high-risk patients.

Using simple statistics, without data about published research, Ioannidis argued that the results of large, randomized clinical trials—the gold standard of human research—were likely to be wrong 15 percent of the time and smaller, less rigorous studies are likely to fare even worse.

Among the most likely reasons for mistakes, he says: a lack of coordination by researchers and biases such as tending to only publish results that mesh with what they expected or hoped to find. Interestingly, Ioannidis predicted that more researchers in the field are not necessarily better—especially if they are overly competitive and furtive, like the fractured U.S. intelligence community, which failed to share information that might have prevented the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But Ioannidis left out one twist: The odds that a finding is correct increase every time new research replicates the same result, according to a study published in the current PLoS Medicine.