Science and the Excitement, the Mystery and the Awe of a Flower

Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard P. Feynman is a great explanation of how scientists think: “The science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower”

I did post on this before. Related book: Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character.

Pseudogap and Superconductivity

MIT physicists shed light on key superconductivity riddle

Hudson’s team is focusing on the state of matter that exists at temperatures just above the temperature at which materials start to superconduct. This state, known as the pseudogap, is poorly understood, but physicists have long believed that characterizing the pseudogap is important to understanding superconductivity.

In their latest work, published online on July 6 in Nature Physics, they suggest that the pseudogap is not a precursor to superconductivity, as has been theorized, but a competing state. If that is true, it could completely change the way physicists look at superconductivity, said Hudson.

“Now, if you want to explain high-temperature superconductivity and you believe the pseudogap is a precursor, you need to explain both. If it turns out that it is a competing state, you can instead focus more on superconductivity,” he said.

DNA Passed to Descendants Changed by Your Life

How your behaviour can change your children’s DNA

Until recently that would also have been the opinion of most scientists. Genes, it was thought, were highly resilient. Even if people did wreck their own DNA through bad diet, smoking and getting fat, that damage was unlikely to be passed to future generations.

Now, however, those assumptions are being re-examined. At the heart of this revolution is a simple but controversial idea: that DNA can be modified or imprinted with the experiences of your parents and grandparents.

According to this new science, known as epigenetics, your ancestors’ diet, smoking habits, exposure to pollutants and levels of obesity could be affecting you today. In turn, your lifestyle could affect your children and grandchildren.
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If we drink heavily, take drugs, get fat or wait too long to reproduce, then epigenetics might start tying up some of the wrong genes and loosening the bonds on others. Sometimes those changes will affect sperm and egg cells.

It seems to me this area is still far from having conclusive proof. But it is another great example of scientists seeking to improve our knowledge of how things work.

Leopard Bests Crocodile

Leopard savaging a crocodile caught on camera:

A series of incredible pictures taken at a South African game reserve document the first known time that a leopard has taken on and defeated one of the fearsome reptiles. The photographs were taken by Hal Brindley, an American wildlife photographer, who was supposed to be taking pictures of hippos from his car in the Kruger National Park.

The giant cat raced out of cover provided by scrub and bushes to surprise the crocodile, which was swimming nearby. A terrible and bloody struggle ensued. Eventually, onlookers were amazed to see the leopard drag the crocodile from the water as the reptile fought back.

Eventually the big cat was able to sit on top of the reptile and suffocate it. In the past, there have been reports of crocodiles killing leopards, but this is believed to the first time that the reverse scenario has been observed.

Fixing the World on $2 a Day

MIT’s Guru of Low-Tech Engineering Fixes the World on $2 a Day

The charcoal project is the responsibility of Mary Hong, a 19-year-old branching out beyond her aerospace major this semester. She and the other students, coincidentally all women, are enrolled in Smith’s D-Lab, a course that is becoming quietly famous beyond the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. The D is for development, design and dissemination; last fall, more than 100 students applied for about 30 slots. To prepare for their field work, D-Lab students live for a week in Cambridge on $2 per day. (Smith joins in.) Right now, eight more D-Lab teams are plying jungle rivers, hiking goat trails and hailing chicken buses in seven additional countries—Brazil, Honduras, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, India and China. In Smith’s view, even harsh aspects of Third World travel have their benefits. “If you get a good bout of diarrhea from a waterborne disease,” she says, “you really understand what it means to have access to clean drinking water.”
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Despite their simplicity, Smith’s creations made her a minor celebrity at MIT, and in 2000 she became the first woman to win the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. The same year, she began teaching full time at the university. It was nearly 30 years since German economist E.F. Schumacher had published Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, the book credited with launching the appropriate technology movement. Schumacher argued that many of the infrastructure projects funded by the World Bank and other organizations hadn’t improved lives on the village level. “He rightly and aptly pointed out that big solutions don’t fit for villages. You have to make it small,”

Tapping America’s Potential

Another business coalition, Tapping America’s Potential coalition, is encouraging investment an increased investment in science and engineering to strengthen the USA economy.

The economy of the 21st century is characterized by increasing competition around the globe, and nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the scientific fields, said William D. Green, chairman and CEO of Accenture and chairman of Business Roundtable’s Education, Innovation & Workforce Initiative and a member of TAP. America’s ability to innovate begins with the talent, knowledge and creative thinking of its workforce, and businesses and government must continue to work together to strengthen science and technology education.

The report includes progress updates on the TAP coalition’s agenda to advance U.S. competitiveness in STEM through:

Boosting and sustaining funding for basic research, especially in the physical sciences and engineering
Reforming visa and immigration policies to enable the United States to attract and retain STEM students from around the world to study for advanced degrees and stay to work in the United States
Upgrading K–12 math and science teaching to foster higher student achievement, including differentiated pay scales for mathematics and science teachers
Building public understanding and support for making improvement in STEM performance a national priority

Finding the Host Genes Viruses Require

Flu-infected fly cells reveal dependencies of the virus

The new study is important because it demonstrates a rapid-fire technique for identifying host factors such as proteins and carbohydrates that a virus commandeers to successfully infect a cell. By exposing the virus’s dependencies, the Wisconsin team has uncovered a target-rich environment for influenza drug developers.
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By working in fly cells, the Wisconsin team was able to deploy a technique to rapidly and selectively silence thousands of genes to see which were used by the flu virus. Screening a library of some 13,000 genes, the group identified more than 100 whose suppression in fly cells hindered the virus’s ability to successfully take over the cell and make new viruses.

Beloit College: Girls and Women in Science

photo of chemistry lab

Girls and Women in Science at Beloit College in Wisconsin:

sixth grade girls, along with their teachers and parents. This award winning conference encourages the exploration of science and mathematics by middle school girls through two days of experiments, activities, and interaction with science professionals. The girls, teachers, and parents will work with Beloit College faculty, students, and alumnae.

Girls getting into science

Eaton said the 24 girls participating will be able to take an active role in the laboratories. It’s critical the girls are encouraged and get the chance to increase their risk-taking abilities without boys.

The problem is, Eaton said, that sixth-grade girls’ interest in science starts dwindling and boys start becoming more dominant. “The boys take over the hands-on projects and the girls take notes,” Eaton said. “Boys will answer a question more authoritatively. Girls pose answers as a question. They are not as confident in their answers.”

To help foster activity among girls, the weekend conference also offers several workshops for parents and teachers. The workshops teach adults what they are doing to discourage girls and how they can learn to encourage them more.

Ruby on Rails Job Opportunity

I, John Hunter, work for the American Society for Engineering Education (Information Technology Program Manager): my work on this blog is not associated with ASEE and the opinions I express are mine and not those of ASEE. That said, we are looking for a Ruby on Rails developer at ASEE, in Washington DC. So please apply, if you are interested.

I could list details but essentially we develop web applications using Ruby on Rails. We are seeking someone with the experience and skill to be an immediately productive member of a team working on rails applications. They will need to be able to code features with little supervision and follow ruby on rails and our coding conventions. Programmers are given responsibility but within our conventions – this has been something we have slipped on prior to moving to Ruby on Rails but now we are focused on doing this well.

We do have a senior Ruby expert so we do have a senior person to assign the most complex tasks to. We are very focused on following best practices in ruby and ruby on rails development. And we are very focused on creating applications that follow rails, and ASEE coding conventions in order to maximize performance and minimize life cycle costs. My experience indicates that as a programmer shows they can take on more responsibility they will be given more responsibility.

The ideal candidate will love Ruby on Rails. For those of you who are not programmers loving your job might seem odd. But a large number of those that develop using Ruby on Rails do. And those will fit in well. Those that don’t appreciate the beauty of Ruby code can still succeed in this position, but might feel out of step with how we work. Contact Keith Mounts or me if you are interested. We are looking to hire a permanent employee that will work in our office, but we may consider hiring a contractor that could work remotely on a 3 to 6 month project that we have recently started.

2 Mysterious Species in the UK

Plane Bug - UK

Mystery insect found in Museum garden

This mystery bug has not been seen in the UK before and has made the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Garden its home. The tiny bug is baffling insect experts at the Museum who are still trying to identify the mystery newcomer. The almond-shaped bug is red and black and about the size of a grain of rice
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Experts checked the new bug with those in the Museum’s national insect collection of more than 28 million specimens. Amazingly, there is no exact match.
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The bug closely resembles the fairly rare species Arocatus roeselii, which is usually found in central Europe. However, the roeselii bugs are brighter red than this new bug and they are usually associated with alder trees rather than plane trees.

However, the National Museum in Prague discovered an exact match to the mystery bug in their collections – an insect that was found in Nice and is classified as Arocatus roeselii. ‘There are two possible explanations,’ explains Barclay. ‘That the bug is roeselii and by switching to feed on the plane trees it could suddenly become more abundant, successful and invasive. The other possibility is that the insect in our grounds may not be roeselii at all.’

The Museum is working with international colleagues to analyse the bug’s body shape, form and DNA to see whether it is a newly discovered species or if it is in fact Arocatus roeselii.

Here is a green bug from my trip to Clifton Gorge Nature Preserve that is probably easier to identify. Or how about this insect from the Forest Glen Preserve, Illinois. Or how about this one at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, in Kentucky.

Help us find out more about the mysterious alien “Ghost Slug”
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