The Silent Aircraft Initiative

Conceptual aircraft image

Silent Aircraft gives young engineers a flight of fancy:

these students are not undergraduates. They are budding young engineers, aged 13 to 18, taking part in a three-month design challenge with Cambridge’s Engineering Department to tackle aircraft noise. Working in teams, the students – from schools and colleges across the country, from Bristol to Sheffield – are doing a project related to the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s Silent Aircraft Initiative. This initiative links researchers at Cambridge and MIT with industrial partners to design a radically quieter passenger plane, and includes research into ways to reduce the noise from the undercarriage – one of the major noise sources on a landing aircraft. So this challenge has tasked these young students to design, and make a model of, a quieter undercarriage.

Related: The Silent Aircraft Initiative – Engineering the Boarding of Airplanes – Flying Luxury Hotel – The birth of a quieter, greener plane

The Silent Aircraft Initiative (SAI) team has succeeded in coming up with a radically quieter plane. Crucially, the SAX-40 is also 35% more fuel-efficient than any airliner currently flying.

Microbes on Earth

Tiny microbes play big role (broken link removed Feb 2007 – shame on the Detroit Free Press):

Like explorers of old, scientists are venturing into the immense but little-known realm of the microscopic organisms that dominate our planet.

“It’s an entire world that most of us have no idea about,” said Alan Leshner, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Countless trillions of microbes — mostly bacteria and a recently discovered kingdom of one-celled creatures known as archaea — inhabit every cranny of the globe. They reshape their environment, make life possible and sometimes destroy it.

Related: Beneficial Bacteria – Energy Efficiency of Digestion – Bacteria Living in Glacier – Microbe Types – How Bacteria Nearly Destroyed All Life – Molecular DNA Switch Found to be the Same for All Life – Life Untouched by the Sun – Soil Could Shed Light on Antibiotic Resistance

Web Science

MIT and University of Southampton launch World Wide Web research collaboration:

The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) will generate a research agenda for understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web. Of particular interest is the volume of information on the web that documents more and more aspects of human activity and knowledge. WSRI research projects will weigh such questions as: How do we access information and assess its reliability? By what means may we assure its use complies with social and legal rules? How will we preserve the web over time?

Commenting on the new initiative, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a founding director of WSRI, said, “As the web celebrates its first decade of widespread use, we still know surprisingly little about how it evolved, and we have only scratched the surface of what could be realized with deeper scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society.

Tim Berners Lee continues to show great insight. Continue reading →

Physicists Observe New Property of Matter

Physicists Observe New Property of Matter by Kim McDonald

Physicists at UC San Diego have for the first time observed the spontaneous production of coherence within “excitons,” the bound pairs of electrons and holes that enable semiconductors to function as novel electronic devices.

Scientists working in the emerging field of nanotechnology, which is finding commercial applications for ultra-small material objects, believe that this newly discovered property could eventually help the development of novel computing devices and provide them with new insights into the quirky quantum properties of matter.
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“What is coherence and why is it so important?” said Butov. “To start with, modern physics was born by the discovery that all particles in nature are also waves. Coherence means that such waves are all ‘in sync.’ The spontaneous coherence of the matter waves is the reason behind some of the most exciting phenomena in nature such as superconductivity and lasing.”

Related: 5th State of Matter – Quantum Mechanics Made Relatively Simple Webcasts

Student Algae Bio-fuel Project

photo of Tessa Churchill, left, and Holly Jacobson

Students take algae-to-biofuel project to MIT by J.T. Leonard. Photo: Tessa Churchill, left, and Holly Jacobson. The students are competing in the regional finals of the Siemens Math, Science & Technology competition.

Holly Jacobson and Tessa Churchill, seniors at Greely High School in Cumberland, are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, explaining how they would use fast-growing algae to help solve the energy crisis.

In a nutshell, the young women may have found a way to produce more biodiesel fuel while consuming fewer organic resources.

The project got its start two years ago when Jacobson and Churchill began examining natural oils stored in fatty acids — called lipids — in various forms of marine algae. Recently, they identified a strain of algae that produces more oil for a given mass.

Related: 2005 Seimens winners – UK Young Engineers Competitions – Math Counts Competition – Intel Science Talent Search Results

Fishy Future?

Will seafood nets be empty? Grim outlook draws skeptics:

The researchers found that harvests of nearly 30 percent of commercial seafood species already have collapsed. Without major changes in fisheries management, they say, the trend will accelerate.

“It looks grim, and the projections into the future are even grimmer,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist and a lead author in the peer-reviewed study, which was published today in the journal Science.

But other scientists question that forecast. “It’s just mind-boggling stupid,” said Ray Hilborn, a University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences.

The evidence seems pretty convincing overfishing has created serious problems and if unchecked those problems threaten to become even more serious. It also seems a stretch to claim those problems will be unchecked (that the checks will be less than they should be I think is a reasonable position). It seems to me the original stories talking about the end of fishing stocks in the next 40 years are alarmist to the point of being counterproductive.
Continue reading →

Google History

Google History @Google.com

Already Google.com, still in beta, was answering 10,000 search queries each day. The press began to take notice of the upstart website with the relevant search results, and articles extolling Google appeared in USA TODAY and Le Monde. That December, PC Magazine named Google one of its Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998. Google was moving up in the world.
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As 2000 ended, Google was already handling more than 100 million search queries a day — and continued to look for new ways to connect people with the information they needed, whenever and wherever they needed it.
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In February of 2002, AdWords, Google’s self-service advertising system, received a major overhaul, including a cost-per-click (CPC) pricing model that makes search advertising as cost-effective for small businesses as for large ones. Google’s approach to advertising has always followed the same principle that works so well for search: Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Programing Bacteria

Duke Packard Fellow to Examine Processing Speed of “Reprogrammed” Bacteria:

research into the development of synthetic gene circuits, carefully designed combinations of genes that can be “loaded” into bacteria or other cells, directing their activity in much the same way that a basic computer program directs a computer. Such re-programmed bacteria might eventually serve in a wide variety of applications, including biocomputing, medical treatments, and environmental cleanup
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The research now, however, is in its very early stages, You said. So far, E. coli bacteria have been programmed to grow in numbers until a certain population size is reached. The bacteria then kill themselves off, growing again only after their numbers dwindle sufficiently.

The relatively simple program takes advantage of bacteria’s ability to communicate with one another, a process known as “quorum sensing,” and essential genetic pathways that control cell death.

Related: 2006 Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering Awarded to 20 Young Researchers – Dr. Lingchong You – Duke Engineer Designing ‘Gene Circuits’ that Control Cell Populations with Killer Genes – Sick spinach: Meet the killer E coli

The Next Generation Internet

Experts say U.S. must act on Internet. The results of a survey by Juniper Networks:

86 percent of a group of more than 1,000 experts on the next-generation Internet say they worry that the head start of other nations will hurt the United States.

They fear that China, India, and many European and Asian countries are moving faster to implement the addressing scheme known as Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6.

Vint Cerf – Spotlight on IPv6 Challenges

Related: China Builds a Better Internet