The Technology Job Market is Strong

Technology: It’s Where the Jobs Are by Arik Hesseldahl, Business Week:

Here’s a hint for high school graduates or college students still majoring in indecision: Put down that guitar or book of poetry and pick up a laptop. Study computer science or engineering
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Seattle added a net 7,800 jobs [in 2006], followed by the New York and Washington (D.C.) metro areas, which added more than 6,000 jobs apiece. The fastest-growing area on a percentage basis was the combined metro area of Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., which saw its tech-employment figures grow by 12%.
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The highest concentration of technology workers – 286 for every 1,000 workers – was in, no surprise, Silicon Valley. Boulder, Colo., came in second, with 230, and Huntsville, Ala.; Durham, N.C.; and Washington rounded out the top five in density.

Now for the answer to the question on everyone’s mind: Where are the highest salaries? That would be Silicon Valley, where the average tech worker is paid $144,000 a year. That’s nearly double the $80,000 national average for tech jobs.
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More than 850,000 IT jobs will be added during the 10-year period ending in 2016, which would be a rise of 24%. Add all the jobs that will replace retiring workers, and the total increase could be a tidy 1.6 million. That means one job in every 19 created over the course of the next decade will be in technology.

And while demand for tech-savvy employees is certainly multiplying, another survey, this one from the Computing Research Assn. and released in March, found a 20% drop in the number of students completing degrees in computer-related fields, and the number of students enrolling in these programs is the lowest it’s been in 10 years, as far back as the data go.

Cost Efficient Solar Dish by Students

Solar Energy Dish

Low-cost system could revolutionize global energy production

A team led by MIT students this week successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world – one team members believe has the potential to revolutionize global energy production.

The system consists of a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish that team members have spent the last several weeks assembling. The dish, made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror, concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 – creating heat so intense it could melt a bar of steel.

To demonstrate the system’s power, Spencer Ahrens, who just received his master’s in mechanical engineering from MIT, stood in a grassy field on the edge of the campus this week holding a long plank. Slowly, he eased it into position in front of the dish. Almost instantly there was a big puff of smoke, and flames erupted from the wood. Success!

Burning sticks is not what this dish is really for, of course. Attached to the end of a 12-foot-long aluminum tube rising from the center of the dish is a black-painted coil of tubing that has water running through it. When the dish is pointing directly at the sun, the water in the coil flashes immediately into steam.

Someday soon, Ahrens hopes, the company he and his teammates have founded, called RawSolar, will produce such dishes by the thousands. They could be set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within a couple of years with the energy they produce.

“This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence, and it was just completed,” says Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish’s design–the rights to which he has signed over to the student team.

Great job students. Good luck with RawSolar. Photo (by David Chandler): Matt Ritter shows steam coming from the return hose after passing through the coil above the solar dish.

Kudzu Biofuel Potential

Kudzu Gets Kudos as a Potential Biofuel

The kudzu vine, also known as “the plant that ate the South,” was brought from eastern Asia in 1876 and can grow more than 6.5 feet a week. Its starchy roots plunge deep into the soil, and just a fragment of the plant remaining in the ground is enough to allow it to come back next season.

“Kudzu is just a large amount of carbohydrate sitting below ground waiting for anyone to come along and dig it up,” Sage said. “The question is, is it worthwhile to dig it up?”
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The roots were by far the largest source of carbohydrate in the plant: up to 68 percent carbohydrate by dry weight, compared to a few percent in leaves and vines.

The researchers estimate that kudzu could produce 2.2 to 5.3 tons of carbohydrate per acre in much of the South, or about 270 gallons per acre of ethanol, which is comparable to the yield for corn of 210 to 320 gallons per acre. They recently published their findings in Biomass and Bioenergy.

Crucial to making the plan work would be figuring out whether kudzu could be economically harvested, especially the roots, which can be thick and grow more than six feet deep. To balance this expense, Sage said, the plant requires zero planting, fertilizer or irrigation costs.

Fold.it – the Protein Folding Game

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This is another awesome combination of technology, distributed problem solving, science education…

Essentially the game works by allowing the person to make some decisions then the computer runs through some processes to determine the result of those decisions. It seems the human insight of what might work provides an advantage to computers trying to calculate solutions on their own. Then the results are compared to the other individuals working on the same protein folding problem and the efforts are ranked.

This level of interaction is very cool. SETI@home, Rosetta@home and the like are useful tools to tap the computing resources of millions on the internet. But the use of human expertise really makes fold.it special. And you can’t help but learn by playing. In addition, if you are successful you can gain some scientific credit for your participation in new discoveries.

The site includes some excellent educational material on proteins and related material. What is a protein:

Proteins are the workhorses in every cell of every living thing. Your body is made up of trillions of cells, of all different kinds: muscle cells, brain cells, blood cells, and more. Inside those cells, proteins are allowing your body to do what it does: break down food to power your muscles, send signals through your brain that control the body, and transport nutrients through your blood. Proteins come in thousands of different varieties, but they all have a lot in common. For instance, they’re made of the same stuff: every protein consists of a long chain of joined-together amino acids.
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structure specifies the function of the protein. For example, a protein that breaks down glucose so the cell can use the energy stored in the sugar will have a shape that recognizes the glucose and binds to it (like a lock and key) and chemically reactive amino acids that will react with the glucose and break it down to release the energy.
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Proteins are involved in almost all of the processes going on inside your body: they break down food to power your muscles, send signals through your brain that control the body, and transport nutrients through your blood. Many proteins act as enzymes, meaning they catalyze (speed up) chemical reactions that wouldn’t take place otherwise. But other proteins power muscle contractions, or act as chemical messages inside the body, or hundreds of other things.

Continue reading →

Physicist Swimming Revolution

A Revolution That Began With a Kick by Amy Shipley:

The answer, they say, cannot lie solely in the latest high-tech swimsuits introduced amid a swirl of controversy this winter, because the world-record smashing began at last year’s world championships — long before the newest of the newfangled apparel came out.

Swimmers, coaches and scientists say it is impossible to pinpoint one explanation. They cite many contributing factors, ranging from professional training groups that have sprouted across the United States to greater access to underwater cameras and other advanced technology.

But some say the most significant breakthrough has been a revival of a swimming maneuver developed more than 70 years ago by one of the physicists who worked on the atomic bomb.

Though utilized for decades, the underwater dolphin kick had not been fully exploited by the swimming mainstream until Olympic megastar Michael Phelps and a few other stars began polishing it — and crushing other swimmers with it — in recent years.

Very interesting and another example of how good ideas are often ignored for a long time.

The underwater dolphin kick attracted the interest of swimming innovators as early as the 1930s. The late Volney C. Wilson explored its possibilities before diving into later work on nuclear fission and the atomic bomb, according to David Schrader, a research professor at Marquette University who is Wilson’s biographer.

Schrader said Wilson, an alternate on the 1932 Olympic water polo team who studied fish propulsion at a Chicago aquarium, claimed to have shown the kick to Johnny Weissmuller, a training mate at the Illinois Athletic Club. “Weissmuller reproduced it perfectly, but was not impressed by it,” said Schrader in a phone interview, recalling a conversation with Wilson.
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One of the first swimmers to turn heads with the underwater dolphin kick was David Berkoff, a Harvard graduate who became known for the “Berkoff Blastoff.” In 1988, Berkoff set several world records in the 100 backstroke by dolphin-kicking for 35 meters underwater at the start of the race.

Which goes to show you that you can gain advantages just by using the information that is available – your own innovation is not the only way to get ahead. Just doing a better job of adapting what others learn to your challenges can be very rewarding.

The Science Behind Spore

Spore is the hugely anticipated game from Wil Wright (the creator of Sims). In this webcast he discusses the science behind Spore. The creature creator was released this week and the full game will be released soon. Spore has been doing a great job marketing the product and they continue to do so with lots of material on You Tube including the Spore Ultimate Dance Contest.

The idea of the game is to design creatures that then go out into the world and interact and evolution takes it course. It looks very cool.

Mojave Desert Tortoises

photo of desert tortoise

Mojave Desert Tortoises by Pelf Nyok:

But we were very lucky 🙂 We managed to see 5 desert tortoises (Gopherus agassizii) on that particular day, and one of them was spotted on the dirt road (not in the burrow)!

Desert tortoises are thought to live 40 – 60 years. They grow relatively slowly and adult females are larger than adult males (for obvious reasons). They typically breed from April to June and the female tortoises lay between 1 and 11 eggs. Incubation period for eggs varies from 80 to more than 100 days.

Pelf is experiencing a turtle conservation training and tour of the USA (see Turtle Camps in Malaysia). Her blog is doing a great job showing they made a good selection in choosing her for the scholarship.

Cloned Immune Cells Clear Patient’s Cancer

Cloned immune cells cleared patient’s cancer

A patient whose skin cancer had spread throughout his body has been given the all-clear after being injected with billions of his own immune cells. Tests revealed that the 52-year-old man’s tumours, which spread from his skin to his lung and groin, vanished within two months of having the treatment, and had not returned two years later.

Doctors attempted the experimental therapy as part of a clinical trial after the man’s cancer failed to respond to conventional treatments.

The man is the first to benefit from the new technique, which uses cloning to produce billions of copies of a patient’s immune cells. When they are injected into the body they attack the cancer and force it into remission.

There are many more wonderful announcements than wonderful solutions that live up to the hope provided by the announcement. Still this is one in the long line of potentially wonderful treatments. If it turns out to be successful the whole world will benefit which is an example of why I am thankful so many countries are investing in science and technology.

Lancelet Genome Provides Answers on Evolution

Lancelet genome shows how genes quadrupled during vertebrate evolution by Robert Sanders

“If you compare the 23 chromosomes of humans with the 19 chromosomes of amphioxus, you find that both genomes can be expressed in terms of 17 ancestral pieces. So, we can say with some confidence that 550 million years ago, the common ancestor of amphioxus and humans had 17 chromosomal elements.”
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Each of those 17 ancestral segments was duplicated twice in the evolution of vertebrates, after which most of the routine “housekeeping” genes lost the extra copies. Those left, totaling a couple thousand genes, found new functions that, Putnam said, make us different from all other creatures.

“These few thousand genes have been retooled to make humans more elaborate than their simpler ancestors. They are involved in setting up the body plan of an animal and differentiating different parts of the animal,” he said. “The hypothesis, pretty strongly supported by this data, is that the multiplication of this particular kind of gene and differentiation into different functions was important in the formation of vertebrates as we know them.”

“The most exciting thing that the amphioxus genome does is provide excellent evidence for the idea that Ono proposed in 1970, that the human genome had undergone two rounds of whole-genome duplication with subsequent losses,”

A great example of the scientific method in action. It often isn’t a matter of developing a theory one day, testing it the next and learning the outcome the next. The process can take decades for complex matters.

Tracking Down Tomato Troubles

Tracking the bug in tomatoes

David Acheson is the nation’s top food detective, but so far he has met his match in the wily tomato.

With the salmonella scare that has plagued tomatoes, Acheson has faced perhaps his biggest test—at least as far as outbreaks of illness go—since he assumed the newly created “food safety czar” post at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about a year ago.

That position was born amid a growing concern that the FDA couldn’t get a grip on food safety, as tales of food-borne illnesses multiplied. Now comes salmonella-laden tomatoes that have sickened at least 277 people nationwide, hospitalizing 43.
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The FDA concluded that the tainted tomatoes most likely came from Mexico or a certain part of Florida. The agency managed to narrow down the possible origins of the tainted tomatoes largely by a process of elimination. Based on the timing of their growing seasons and tomato harvests, many states or countries could not be the source of the tomatoes that caused illnesses, so they were deemed safe sources.

Restaurants and food retailers say they are now sourcing tomatoes from places deemed safe by the FDA. The outbreak has been a particularly tough one to crack because it has been so widespread. Illness has shown up in people who frequented a variety of restaurants, and who bought tomatoes at myriad grocery stores.