Tag Archives: Research

Chinese Engineering Innovation Plan

Self-innovation has become a top priority to advance science and technology in China. Chinese President Hu Jintao launched the drive to build China into a self-innovative country by the end of 2020 early this year during the first national science and technology conference in the 21st century.
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Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice minister of Nat’l Development & Reform Comm., said: “In the next five years, the central government will set up 100 state-level engineering laboratories and push for the construction of 50 state engineering project research centers in the fields of the Internet, coal mine gas monitoring and digital equipment. These moves will help build technological centers in several hundred large-scale enterprises in various sectors.”

Better Way To Desalinate Water

NJIT Professor Discovers Better Way To Desalinate Water – NJIT broke the link to their press release so I removed it 🙁 A university breaking news release web link, sigh. At least far fewer web sites are run by pointy haired bosses that don’t understand extremely basic rules like web pages must live forever.

Chemical engineer Kamalesh Sirkar, PhD, a distinguished professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and an expert in membrane separation technology, is leading a team of researchers to develop a breakthrough method to desalinate water. Sirkar, who holds more than 20 patents in the field of membrane separation, said that using his technology, engineers will be able to recover water from brines with the highest salt concentrations.

Phony Science Gap?

A Phony Science Gap? by Robert Samuelson:

And the American figures excluded computer science graduates. Adjusted for these differences, the U.S. degrees jump to 222,335. Per million people, the United States graduates slightly more engineers with four-year degrees than China and three times as many as India. The U.S. leads are greater for lesser degrees.

It is good to see more people using the data from the Duke study we have mentioned previously: USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates – Filling the Engineering Gap. However, I think he misses a big change. It seems to me that the absolute number of graduates each year is the bigger story than that the United States has not lost the percentage of population rate of science and engineering graduates yet. China significantly exceeds the US and that India is close to the US currently in science and engineering graduates. And the trend is dramatically in favor of those countries.

There has been a Science gap between the United States and the rest of the world. That gap has been between the USA, in the lead, and the rest. That gap has been shrinking for at least 10 years and most likely closer to 20. The rate of the decline in that gap has been increasing and seems likely to continue in that direction.

Despite an eroding manufacturing base and the threat of “offshoring” of some technical services, there’s a rising demand for science and engineering skills. That may explain higher enrollments and why this “crisis” — like the missile gap — may be phony.

I wonder what eroding manufacturing base he is referring to? The United States is the world’s largest manufacturer. The United States continues to increase its share of the world manufacturing and increase, incrementally year over year. Yes manufacturing employment has been declining (though manufacturing employment has declined far less in the United States than in China). Granted China has been growing tremendously quickly, but they are still far behind the United States in manufacturing output.
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MIT Energy Storage Using Carbon Nanotubes

Images of different types of carbon nanotubes

MIT Researchers Fired up Over New Battery

Image / Michael StrÃ¶ck, Images of different types of carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are key to MIT researchers’ efforts to improve on an energy storage device called an ultracapacitor. Larger image

Work at MIT’s Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) holds out the promise of the first technologically significant and economically viable alternative to conventional batteries in more than 200 years.
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The LEES ultracapacitor has the capacity to overcome this energy limitation by using vertically aligned, single-wall carbon nanotubes — one thirty-thousandth the diameter of a human hair and 100,000 times as long as they are wide. How does it work? Storage capacity in an ultracapacitor is proportional to the surface area of the electrodes. Today’s ultracapacitors use electrodes made of activated carbon, which is extremely porous and therefore has a very large surface area. However, the pores in the carbon are irregular in size and shape, which reduces efficiency. The vertically aligned nanotubes in the LEES ultracapacitor have a regular shape, and a size that is only several atomic diameters in width. The result is a significantly more effective surface area, which equates to significantly increased storage capacity.

Soil Could Shed Light on Antibiotic Resistance

Soil Could Shed Light on Antibiotic Resistance, Science Friday podcast (7 minutes) from NPR. The podcast is an interview with Gerry Wright, McMaster University, Canada.

“New research points to drug resistance in soil-dwelling bacteria. Scientists say studying bacteria in the soil can help in understanding how the bacteria in humans develop resistance.”

Posts relating to antibiotics
Overuse of anitbiotics articles
Curious Cat McMaster University Alumni Connections

Self-Assembling Cubes Could Deliver Medicine

Nanocubes photos

Tiny Self-Assembling Cubes Could Carry Medicine, Cell Therapy – News Release from Johns Hopkins (pdf format)

Details of photos: “Scanning electron microscopy images of image of (A) a hollow, open surfaced, biocontainer, and (B) a device loaded with glass microbeads. (C) Fluorescence microscopy images of a biocontainer loaded with cell-ECM-agarose with the cell viability stain, Calcein-AM. (D) Release of viable cells from the biocontainer.”

Johns Hopkins researchers have devised a self- assembling cube-shaped perforated container, no larger than a dust speck, that could serve as a delivery system for medications and cell therapy.

When the process is completed, they form a perforated cube. When the solution is cooled, the solder hardens again, and the containers remain in their box-like shape.

“To make sure it folds itself exactly into a cube, we have to engineer the hinges very precisely,” Gracias said. “The self-assembly technique allows us to make a large number of these microcontainers at the same time and at a relatively low cost.”

Gracias and his colleagues used micropipettes to insert into the cubes a suspension containing microbeads that are commonly used in cell therapy. The lab team showed that these beads could be released from the cubes through agitation. The researchers also inserted human cells, similar to the type used in medical therapy, into the cubes. A positive stain test showed that these cells remained alive in the microcontainers and could easily be released.

And they are “always on the lookout for exceptional and highly creative undergraduate, graduate students and post-doctoral candidates” – maybe you.