Particles and Waves

Science team shows light is made of particles and waves:

Work completed by a visiting research professor at Rowan University, physics professors and a student from the institution shows that light is made of particles and waves, a finding that refutes a common belief held for about 80 years.

Shahriar S. Afshar, the visiting professor who is currently at Boston’s Institute for Radiation-Induced Mass Studies (IRIMS), led a team, including Rowan physics professors Drs. Eduardo Flores and Ernst Knoesel and student Keith McDonald, that proved Afshar’s original claims, which were based on a series of experiments he had conducted several years ago.

An article on the work titled “Paradox in Wave-Particle Duality” recently published in “Foundations of Physics,” a prestigious, refereed academic journal, supports Albert Einstein’s long-debated belief that quantum physics is incomplete. For eight decades the scientific community generally had supported Niels Bohr’s ideas commonly known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
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“The important new contribution is that light carries both wave and particle aspects at all times, and future experiments will further clarify the nature of each component.” Afshar said.

Open Source 3-D Printing

3-D Fabrication Goes Open Source

Hod Lipson and Evan Malone of Cornell University have cooked-up a cheap DIY 3-D printer – the Fab@Home – that they believe could lead to the widespread use of fabrication machines by hobbyists and experimenters. Fabrication machines, or fabbers, operate on the same principle as inkjet printers, but instead of squirting out ink onto paper, they squirt plastic or other materials into three-dimensional shapes. Commercial systems average around $100,000, but you can build Cornell’s Fab@Home for about US$2,300 worth of off-the-shelf parts.

Attacking Bacterial Walls

Bacterial Walls Come Tumbling Down:

Penicillin and many newer antibiotics work by blocking a piece of the machinery bacteria use to construct their durable outer walls. Without these tough, protective coatings, bacteria die. The enzymatic machinery (known as PBP2) studied by Strynadka’s group has two main parts: One end assembles long sugar fibers; the other end stitches them together with bits of protein to form a sturdy interlocking mesh shell.
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“This enzyme is an awesome target for antibiotics,” said Strynadka. “We have a totally new understanding of how the enzyme works and how a very good animal antibiotic inhibits the enzyme.” Although moenomycin is poorly absorbed by the human body, the new understanding of exactly how it interferes with bacterial enzyme function should help scientists design modified versions that are more suitable for use in people.

Understanding the structure of this enzyme should also speed up screening and design of new antibiotics, which are in constant demand as microbes continually evolve new ways to evade the drugs that researchers design to thwart them. The time it takes for bacteria to develop resistance to new antibiotics has been as short as one year for penicillin V and as long as 30 years for vancomycin.

Invasive Plants: Tamarisk

To Save the West, Kill a Plant by Josh McDaniel:

The tamarisk, an invasive species introduced to the United States from Eurasia, is a deep-rooted plant that aggressively obtains water from the soil and groundwater. A single mature tree can produce up to 500,000 seeds per year, crowding out native plants along rivers and creeks and reducing wildlife habitat. The species now infests all the major rivers, springs, ditches, and wetlands in ten states—including Texas, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and California—and is rapidly expanding into others.

In the delicately dry ecosystems of the southwestern United States, that is a serious problem, adding up to over 800 billion gallons of lost water per year across the parched region. “That is equal to the water needs of 20 million people or one million acres of irrigated farmland,” said Tim Carlson, an environmental engineer and director of the Tamarisk Coalition, which aims to control the plant.

Living systems include risks for those that attempt to engineer improvement. The past is littered with examples of attempts to intervene that go wrong.

“One night, after I gave a presentation on tamarisk, an older gentleman came up to me and told me that he had earned his Eagle Scout rank by planting tamarisk to prevent soil erosion after the Dust Bowl era in the 1930s,” Carlson recalled. “He said he would gladly earn it again by helping me remove it.”

I don’t think there is a simple answer. We are going to have intentional and unintentional consequences results from our actions. To me the lesson is to learn from our past that we often have unintended consequences that are worse than we envisioned and we need to be careful. We can’t assume there are no risks that we don’t know about. There are risks we can’t predict.

Non-Newtonian Fluid Demo

via: A pool filled with non-newtonian fluid:

They filled a pool with a mix of cornstarch and water made on a concrete mixer truck. It becomes a non-newtonian fluid. When stress is applied to the liquid it exhibits properties of a solid. Video was recorded at Barcelona, Spain. A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid in which the viscosity changes with the applied strain rate. As a result, non-Newtonian fluids may not have a well-defined viscosity.

USA Science and Engineering Degree Data – 2007

A huge amount of interesting data can be found in NSF’s report on the USA: Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (pdf)

Since 2000 women have received more science and engineering bachelors degrees than men. Men still receive more master’s and doctoral degrees in science and engineering.

2004 bachelor’s degrees	Female	Male
Engineering	13,257	51,418
Computer Science	14,406	42,999
Psychology	64,208	18,302
Science and engineering	227,813	224,525
Total non-S&E	583,004	371,667

200,000 more for bachelor’s degrees for women – wow. This is just a continuation of a trend but still is fairly amazing.

2004 Master’s degrees for US citizens	Female	Male
Engineering	7,135	26,737
Computer Science	6,195	13,658
Psychology	11,950	3,348
Science and engineering	51,420	66,631
Total non-S&E	276,782	160,704

2004 Doctoral degrees for US citizens	Female	Male
Engineering	1,014	4,353
Computer Science	195	690
Psychology	2,245	1,042
Science and engineering	9,819	15,728

Some more interesting data: 90% of Asian, 60% of Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander 40% of Hispanic doctoral S&E faculty were born outside the United States. Over 80 % of white, American Indian/Alaska Native, and multiple race doctoral S&E faculty were born in the United States.

Robo-Salamander

Robot Salamander

Novel salamander robot crawls its way up the evolutionary ladder:

A group of European researchers has developed a spinal cord model of the salamander and implemented it in a novel amphibious salamander-like robot. The robot changes its speed and gait in response to simple electrical signals, suggesting that the distributed neural system in the spinal cord holds the key to vertebrates’ complex locomotor capabilities.

In a paper appearing in the March 9, 2007 issue of the journal Science, scientists from the EPFL in Switzerland and the INSERM research center/University of Bordeaux in France introduce their robot, Salamandra Robotica. This four-legged yellow creature reveals a great deal about the evolution of vertebrate locomotion. It’s also a vivid demonstration that robots can be used to test and verify biological concepts, and that very often nature herself offers ideal solutions for robotics design.

The researchers used a numerical model of the salamander’s spinal cord to explore three fundamental issues related to this vertebrate’s movement: what were the changes in the spinal cord that made it possible to evolve from aquatic to terrestrial locomotion? How are the limb and axial movements coordinated? And how is a simple electrical signal from the brain stem translated by the spinal cord into a change in gait?

$15 Million for San Jose State College of Engineering

The $15 million gift for the College of Engineering will be used to create endowments to support initiatives and programs in the areas of student and faculty development, leading-edge engineering, innovation and globalization. SJSU will request to officially name the college – the Charles W. Davidson College of Engineering – at the California State University Board of Trustees meeting in March.

“Engineering education has driven the success of Silicon Valley, and San JosÃ© State University has been at the center of this success,” said Belle Wei, dean of the College of Engineering. “Chuck Davidson believes in the college’s mission to enable diverse and promising students to receive a quality, holistic engineering education. His gift will transform the college and help us achieve a new level of excellence in preparing our students to thrive in today’s dynamic and competitive world.”

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.

Use the Force

What geek wouldn’t want to be a Jedi?

Behold Project Epoc, a wireless headset developed by Australian start-up Emotiv Systems. The electrodes embedded in the set read your brain waves, figure out what you’re thinking and, yes, allow you to bend objects on the screen to your omnipotent will.
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Let’s be clear, though: Epoc isn’t anywhere near as easy as picking up a control pad and learning to play a game. The software uses adaptive learning to figure out what your brains’ electrical signals look like when you’re thinking about lifting, pushing, or rotating objects. That takes time (which is why Dave used the headset and not me).

Still, I think I’d be willing to sacrifice an hour of my life for a taste of the Jedi’s power. The effect is amazing, after all – c’mon, this is mind-control people!

Ok, this is not yet available and needs quite a bit more to make consumers demand them – but if it can do what they say that is interesting start. Project Epoc