Nanowired at Berkeley

Nanowires

Photo: Cross-sectional scanning electron micrograph image of vertically-grown silicon nanowires off of a silicon substrate. (courtesy the researchers)

Nanowired by David Pescovitz:

“We’re attacking three fundamental issues,” Yang says. “Can we make these building blocks of nanodevices? Can we identify and harness useful physical properties in them? And can we integrate them in parallel? Individual devices are fundamentally interesting. But more importantly, we need massive numbers of them to work together as one system.”
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The researchers demonstrated that minute voltages could control the flow of ions through the nanoscale plumbing system. In the future, the same technique might be used to shuttle proteins or pieces of DNA from a biological sample through the tubes in a lab-on-a-chip. Yang is currently developing a technique to conduct optical sensing within the nanofluidic channels so that the whole lab is self-contained in one device.

What Makes People Successful?

A Star Is Made – The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt (authors of Freakonomics (an interesting book):

If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4 players born in the last three.

Why? Read the article by the Freakonomics authors for an explanation. In reading the article you get an example of why scientific thought is so important. The data can lead to all sort of conclusions, the article offers several:

a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania

The ability to examine such questions effectively is one of the benefits of learning to think scientifically. Then we can find sensible explanations instead of accepting crazy explanations. In this case the scientist, Anders Ericsson, is looking to learn how people become successful in a field. He concludes we far overestimate talent and far underestimate training and desire.

More information on the topic of the article from the Freakonomics web site.

Electron Clouds

From my favorite science teacher blog, Ms. Frizzle, the Electron Cloud Analogy:

Okay, so suppose we wanted to draw a map of where Tiana is at 10 am on a Wednesday. We could draw the school, because we know exactly where that is, and we could draw this classroom inside the school. But how do we show where Tiana is? Is she always in exactly the same place at that time? No…. but we know where she is most likely to be: in this classroom, in science class, in her seat. But she sometimes changes seats, or gets up and moves to a different part of the classroom. And once in a while, she leaves the room
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This is kind of like the electron cloud diagram – the darker areas tell you that the electrons are more likely to be there, although we don’t know that for absolutely certain, and the lighter areas are places where electrons could be, but more rarely.

Learning science from Ms. Frizzle sure seems like it would be fun.

Score One for Sports Science

Score one for science (link broken so removed)

Bray has analyzed memorable games over the past 50 years and applied research in physics, biology, computing and psychology to the beautiful game.

Using biomechanics to calculate the absolute reach of a goalkeeper diving to try to save a penalty, Bray has identified an area near the posts and in the top corners where the goalkeeper cannot reach as the “unsaveable zone.”

“If a player were to place the ball in those regions, which are 28-30 percent of the goal area, there is not a sniff that the goalkeeper can do to get across to them,” explained Bray, from the University of Bath in England.

Related posts:

America’s Technology Advantage Slipping

A Red Flag In The Brain Game.

The 30th Annual ACM-ICPC World Finals sponsored by IBM were held in San Antonio this April: view results.

Of the home teams, only Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked among the 12 highest finishers. Most top spots were seized by teams from Eastern Europe and Asia. Until the late 1990s, U.S. teams dominated these contests. But the tide has turned. Last year not one was in the top dozen.

As an indicator this is a minor one. But it is one more indication that indeed the tide is turning. The results seem worse based on “The 83 teams who competed in the World Finals are made up of 22 North American teams, 3 teams from Africa/Middle East, 7 from Latin America, 22 from Europe and Russia, and 29 from the Asia/South Pacific region.” So the USA had close to 20% of the participants and only 1 of the top 38 teams (Canada had at least 4 in the top 38). The USA had 5 of the 17 teams tied for 39th place.

The poor showings should serve as a wake-up call for government, industry, and educators. The output of American computer science programs is plummeting, even while that of Eastern European and Asian schools is rising. China and India, the new global tech powerhouses, are fueled by 900,000 engineering graduates of all types each year, more than triple the number of U.S. grads. Computer science is a key subset of engineering. “If our talent base weakens, our lead in technology, business, and economics will fade faster than any of us can imagine,” warns Richard Florida, a professor at George Mason University and author of The Flight of the Creative Class.

Again results of two years of this programming challenge are hardly a significant indication. Still if there was any field that Americans felt they still felt they were dominant in it would likely be programing (maybe health care – what do you think?). Given that this seemed at least worth a post in our blog.

It is also interesting to note, this Business Week article uses the “China and India, the new global tech powerhouses, are fueled by 900,000 engineering graduates of all types each year, more than triple the number of U.S. grads.” stats even though this article specifically tracks a Duke team and Business Week published several articles on the Duke study, USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates, that refutes those numbers.

Related Posts:

Invention Machine

John Koza Has Built an Invention Machine by Jonathon Keats:

Now 62 and an adjunct professor at Stanford University, Koza is the inventor of genetic programming, a revolutionary approach to artificial intelligence (AI) capable of solving complex engineering problems with virtually no human guidance. Koza’s 1,000 networked computers don’t just follow a preordained routine. They create, growing new and unexpected designs out of the most basic code. They are computers that innovate, that find solutions not only equal to but better than the best work of expert humans. His “invention machine,” as he likes to call it, has even earned a U.S. patent for developing a system to make factories more efficient, one of the first intellectual-property protections ever granted to a nonhuman designer.

Yet as impressive as these creations may be, none are half as significant as the machine’s method: Darwinian evolution, the process of natural selection. Over and over, bits of computer code are, essentially, procreating. And over the course of hundreds or thousands of generations, that code evolves into offspring so well-adapted for its designated job that it is demonstrably superior to anything we can imagine.

Great article from Popular Science magazine.

Home Page of John R. Koza. His latest book: Genetic Programming IV: Routine Human-Competitive Machine Intelligence by John R. Koza, Martin A. Keane, Matthew J. Streeter, William Mydlowec, Jessen Yu and Guido Lanza.

Previous posts on popular science articles: Bannanas Going Going Gone and Colored Bubbles.

USA Innovation Lead Challenged

U.S. Tech Lead Challenged by Globalization of Innovation by George Leopold

The exodus of much software development has proven to be a lightning rod in the U.S. debate over outsourcing. But an expert at the symposium said the U.S. remains the clear innovation leader in terms of patents. Chris Forman of Carnegie Mellon University said software services are being outsourced, mostly to India, while innovative database and office automation software continues to be written here.

That could change, however, if the steady decline in federal research dollars continues along with the decline in U.S. computer science graduates, Forman said.

For now, the experts concluded, America retains the keys to innovation. The question, they added, is for how long?

Related:

Mistake Driven Engineering

Book Cover graphic - Success Through Failure

Engineering a Safer, More Beautiful World, One Failure at a Time by Cornelia Dean:

Success masks failure. The more a thing operates successfully, the more confidence we have in it. So we dismiss little failures — like the repeated loss of a space shuttle’s insulating tiles launchings — as trivial annoyances rather than preludes to catastrophe.

Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design by Henry Petroski – read a sample chapter (from Princeton University Press):

Sometimes, as when a part breaks in two, the focal point for the improvement is obvious. Other times, such as when a complex system runs disappointingly slowly, the way to speed it up may be far from clear. In all cases, however, the beginnings of a solution lay in isolating the cause of the failure and in focusing on how to avoid, obviate, remove, or circumvent it. Inventors, engineers, designers, and common users take up such problems all the time.

Related:

Wallaby Milk Cure

Fighting Superbugs with Milk

Cocks has found that the mother’s milk contains a molecule that is 100 times more effective against Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli than the most potent form of penicillin. The molecule, called AGG01, also kills four types of Gram-positive bacteria and one type of fungus. The work was presented at the US Biotechnology Industry Organization 2006 meeting in Chicago last week.