Eideard

For the second year in a row, Tokai University can lay claim to the winner’s laurels in the 2011 Veolia World Solar Challenge, a sun-powered race challenge in Australia that winds over 1,800 miles between Darwin and Adelaide using only 5 kWh of on-board energy and the rest beamed in directly from the sun. As the race’s website says, “These are arguably the most efficient electric vehicles.”

According to the provisional results…seven teams managed to go the entire 2,998 kilometer but Tokai came out on top because their average speed – 91.54 kilometers an hour – was faster than any other finisher. The Tokai’s final time was 32 hours and 45 minutes. The fact that only seven teams finished out of a starting list of 37 shows that this is not an easy race, and this year was particularly difficult thanks to brush fires (set by arsonists) along the route.

Bravo!

We have kin who have worked their butts off for similar competitions in North America – and especially appreciate the effort not only by the designers and teams; but, everyone who works to produce the competition.

Nikita Sachdeva – from Delhi – now a student at University of Chicago

Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.

But because of her 93.5 percent cumulative score on her final high school examinations, which are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges here, Ms. Mohan was rejected by the top colleges at Delhi University, better known as D.U., her family’s first choice and one of India’s top schools…

Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending American colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handful of highly selective universities are overwhelmed…

“The problem is clear,” said Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing education in India, who studied law at Harvard. “There is a demand and supply issue. You don’t have enough quality institutions, and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.”

American universities and colleges have been more than happy to pick up the slack. Faced with shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the United States and growing economic hardship among American families, they have stepped up their efforts to woo Indian students thousands of miles away…

Indians are now the second-largest foreign student population in America, after the Chinese, with almost 105,000 students in the United States in the 2009-10 academic year, the last for which comprehensive figures were available. Student visa applications from India increased 20 percent in the past year, according to the American Embassy here.

RTFA. A multipliplex of incompetence, political foolishness, unwillingness to see beyond your nose.

Young people capable of learning, acquiring skills and knowledge, of contributing to the betterment of society lose the opportunity. The barriers in either nation may differ. The result is the same.

When Jacob Barnett first learned about the Schrödinger equation for quantum mechanics, he could hardly contain himself. For three straight days, his little brain buzzed with mathematical functions.

From within his 12-year-old, mildly autistic mind, there gradually flowed long strings of pluses, minuses, funky letters and upside-down triangles — a tapestry of complicated symbols that few can understand.

He grabbed his pencil and filled every sheet of paper before grabbing a marker and filling up a dry erase board that hangs in his bedroom. With a single-minded obsession, he kept on, eventually marking up every window in the home…

Entirely normal for Jacob, a child prodigy who used to crunch his cereal while calculating the volume of the cereal box in his head…

Elementary school couldn’t keep Jacob interested. And courses at IUPUI have only served to awaken a sleeping giant.

Just a few weeks shy of his 13th birthday, Jake, as he’s often called, is starting to move beyond the level of what his professors can teach.

In fact, his work is so strong and his ideas so original that he’s being courted by a top-notch East Coast research center. IUPUI is interested in him moving from the classroom into a funded researcher’s position.

“We have told him that after this semester . . . enough of the book work. You are here to do some science,” said IUPUI physics Professor John Ross, who vows to help find some grant funding to support Jake and his work…

This is not what Jake’s parents expected from a child whose first few years were spent in silence.

“Oh my gosh, when he was 2, my fear was that he would never be in our world at all,” said Kristine Barnett, 36, Jake’s mother.

“He would not talk to anyone. He would not even look at us.”

RTFA. A delight. Not just for the tale of young Jacob; but, how his parents adapted and learned, experimented with freeing his latent abilities – sometimes regardless of the directions suggested by professional help more inclined to find the right box to put him into.

Great family story from all sides. And a young person I look forward to seeing in a larger picture someday.

Thanks, Mr. Fusion

In the old days it didn’t matter so much which journal research was published in. Now it counts for everything.

Funding bodies now award grants almost exclusively to researchers who have published in a handful of top scientific journals.

According to Peter Lawrence, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, it’s this new accounting mentality that is “corrupting” the scientific process. Professor Lawrence, who used to edit a scientific journal, and is a respected researcher himself, says “it’s a bit like judging a hospital by how quickly the telephone is answered.

“[Awarding grants] was never a very accurate process in the past. But it was done by people reading the [research] papers and determining whether it contained sparks of originality and quality of rigour and argument. Now that aim has been more or less abandoned.”

What counts now is how often the research is cited, or mentioned, by other researchers in their publications, he says. This is supposed to be a reflection of how influential a piece of research has been. But many outside the grant awarding system regard it as a crude measure.

Citations, they say, measure how fashionable and well funded a field of research is rather than its true quality…

According to Professor Lawrence: “Once you start doing that, those numbers start gaining an importance to a point where in fact the real value of the work is extinguished.”

The priority now for many career scientists is to market themselves in a way that maximises their ability to have their research published in the top journals. They spend time travelling to scientific meetings to network with colleagues who may be reviewing their work. The research itself can at times seem a secondary concern.

The only way out of this cycle of “corruption”, according to Peter Lawrence, is for grant agencies to move away from counting citations and to actually read research proposals and to judge their quality.

Kind of seems obvious doesn’t it.

Of course, that might require staff at some of the journals deeply immersed in prestige – instead of leadership in investigation – to put in quality time off the networking circuit.

Click on photo for NSFW version

People who spend a lot of time browsing the Internet are more likely to show depressive symptoms, according to the first large-scale study of its kind in the West by University of Leeds psychologists.

Researchers found striking evidence that some users have developed a compulsive internet habit, whereby they replace real-life social interaction with online chat rooms and social networking sites. The results suggest that this type of addictive surfing can have a serious impact on mental health…

“While many of us use the internet to pay bills, shop and send emails, there is a small subset of the population who find it hard to control how much time they spend online, to the point where it interferes with their daily activities.”

These ‘internet addicts‘ spent proportionately more time browsing sexually gratifying websites, online gaming sites and online communities. They also had a higher incidence of moderate to severe depression than non-addicted users.

“Our research indicates that excessive internet use is associated with depression, but what we don’t know is which comes first — are depressed people drawn to the internet or does the internet cause depression?

Having Spurs kick your butt – with Jermaine Defoe scoring a hat-trick – doesn’t help, either.

Which shows how much concern I feel over chicken v. egg studies like this.

A team of researchers working at the MR-Center of the University Children’s Hospital in Zürich has completed a pilot study using transcranial MR-guided focused ultrasound to treat 10 patients with neuropathic pain.

The origin of chronic pain in these patients included post amputation phantom limb syndrome, nerve injury, stroke, trigeminal neuralgia and post herpetic neuralgia from shingles.

“This study showed that we can perform successful operations in the depth of the brain without opening the cranium or physically penetrating the brain with medical tools, something that appeared to be unimaginable only a few years ago,” says Daniel Jeanmonod M.D., a neurosurgeon at the University of Zurich. “By eliminating any physical penetration into the brain, we hope to duplicate the therapeutic effects of invasive deep brain ablation without the side effects, and for a wider group of patients…”

“This research demonstrates that transcranial MR-guided focused ultrasound can be used non-invasively to produce small thermal ablations with extreme precision and accuracy deep in the brain,” comments Neal Kassell, M.D., a neurosurgeon at the University of Virginia, and Chairman of the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation. “It paves the way for further research into the treatment of a variety of other brain disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor, epilepsy, brain tumors and stroke.”

Any time you don’t have to poke holes in this carcass of ours is a good time.

I have a bit more confidence in ultrasound used for this procedure rather than focussed radiation.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

A Japanese university is giving away Apple’s trendy iPhone to students for free, but with a catch: the device will be used to check their attendance.

The project, which is being tested ahead of its formal launch in June, involves 550 first and second year students and some staff of a department at Aoyama Gakuin University, which is located just outside Tokyo in Sagamihara city.

The school’s iPhones are meant to create a mobile information network between students and professors, but they are also a convenient way for the teachers to take attendance in class.

As students enter the room, instead of writing their name on a sheet, they simply type in their ID number and a specific class number into an iPhone application.

To prevent students from logging in from home or outside class, the application uses GPS location data and checks which router the students have logged in to…

“With Japanese cellphones it’s possible that the location data is automatically sent. However, with the iPhone, you must always confirm before the GPS data can be sent,” Yasuhiro Iijima said…

“Up until now, we’ve been using little slips of paper to take attendance. But with a cell phone, you don’t have to spend time collecting all of those and so I think it’s quite nice,” 20-year-old student Yuki Maruya.

Bet the App Store gets some use, too.

Min-Feng Yu

Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a membrane-penetrating nanoneedle for the targeted delivery of one or more molecules into the cytoplasm or the nucleus of living cells. In addition to ferrying tiny amounts of cargo, the nanoneedle can also be used as an electrochemical probe and as an optical biosensor.

“Nanoneedle-based delivery is a powerful new tool for studying biological processes and biophysical properties at the molecular level inside living cells,” said Min-Feng Yu, an associate professor of mechanical science and engineering and corresponding author of a paper accepted for publication in Nano Letters.

In the paper, Yu and collaborators describe how they deliver, detect and track individual fluorescent quantum dots in a cell’s cytoplasm and nucleus. The quantum dots can be used for studying molecular mechanics and physical properties inside cells…

With a diameter of approximately 50 nanometers, the nanoneedle introduces minimal intrusiveness in penetrating cell membranes and accessing the interiors of live cells…

“Combined with molecular targeting strategies using quantum dots and magnetic nanoparticles as molecular probes, the nanoneedle delivery method can potentially enable the simultaneous observation and manipulation of individual molecules,” said Ning Wang, a MechSE professor and a co-author of the paper…

“Nanoneedles can be used as electrochemical probes and as optical biosensors to study cellular environments, stimulate certain types of biological sequences, and examine the effect of nanoparticles on cellular physiology.”

Wow! As screwed-up as our education system is at the grassroots level, at least the realm of higher studies remains sufficiently advanced to attract the best and brightest.

If we could only figure out how to carry this obvious capacity down to our high schools and all undergraduate institutions.

The University of Washington has surpassed its 2-year-old world record for operating a glider under the ice, this time by successfully operating one of its seagliders for six months as it made round trips hundreds of miles in length under the ice at Davis Strait.

The result contributes to the longest continuous measurement of fresh water exiting the Arctic through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Davis Strait and into the Labrador Sea.

Scientists worry that climate change may increase the amount of fresh water so much that it impacts the formation of very dense water in the Labrador Sea. That dense, cold water is a critical component driving the circulation of the world’s oceans, according to Craig Lee, a principal oceanographer with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory…

Seagliders developed by the UW School of Oceanography and Applied Physics Laboratory are small, reusable underwater vehicles meant to operate on their own, gliding without propellers from the surface to as deep as 1,000 meters, or 3,300 feet, while collecting such information as temperature, salinity and level of dissolved oxygen. When seagliders are at the ocean surface they can be commanded remotely from nearly anywhere in the world via the Internet and can transmit their data via satellite telephone. Unlike faster-moving propeller-driven autonomous underwater vehicles, which may need to be retrieved by ships only days after being deployed, UW seagliders can operate on their own for months at a time…

In the latest deployment, two Applied Physics Laboratory seagliders went into the water Sept. 5…One operated for 25 weeks, spending 51 days and traveling more than 450 miles under the ice, before being collected Feb. 26 by the Danish Navy. During under-ice operations, the glider periodically sought small openings in the ice cover and succeeded in surfacing 10 times to transmit data. It made two round trips under the ice of about 230 miles each…

RTFA. Lots of interesting news and design discussion. Fascinating stuff.

If you answered “Catholic” – you’d be correct.

Daylife/Getty Images

President Obama will speak at Notre Dame’s commencement on May 17. That is an honor to some, but an outrage to others.

Some alumni have called the campus saying they have thrown away their Fighting Irish sweatshirts in disgust. The local bishop, John D’Arcy, has vowed to boycott the graduation ceremony. A visiting high school senior, Halley Chavey, who said she was thrilled just weeks ago to be accepted here, said she might reject the offer because the college was hosting “the most pro-abortion president we’ve ever had…”

“Most of us are like, ‘Wow, the president of the United States is coming,’ ” said Brett Ensor, a Texas native who belongs to the Knights of Columbus, opposes abortion and voted for Mr. Obama’s Republican opponent, Senator John McCain. “What college wouldn’t want Obama to come? This is a tremendous honor for us…”

Notre Dame is regarded as an academic powerhouse and conservative Catholic bastion. But in a mock election here in November, Mr. Obama defeated Mr. McCain among students by about 11 percentage points. He won roughly the same margin of victory among Catholic voters in the national election…

In the view of the Rev. Richard McBrien, a prominent liberal theologian at Notre Dame, the commotion over Mr. Obama centers not on faith, but on politics.

“This crowd,” Mr. McBrien said, referring to conservative Catholics, “are simply Republicans who are upset that Obama won the election — and they want to pick a fight.”

Pretty accurate characterization of American Catholics in the article. Including their divergence from monocultural obedience as practiced by the Vatican. If this was a Catholic university in Italy, the invitation would never have been allowed.