Save the Microbes, Save the World

The panel starts speaking at about minute 14. The technical presentation of the video could be better (likely will be as we develop good, easy ways to capture speaking events for web delivery) but their is some interesting content.

Broken Window Theory Bolstered with Experiments

The broken window theory is that as the visible deterioration of an area (broken windows, graffiti, lettering…) takes place, crime will increase. And that this starts a cycle of decline for the area feeds upon itself (a negatively reinforcing loop in system thinking parlance). The theory was put forth in an article in The Atlantic in 1982 by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson.

Criminology Can the can, The Economist

Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen deliberately created such settings as a part of a series of experiments designed to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change the way people behave.
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The most dramatic result, though, was the one that showed a doubling in the number of people who were prepared to steal in a condition of disorder. In this case an envelope with a â‚¬5 ($6) note inside (and the note clearly visible through the address window) was left sticking out of a post box. In a condition of order, 13% of those passing took the envelope (instead of leaving it or pushing it into the box). But if the post box was covered in graffiti, 27% did. Even if the post box had no graffiti on it, but the area around it was littered with paper, orange peel, cigarette butts and empty cans, 25% still took the envelope.

The researchers’ conclusion is that one example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing. Dr Kelling was right. The message for policymakers and police officers is that clearing up graffiti or littering promptly could help fight the spread of crime.

Demystifying the Memristor

Demystifying the memristor

The memristor — short for memory resistor – could make it possible to develop far more energy-efficient computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there’s no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. It may even be possible to create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain.
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By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, the team makes possible for engineers to develop integrated circuit designs that take advantage of its ability to retain information.

“This opens up a whole new door in thinking about how chips could be designed and operated,” Williams says.

Engineers could, for example, develop a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (D-RAM). Computers using conventional D-RAM lack the ability to retain information once they are turned off. When power is restored to a D-RAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming “boot-up” process is necessary to retrieve data stored on a magnetic disk required to run the system.

National Girls Collaborative Project for STEM

The National Girls Collaborative Project for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) collaborates with those seeking to increase the participation of girls in STEM feeder activities. The goal is to encourage girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Collaboration as a Means to Building Capacity: Results and Future Directions of the National Girls Collaborative Project:

The purpose of the NGCP is to extend the capacity, impact, and sustainability of
existing and evolving girl-serving STEM projects and programs. The NGCP is structured to bring organizations together to compare needs and resources, to share information, and to plan strategically to expand STEM–related opportunities for girls.
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Although we are still refining it, the NGCP collaborative model has shown its effectiveness through increased collaboration and minigrant projects with sustained results. As we have described, the success to date of the NGCP in developing collaborations has been demonstrated via data from the collaboration rubric, mini-grant reports, and metrics that show how collaborative activities have increased over the duration of the NGCP projects. As NGCP expands over the next few years to provide regional collaboratives across the entire United States and Puerto Rico, we will continue our assessment of its impact and hope to be able to report its influence on building capacity to attract and retain girls in STEM.

I support programs encouraging STEM activities for girls – and boys. NSF data shows for 2005 shows women outnumbered men in undergraduate degree in science and engineering. For post-graduate degrees men still outnumbering women but that gap has been reducing and seems like it will continue to. And the representations in the workplace seem poised to continue to show a reducing number of men and increasing number of women. Engineering is an example of an area with far more men than women graduating – the imbalance is equivalent to the imbalance the other way for psychology.

Single-Celled Giant Provides New Early-Evolution Perspective

Discovery of Giant Roaming Deep Sea Protist Provides New Perspective on Animal Evolution
Biologist Mikhail “Misha” Matz and his colleagues recently discovered the grape-sized protists and their complex tracks on the ocean floor near the Bahamas. DNA analysis confirmed that the giant protist found by Matz and his colleagues in the Bahamas is Gromia sphaerica, a species previously known only from the Arabian Sea.

Matz says the protists probably move by sending leg-like extensions, called pseudopodia, out of their cells in all directions. The pseudopodia then grab onto mud in one direction and the organism rolls that way, leaving a track. Hr says the giant protists’ bubble-like body design is probably one of the planet’s oldest macroscopic body designs, which may have existed for 1.8 billion years.

“I personally think now that the whole Precambrian may have been exclusively the reign of protists,” says Matz. “Our observations open up this possible way of interpreting the Precambrian fossil record.”

He says the appearance of all the animal body plans during the Cambrian explosion might not just be an artifact of the fossil record. There are likely other mechanisms that explain the burst-like origin of diverse multicellular life forms.

Single-Celled Giant Upends Early Evolution

Slowly rolling across the ocean floor, a humble single-celled creature is poised to revolutionize our understanding of how complex life evolved on Earth.

A distant relative of microscopic amoebas, the grape-sized Gromia sphaerica was discovered once before, lying motionless at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. But when Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and a group of researchers stumbled across a group of G. sphaerica off the coast of the Bahamas, the creatures were leaving trails behind them up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) long in the mud.

The trouble is, single-celled critters aren’t supposed to be able to leave trails. The oldest fossils of animal trails, called ‘trace fossils’, date to around 580 million years ago, and paleontologists always figured they must have been made by multicellular animals with complex, symmetrical bodies.

Friday Fun: Penguin Evades Orcas

A penguin takes sanctuary on a boat while killer whales circle.

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card has just been published. It is the ninth book in the Ender Wiggen series that began with Ender’s Game (Hugo and Nebula book award winner). I love the Ender series and have a table showing the sequence of the books. The books have not been published in the order of events in the fictional world. Ender in Exile is directly follows Ender’s Game (which makes it 3rd in story order – since Ender’s Shadow took place concurrently with Ender’s Game).

You can listen to Orson Scott Card read from Ender in Exile.

I include this post because I enjoyed the book. It doesn’t really have much to do with science or engineering but here is a quote from the book (page 106): “Besides, that’s what science was – the sharing of information the pooling of knowledge. That’s my gene pool, Afriama, he thought. The meme pool, the collective knowledge of science. What I discover here, what I learn, the problems I solve – those will be my children.”

Enjoy the book, and if you have not read Ender’s Game I highly recommend it. You can read the original Ender’s Game short story online. And if you haven’t read The Investment Counselor (about Jane, Ender’s computer companion) it is excellent (included in First Meetings in Ender’s Universe)

DoE: Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program

The United States Department of Education’s Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program (MSEIP) provides funds to schools to provide awards to students. 20 new awards (average value of $139,000) were awarded this year. That brings total funding this year to 71 awards (50 continue from previous years). Institutions recieving funds include: Clark Atlanta University, Rust College, New Mexico State University, Spelman College, Virginia State University and the College of Menominee Nation.

The program is designed to effect long-range improvement in science at predominantly minority and engineering education programs to increase the participation of underrepresented ethnic minorities, particularly minority women, into scientific and technological careers.

Wiley College, one of the new recipients, aims to increase the number of science majors, especially in the fields of biology and chemistry. A key feature of this grant is the creation of a high school science competition that will allow local and regional high school students to visit the campus and compete in a variety of scientific events.

This event will bring five area high schools together to compete in ten scientific events based on biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics. Individual first-place winners will be given scholarships to Wiley College. There will also be an overall grand champion awarded. This event will allow high school students to experience life at Wiley College and the possibilities of a career in science.

“This event not only gives students a financial reason to enroll at Wiley, but also allows them to become familiar with the campus and its faculty and students, said Dr. Shumate. “This grant also furthers a connection between Wiley and both the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Arkansas, allowing current Wiley students to attend these schools in the summer for biomedical research.”

Wiley hosts HS science competition Saturday

Looking for Signs of Dark Matter Over Antarctica

Dark Matter Proof Found Over Antarctica?

High-energy electrons captured over Antarctica could reveal the presence of a nearby but mysterious astrophysical object that’s bombarding Earth with cosmic rays, researchers say. Or the electrons may be the long-awaited physical evidence of elusive dark matter.

Either way, the unusual particles are exciting for astrophysicists, who say they could someday confirm or deny decades of unproven theories. “In the first case, we have now seen for the first time a nearby source of cosmic rays.
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Cosmic rays are not beams per se but are any protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles that careen toward Earth from a variety of sources, including the supernova explosions that mark the deaths of stars.

Most of the cosmic electrons that reach Earth are low-energy, because the highest-energy ones fizzle the fastest and don’t last long enough to get here.

Wednesday Fun: Dancing Robot Hexapod

Dancing Robot Hexapod

Created by students from the Upper Austria University of Applied Science for the Hexapod Robot competition that happens yearly, this dancing robot strutted its six legs, costumed with hat, sunglasses and Ali-G looking goat tee and used its metal joints to prove it has got rhythm. It is no wonder it is the winner, for it is highly entertaining!