International Student Collaboration

Contest links high school students worldwide:

During the school year, 58 teams of American students coupled with students from China, India and Japan tackled technological solutions to global warming. They chatted online, divided jobs based on skill, consulted with advisers, and in the final grueling weeks, wrote a professional business plan.

“The most important goal is to engage U.S. students in international collaboration using science and technology,” said David Gibson, executive director of the Global Challenge and a research assistant professor in computer sciences at the University of Vermont. The idea for the contest came to management consultant Craig DeLuca two years ago as one of his clients planned to outsource design and manufacturing, and his community in Stowe considered putting off buying science textbooks.

“I’ve got to do something so that our kids have a shot in the global economy,” he said then. He launched the contest in Vermont, and last fall it was awarded a $900,000 National Science Foundation Grant and expanded worldwide. Winners will be announced in June.

Not only does the contest encourage interaction between students across the globe to solve problems, it also exposes them to opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math, Gibson said. “We need projects like this across the nation, so we can scoop these kids up because schools don’t do it for them,” he said.

Chemistry of Common Items

The American Chemistry Society offers interesting articles on the chemistry of everyday products including: amber, henna, catnip and honey:

To make this delicious treat, foraging bees start out by guzzling nectar, a dilute solution of sugars in flowers. Then, they mix the nectar with enzymes in their stomachlike honey sacs. Back at the hive, the foragers pass the digested material to house bees who reduce the moisture content of the mixture by ingesting and regurgitating it. They then deposit concentrated drops into honeycomb cells. Over the next few days, bees fan the fluid with their wings to further concentrate it, and finally, they cap the cells with wax. At the same time, enzyme-mediated changes produce a range of sugars and acids in the honey.

Bee enzymes also show up in the finished product. Invertase is the most critical. It splits the sucrose in the nectar into fructose and glucose and also produces some erlose. Another enzyme, glucose oxidase, converts glucose to gluconolactone, which is then hydrolyzed to give gluconic acid, the principal acid in honey. Formic, acetic, butyric, and lactic acids are also found in honey, which explains why its pH typically measures 3.8-4.0 and bacteria have a hard time growing in it.

Engineering, Math and Physics Applets

Java applets illustrating concepts in math, physics and engineering including: Coupled Oscillations, Digital Filters, 3-D Magnetostatic Fields and Ordinary Differential Equations.

Deep-Sea Alien Abode Discovered

Deep-Sea Alien Abode Discovered by Jeanna Bryner:

Recent expeditions have uncloaked this polar region, finding nearly 600 organisms never described before and challenging some assumptions that deep-sea biodiversity is depressed. The findings also suggest that all of Earth’s marine life originated in Antarctic waters.

Scientists had assumed that the deep sea of the South Pole would follow similar trends in biodiversity documented for the Arctic. “There are less species in the Arctic than around the equator,” said one of the study scientists, Brigitte Ebbe, a taxonomist at the German Center for Marine Biodiversity Research. “People assumed that it would be the same if you went from the equator south, but it didn’t prove to be true at all.”

Very interesting stuff. Related: Altered Oceans, the Crisis at Sea – Ocean Life – Antarctic Robo-sub

CERN Prepares for LHC Operations

A Giant Takes On Physics’ Biggest Questions

The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics.

They are getting ready to see the universe born again. Again and again and again – 30 million times a second, in fact.

Starting sometime next summer if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 17-mile underground ring stretching from the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva, into France and back again – luckily without having to submit to customs inspections.

Crashing together in the bowels of Atlas and similar contraptions spaced around the ring, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.

Wow that sounds impressive. Oh yeah, it is impressive. Good writing too.

Bird Species Plummeted After West Nile

Bird Species Plummeted After West Nile:

Several common species of North American birds have suffered drastic population declines since the arrival of the West Nile virus eight years ago, leaving rural and suburban areas quieter than they used to be and imposing ecological stresses on a variety of other animals and plants, a new study has found.

In Maryland, for example, 2005 chickadee populations were 68 percent lower than would have been expected had West Nile not arrived, and in Virginia chickadee populations were 50 percent below that prediction.
…
It shows that the post-1998 declines were greatest at times and places in which the virus was especially prevalent — as indicated by the number of human infections diagnosed. As expected, American crows were among the worst hit, suffering declines of as much as 45 percent in some regions and wipeouts of 100 percent in some smaller areas. Other species that suffered included the blue jay, the tufted titmouse, the American robin, the house wren, the chickadee and — unexpectedly — the American bluebird.

Hot Ice Planet

Scooped!:

The planet has a mass of 23 Earth-masses and an orbital period of 2.64385 days. It orbits a red dwarf star 33 light years away. The temperature on the planet is somewhere in the oven-cleaning neighborhood of 600K (327K, 620F). No habitability news stories on CNN for this fine fellow. The transit depth is a healthy 0.6%, which implies that the the planet’s radius is ~25,000 km. That’s four times that of the Earth, and essentially identical to the 24,764 km radius of Neptune.

Astronomers Detect Shadow Of Water World In Front Of Nearby Star:

As the planet is close to its host star, its surface temperature is expected to be at least 300 C (600 F). The water in its atmosphere would therefore be in the form of steam. Inside, the water is crushed under intense pressure and adopts states unknown on Earth, except in physicist’s laboratories. Says FrÃ©dÃ©ric Pont: “water has more than a dozen solid states, only one of which is our familiar ice. Under very high pressure, water turns into other solid states denser than both ice and liquid water, just as carbon transforms into diamond under extreme pressures. Physicists call these exotic forms of water ‘Ice VII’ and ‘Ice X’. If Earth’s oceans were much deeper, there would be such exotic forms of solid water at the bottom.” Inside GJ 436’s planet, this strange ice is moreover heated to many hundred degrees.

Proof – Movie

It is a stretch to say this post is related to math but the plot of the movie involves a mathematical proof so… I just watched the Proof DVD and thought is was excellent, and I get to write about what I want, and therefore this post exists. It really is a great movie but doesn’t have much at all to do with math other than as a backdrop.

The main mathematician characters flirt with (or have) mental illness – which seems to be a common combination in movies: Pi, A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting (all worth watching by the way).

Bacterium Living with High Level Radiation

Organism found at SRS amazes scientific world by Rob Pavey

In addition to thriving in the face of normally-lethal radiation, the organism also demonstrates remarkable survival characteristics in terms of its DNA. Humans and most organisms can tolerate few breaks in DNA molecules, he said, but kineococcus radiotolerans has the ability to reassemble itself.

“With this organism, we can take an intact DNA molecule, blast it into little pieces, and in five to six hours the organism is restored and growing normally again,” Dr. Bagwell said. Dr. Bagwell and others who have studied the organism hope further research will yield clues that could aid in medical research, cancer studies and other areas.

“There’s a lot of excitement about this organism because of its ability to withstand tremendous abuse,” he said. “What we don’t know is how it does these things – and what more it can do. That’s the direction we’re going now.”

Related: What is an Extremophile? – more info on Kineococcus radiotolerans

Science Topics Explained on One Page

Seed Magazine has one page crib sheets on science topics as guides for living in the 21st century. For example, String Theory:

To unite the seemingly incompatible worlds of the very large and the very small, physicists propose string theory, a model of the universe in which tiny strings vibrate in more than three dimensions. This Cribsheet covers the basics of string theory: what it says, why we think it might give us a unified theory of physics, and whether experiment supports it. In addition, we tell you how the strings are shaped and why string theory may not be the final “theory of everything.”

Other topics: stem cells, climate change, avian flu, hybrid cars, nuclear power, hurricanes, extinction and the elements. Great stuff.

Related: Physics Concepts in 60 Seconds