Reducing Risk of Diabetes Through Exercise

A Diabetic Battle of the Bulge by Diane Garcia

Diabetes appears to be written into some people’s genes, but with the right diet and exercise, the disease may never surface, according to a new study.
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In the lifestyle modification group, however, even individuals with two copies of the variant were no more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than participants without the variant, the team reports 20 July in the New England Journal of Medicine

Update – AAAS broke the link so I removed the link. I hope those responsible for web sites eventually take the time to learn what that responsibility entails: Web Pages Must Live Forever. I find these failures to follow the most basic web usability practices displayed most often in organizations where burocrates that don’t understand technology make decisions on how web sites should work instead of allowing those that have the necessary understanding of the technology do so.

A plane You Can Print

A plane you can print by Paul Marks:

In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part – a wing strut, say – is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focused, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes.

Polecat is a new unmanned plane: “About 90 per cent of Polecat is made of composite materials with much of that material made by rapid prototyping.”

More information on 3d printing from a manufacturer of the printers. Not quite ready for in home printing of say a new can opener on demand but can that day really be far away?

A New Ocean?

Secrets of ocean birth laid bare:

Geologists say a crack that opened up last year may eventually reach the Red Sea, isolating much of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the rest of Africa.
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“We think if these processes continue, a new ocean will eventually form,” he told the BBC News website. “It will connect to the Red Sea and the ocean will flow in.”

When do they expect this? “in about a million years.” Just around the corner geologically speaking, though for me that still seems a long way off 🙂

A New Engineering Education

Engineering a new way by Amy Hetzner

The crux of Olin’s effort is a “do-learn” model that stresses teaching students through projects and a student-focused environment aimed at heading off the high dropout rates at other engineering schools around the country, said Sherra Kerns, Olin’s vice president for innovation and research.

See our previous posts: Olin Engineering Education Experiment – Improving Engineering Education

UW has been able to turn around a dismal attrition rate in the early 1990s, when two-thirds of engineering students didn’t stick with the program. Today, close to 60% of engineering students graduate with a degree in the field, he said.

Wow, 33% of engineering students graduating sure wasn’t very impressive. Frankly I don’t think 60% is very good but I believe comparatively it is reasonably good. Overall that rate really needs to be improved. Olin College does have some advantages being small and providing a full scholarship: their first class graduated 66 of the 75 that started 4 years ago.

Primary Science Education in China and the USA

Should the US Take a Page Out of China’s Schoolbook?

China consistently performs well on international benchmarks despite having to serve 20% of the world’s students with only 2% of its educational resources.

Pretty impressive.

But mimicking China’s system is by no means a blanket solution for American education woes.

Mimicking is almost never a successful strategy. What can be successful is learning from what others do well and adopting the good ideas in ways that makes sense in your system.
Continue reading →

Robot Learning

photo of robot dog playpen

This is very cool stuff:

Indeed, as opposed to the work in classical artificial intelligence in which engineers impose pre-defined anthropocentric tasks to robots, the techniques we develop endow the robots with the capacity of deciding by themselves which are the activities that are maximally fitted to their current capabilities. Our developmental robots autonomously and actively choose their learning situations, thus beginning by simple ones and progressively increasing their complexity. No tasks are pre-specified to the robots, which are only provided with an internal abstract reward function. For example, in the case of the Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity which we developped, this internal reward function pushes the robot to search for situations where its learning progress is maximal.

Very interesting article from Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris (Developmental Robotics): Discovering Communication by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Frederic Kaplan, abstract:
Continue reading →

Berkeley and MIT courses online

Huge amount of University of California Berkely webcasts of course lectures. Subscribe to RSS feeds and listen to podcasts or listen online.

Courses include: General Biology, Solid State Devices and Introductory Physics. Course websites include handouts for the lectures.

A great open access resource.

I can’t believe I have mentioned MIT open courseware before but a search didn’t find anything. MIT’s effort is an excellent resource, many on science and engineering: Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, etc..

MIT also includes the excellent: Visualizing Cultures – a gateway to seeing history through images that once had wide circulation among peoples of different times and places by John Dower (author of National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II) and Shigeru Miyagawa.

Evolution in Darwin’s Finches

“Instant” Evolution Seen in Darwin’s Finches, Study Says by Mason Inman

In 1982 the large ground finch arrived on the tiny Galápagos island of Daphne, just east of the island of San Salvador (map of the Galápagos).

Since then the medium ground finch, a long-time Daphne resident, has evolved to have a smaller beak—apparently as a result of direct competition with the larger bird for food.

Evolutionary theory had previously suggested that competition between two similar species can drive the animals to evolve in different directions.

But until now the effect had never been observed in action in the wild.
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Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary ecologist at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved with the Grants’ work.

“This study will be an instant textbook classic,” he said.