The Art and Science of Imaging

Cancer Cell

The Art of Imaging from Invitrogen (via Molecular Probes’ protocols for pretty pictures). See interesting images and details on exactly how to scientists create such images.

image: -catenin in HeLa human cervical cancer cells was labeled using mouse anti–catenin and visualized with Alexa Fluor 488 goat anti-mouse IgG (green). Filamentous actin was visualized using red-fluorescent Alexa Fluor 635 phalloidin. Nuclear DNA was stained with blue-fluorescent DAPI. Larger photo and more details

The image gallery includes many more images.

Drilling to the Center of the Earth

The Deepest Hole by Alan Bellows:

In the 1960s the Soviet Union began a project to drill through the upper crust of the earth to reach the “mysterious area where the crust and mantle intermingle.” That project continued over 4 decades but they never were able to succeed. In order to drill at the depths they did reach they needed to engineer new drilling techniques.

Inside the project’s 200-foot-tall enclosure resides a unique drilling apparatus. Most deep-drilling rigs use a rotating shaft to bore through the ground– using a series of extensions which are incrementally added as the hole grows deeper– but such a method was unworkable with a hole as deep as Kola was planned to be. To overcome this, the Russian researchers devised a solution where only the drill bit at the end of the shaft was rotated. They accomplished this by forcing the pressurized “drilling mud”– the lubricant pumped down the drill shaft– through the specially-designed drill bit to cause it to spin.

Rare “Rainbow” Over Idaho

Rainbow like clouds

Rare “Rainbow” Spotted Over Idaho by Victoria Gilman:

The arc isn’t a rainbow in the traditional sense—it is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. The sight occurs only when the sun is very high in the sky (more than 58° above the horizon). What’s more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground.

When light enters through a vertical side face of such an ice crystal and leaves from the bottom face, it refracts, or bends, in the same way that light passes through a prism. If a cirrus’s crystals are aligned just right, the whole cloud lights up in a spectrum of colors.

Arctic Seed Vault

Work begins on Arctic seed vault:

More than 100 countries have backed the vault, which will store seeds, packaged in foil, at sub-zero temperatures.
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The vault’s purpose is to ensure survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change; and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out.

At temperatures of minus 18C (minus 0.4F), the seeds could last hundreds, even thousands, of years. Even if all cooling systems failed, explained Mr Riis-Johansen, the temperature in the frozen mountain would never rise above freezing due to the permafrost on the mountainside.

Bill Gates Interview from 1993

Bill Gates Interview by David Allison, Smithsonian Institution, 1993. For those interested in the early development of the personal computer and Microsoft this is an interesting interview. Bill Gates:

There were a lot of mis-steps in the early days, but because we got in early we got to make more mistakes than other people. I had customers who went bankrupt and didn’t pay us. Customers who we spent a lot of time with who never built microcomputer-based machines.
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There was another interpretive language called FOCAL that we’d written a version of for the 8080 and 6502. Having two interpretive languages like that was not a good approach. That was a dead-end project. Everything else, COBOL, FORTRAN, the way we selected the various chips…
Multiplan, targeting the 8-bit machines instead of just relying on the next generation to come, the IBM PC generation, that was a huge error. When we talk about, “Are we aiming too low, in terms of system requirements, we often think, is this another case like Multiplan?” Because it was a great product, but it was the basic strategy that was wrong. And, in fact, to some degree that allowed me to make one of the best decisions I ever did, which was later, when we had to compete with 1-2-3. There was a question of whether to do it in the character-mode environment, or whether to move up to the next generation, which was graphical. And we said, “Okay, we’ll let them dominate the DOS-character world. We are going after Mac and Windows. We are going to be a generation ahead.” And that worked out very well. Multiplan was certainly an experience that was helpful there.

Robot Football (Soccer)

In addition to the World Cup another international football event is taking place in Germany this month: RoboCup 2006

Researcher Founds a Robot Soccer Dynasty (including video webcast):

RoboCup is an international project to foster advances in artificial intelligence and intelligent robotics research. The ultimate goal of RoboCup is to develop, by 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can beat the human world champion soccer team. Veloso and Carnegie Mellon have been participating since “pre-RoboCup” events in 1996 and the first official RoboCup games in 1997. Veloso was general chair of RoboCup 2001 in Seattle.

Gecko Tape

Gecko TapeSticking Around with Gecko Tape:

The tape is a simple version of the adhesive on a gecko’s feet. The soles of the lizard’s feet are covered with millions of tiny little hairs, too small to see with the naked eye. The molecules in these hairs snuggle up to the molecules of any surface the gecko walks on. The molecules are attracted to each other, forming a temporary bond that keeps the gecko firmly in place.

Also see, Caught on tape: Gecko-inspired adhesive is superstrong, for more details.

Photo: An array of tiny plastic pegs mimics the microscopic structure of a gecko’s sticky sole.

MIT Hosts Student Vehicle Design Summit

Solar concept car drawing

Student summit set on vehicle design by Deborah Halbe

Seventy-three students from 21 universities around the world will gather at MIT this summer to design and build between five and 10 commuter vehicles that exploit human power, biofuels, solar technologies and fuel cells to travel at least 500 miles per gallon of fuel.
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An added goal for the June 13-Aug. 13 program is to lay a foundation for ongoing multidisciplinary transportation research involving all five MIT schools. “We hope to create a project-based, socially conscious engineering curriculum for the ’06-’07 academic year,” said Anna S. Jaffe, a junior in civil and environmental engineering and one of the summit student organizers.

Image by Mitchell Joachim and William Lark, sketch of a concept solar car was created for the MIT Vehicle Design Summit.

Malaysia Looking to Learn from India

Lessons from India’s Success in IT Industry

Infosys alone has hired 300,000 fresh engineering graduates in the various disciplines so far this year and plans to take in another 140,000.

They will undergo a 14-month IT course designed to meet the current requirements of the relevant industries.

The numbers of new hires is amazing (update – see comments, in fact the numbers are not for Infosys. According to Bloomberg:

India’s biggest software makers, hired about 229,000 workers in India in the year to March 31, according to National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom. Tata Consultancy plans to add 30,500 jobs this year and Infosys 25,000, the companies said separately in April.).

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Scientific Illiteracy

Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology by Liza Gross, Public Library of Science:

Since 1979, the proportion of scientifically literate adults has doubled—to a paltry 17%. The rest are not savvy enough to understand the science section of The New York Times or other science media pitched at a similar level. As disgracefully low as the rate of adult scientific literacy in the United States may be, Miller found even lower rates in Canada, Europe, and Japan—a result he attributes primarily to lower university enrollments.

While the 17% figure does not amaze me I am surprised that the scientific literacy has doubled since 1979.

A comparison of science education achievement: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (TIMSS), Average science scale scores of eighth-grade students, by country (2003), top 13 shown below:
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