60 Acre (24 hectare) Spider Web

Two interesting articles Millions of Tiny Spiders Spin Mystery in a British Columbia Clover Field, and Spiders weave huge natural wonder in B.C. cover a story from 2002:

A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders.

Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.

Related: Another remarkable natural event, giant wasp nest. Also see a post on spider thread.

Residence Halls for Engineering Students

Three residence halls allocated just for engineering students at Southern Illinois University by Alexis Boudreau

The National Science Foundation in September granted SIUC $1.2 million to help fund the endeavor. Chrisman said more than half of the grant would go toward funding the peer mentors’ salaries.
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Nicklow said there would be approximately five students per mentor, and the mentor would attend at least one class per week with the students, along with providing tutoring and guidance.
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“The whole purpose is for them to interact with one another,” Lorentz said. “They will be able to live, learn and study together. It will enhance the student experience.”
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The new program will also involve faculty mentors, free tutoring available in the halls four or five nights a week and 36 practicing engineers who will periodically speak to students.

Some of the ideas sound good. I am skeptical of the advantage for completely separate dorms, but I believe in experiments so I like the idea of trying this. It will be interesting to see the results of this effort.

High Pay for Engineering Graduates

Undergraduate engineering degrees top the list of best paid: Most lucrative degrees for college grads. This article offers a slight update to Lucrative college degree post from July.

Student Loan Forgiveness for Teachers

School of Education creates $20 million loan-forgiveness program to encourage students to become teachers

This program from Standford is one of the many good ideas being applied currently. Alone it really is a pretty small step but as one small step of many it is a good one.

$10 million gift matched by Stanford will create a $20 million loan-forgiveness program at the university’s School of Education to encourage students to become K-12 teachers.
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Under the program, half of a STEP student’s loan will be “forgiven”-effectively cancelled-when the graduate has taught for two years. After four years, the loan balance will be forgiven. Research has shown that a teacher who pursues teaching for three years or more is likely to stay in the field.

Sick spinach: Meet the killer E coli

Sick spinach: Meet the killer E coli:

O157 is unusually infectious, adds B. Brett Finlay, professor of microbiology at the University of British Columbia, who has studied the devious bug’s genetics and tactics. “Ten organisms can make you sick, while salmonella takes 10 million. And E. coli O157:H7 is resistant to acid in the stomach that normally kills most things.”

Read more in this detailed articles from the why files.

iWoz

iWoz book cover image

iWoz, autobiography of Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder is now available. Quote from Guy Kawasaki:

Every engineer—and certainly every engineering student—should read this book. It is about the thrill of invention, the process of making the world a better place, and the purity of entrepreneurship. I, Woz is the personal computer generation’s version of The Soul of a New Machine. It is, in a nutshell, the engineer’s manifesto. I hope that the so-called “innovation experts” and MBAs choke when they read it.

Cobert report interview with Steve Wozniak. NPR interview: Computer Pioneer Steve Wozniak Tells His Story

New Visualization of the Periodic Table

New Visualization of the Periodic Table from the New York Times.

Erasmus Mundus Scholarships

The Erasmus Mundus program is funded by the European Union to strengthen European co-operation and international links in higher education. To do this it supports high-quality European Masters Courses, enables students and visiting scholars from around the world to engage in postgraduate study at European universities, and funds European students and scholars to learn outside the EU. The program is funded for five years (2004-2008) for 230 million Euro.

In concrete terms, Erasmus Mundus will support about 100 Erasmus Mundus Masters Courses of outstanding academic quality. It will provide grants for some 5,000 graduate students from third countries to follow these Masters Courses, and for more than 4,000 EU graduate students involved in these courses to study in third countries. The programme will also offer teaching or research scholarships in Europe for over 1,000 incoming third-country academics and for a similar number of outgoing EU scholars. Last but not least, Erasmus Mundus will support about 100 partnerships between Erasmus Mundus Masters Courses and higher education institutions in third countries.

Student nationalities for 2006-7: China 81, Brazil 43, Russia 36, India 31, Ethiopia 38, USA 31, Malaysia 25, Mexico 21. There is also a special Asia program with an additional: 288 from India, 99 China, 53 Thailand…

Why does orange juice taste so bad after brushing your teeth?

Why does orange juice taste so bad after brushing your teeth? Ok, those that have never experienced this go try it. You will discover why I still remember learning that orange juice and toothpaste didn’t mix when I was a kid. Isn’t it great that I can stumble across answers to questions I had forgotten I asked 🙂

David Cannell is the scientific spokesperson for Questacon, “It’s because of a certain ingredient in toothpaste called sodium laurel sulfate. It actually blocks sweet sensors. All the other taste bud cells in your mouth are firing away nicely, but the receptors which pick up the sweet sensors are not working anymore. Not only does it block the sweet sensors, it enhances the sour and bitter, so you get this massive influx of sour and bitter taste coming through the mouth.”

David says tastebuds are a very interesting part of the body, “They’re the little bumps on the top of your tongue. They look like a tiny onion, if you look at it with a high powered microscope. Each tastebud, which we have about ten thousand of, has about fifty different taste cells.”

Just imagine what we will find with the better internet that China is building?

Lab on a Chip Blood Tests

Portable ‘lab on a chip’ could speed blood tests:

Within the lab on a chip, biological fluids such as blood are pumped through channels about 10 microns, or millionths of a meter, wide. (A red blood cell is about 8 microns in diameter.) Each channel has its own pumps, which direct the fluids to certain areas of the chip so they can be tested for the presence of specific molecules.

Until now, scientists have been limited to two approaches to designing labs on a chip, neither of which offer portability. The first is to mechanically force fluid through microchannels, but this requires bulky external plumbing and scales poorly with miniaturization.

The second approach is capillary electro-osmosis, where flow is driven by an electric field across the chip. Current electro-osmotic pumps require more than 100 volts of electricity, but the MIT researchers have now developed a micropump which requires only battery power (a few volts) to achieve similar flow speeds and also provides a greater degree of flow control.