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August 24th, 2010ASME Response to the Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
August 16th, 2010ASME joins the engineering and technology community in expressing its deep concern for the situation in the Gulf of Mexico resulting from the explosion that occurred on the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig on April 20, 2010. Our sincere sympathies go out to the families and colleagues of the workers that lost their lives and more that were injured in this tragedy and to the communities being impacted.
As ASME continues to monitor news on the efforts to contain the oil flow from the damaged undersea well, the Society will make every effort to support the dissemination and discussion of the facts and available technical information related to this incident.
At appropriate times in the future, ASME plans to convene experts and leaders from the offshore technology community to participate in special sessions to discuss the technical issues associated with deepwater drilling. During upcoming conferences and other venues, ASME plans to host discussions on key issues such as lessons learned, best practices and ways to improve risk management processes.
While news surrounding this tragic incident continues to unfold, ASME will remain committed to making meaningful contributions to the Energy Grand Challenge, in the United States and throughout the world, by optimizing its volunteers and staff resources and by partnering with other organizations.
To read selected articles by ASME click here
asme.org 16 August 2010 http://www.asme.org/NewsPublicPolicy/Response_Oil_Spill_Gulf.cfm
ICE urges Government to reconsider UK aviation development plans in new report
August 11th, 2010Engineering experts have urged the Government to rethink its plans for UK aviation and airport infrastructure development, including its decision to ban new runways at the country’s busiest airports.
In a new report published today, Rethinking Aviation, ICE warns that a ‘better not bigger’ approach to airport runway capacity could seriously undermine the UK’s global connectivity and competitiveness, and see us lagging behind North European rivals that have been boosting their hub runway capacity at a considerable rate.
The ICE report acknowledges that the Government has ruled out building additional runway capacity in the South East as part of the aim to reduce aviation emissions, and agrees that unrestrained growth in demand for air travel without quick improvements in aircraft efficiency would damage the environment and needs addressing. But it urges Government to think carefully about the UK ’s long-term airport infrastructure needs and the wider implications of its decision.
ICE Aviation Expert, Simon Godfrey-Arnold, said: “We agree the green agenda must be priority, and realise that when it comes to the UK ’s airport infrastructure needs, there are some tough political and public choices. But we believe there are choices that can secure the best outcomes for the environment, society and the economy.
Click HERE to read the entire article…
ice.org.uk 11 August 2010 http://www.ice.org.uk/News-Public-Affairs/ICE-News/ICE-urges-Government-to-reconsider-UK-aviation-dev
MIT’s OpenCourseWare, Viewed by Millions Worldwide, Wins Science SPORE Prize
August 2nd, 2010When MIT made a formal decision in the year 2000 to publish their course materials on the Internet, MIT alumni could have been miffed. Here was the institution’s renowned curriculum—previously accessible to students who paid for it with their tuition and hard-won academic achievement—being offered to anyone with a computer.
The executive director of the MIT OpenCourseWare program that manages publication of the curriculum, who herself is an alumna of MIT and the daughter of two more MIT graduates, says she and her former classmates were thrilled.
“We were really, really proud of MIT for doing this,” Cecilia d’Oliveira says. “Basically, we were leveraging what MIT does and making it more available to more people.”
Today, the biggest donors to the OpenCourseWare Web site are MIT alumni, and the average number of visitors each month is more than 1.5 million.
Because of its enormous success as a science and engineering education tool, MIT OpenCourseWare has been selected to receive the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education, or SPORE. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
Click HERE to read the entire article…
aaas.org 1 Augusts 2010 http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2010/0729spore_mit.shtml?sa_campaign=Internal_Ads/AAAS/AAAS_News/2010-04-13/jump_page
Longest living amphibians, salamanders, may hold secrets to elixir of life
July 27th, 2010Washington, DC: A small cave salamander, dubbed “the human fish” because of its human-like skin tone, has broken the world’s record for longest-lived amphibian—a discovery, according to researchers, could unravel secrets of elixir of life.
Also called olm and Proteus, the salamander, which can live to over 100, is endangered, but reaches such advanced ages in zoos and protected environments.
Future studies on this amphibian might shed light on what promotes longevity in the animal kingdom.
“Among amphibians the human fish is clearly the most long-lived species,” Discovery News quoted lead author Yann Voituron as saying.
Voituron, a professor at Claude Bernard Lyon University, and his team calculated growth rates, generation times and the lifespan of olms living in a cave at Moulis, Saint-Girons, France.
Since the 1950s, conservationists have established a breeding program there for the threatened salamanders.
In addition to determining the lifespan of the cave salamanders, the researchers found that this species becomes sexually mature at around age 16 and lays, on average, 35 eggs every 12.5 years.
Click HERE to read the entire article…
dnaindia.com 27 July 2010 http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_longest-living-amphibians-salamanders-may-hold-secrets-to-elixir-of-life_1413158
Nature’s Recourse
July 21st, 2010Nature has a shifty side. Bees cheat flowers. Flowers cheat bees. Fish cheat other fish, and so on. The more biologists look, the more skulduggery turns up.
In this sense, cheating means pretty much what it does among people, says evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers of VU University Amsterdam: One party exploits another, taking more than its fair share or happily reaping benefits without paying the costs. “There is always that one person that orders the most expensive meal on the menu and then insists on splitting the bill evenly,” Kiers says.
Diners in nature don’t always mind their manners, either. A bee that bites through a flower wall for a long, sweet drink of nectar but doesn’t reciprocate by moving pollen, for instance, has cheated the plant. Such nectar snatches violate an evolutionarily ancient arrangement of trading food for pollination.
No outraged tablemates crack down on freeloaders in the wild. Yet, Kiers says, “Nature has its own tools.” These safeguards help keep pollinators pollinating and many other vital, two-partner biological processes humming along.
Theorists have long predicted that such anti-exploitation measures would have evolved. Now a burst of studies are revealing how real organisms cope with cheating. Most dramatic are the lethal punishments enacted by otherwise harmless-looking partners. “Plants can be brutal,” Kiers notes. Other creatures deliver sanctions that aren’t so harsh, or instead switch partners when things don’t work out. And in some cases of natural larceny, the cheating amounts to an annoyance that is easier to live with than to fight.
Click HERE to read the entire article…
sciencenews.org 21 July 2010 http://sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/61138/title/Nature’s_recourse
How are sadness and happiness like diseases? They’re infectious, study finds
July 14th, 2010Is sadness a sickness? It appears to spread like one, a new study has found.
Researchers at Harvard University and MIT wanted to see if a mathematical model developed to track and predict the spread of infectious diseases such as SARS and foot-and-mouth disease could also apply to the spread of happiness — and found that it worked.
They used data collected from 1,880 subjects in the Framingham Heart Study, a long-term research effort that has followed subjects since 1948 (and added some new ones along the way), giving them physical and emotional exams every two years. At each visit, subjects were classified as content, discontent or neutral. The researchers monitored how these emotional states changed over time and how these changes depended on the emotions of the people with whom the participants came into contact.
When the information was put into a traditional infectious-disease simulation, slightly modified to reflect the unique qualities of emotional spread rather than actual disease, the researchers found a correlation between an individual’s emotional state and those of the person’s contacts.
In other words, it appears that you can catch happiness. Or sadness. Moreover, the “recovery time” doesn’t depend on your contacts at all, which is a hallmark of diseases but surprising in an emotional context, since continuing contact with happy or sad people could be expected to affect one’s emotional state even after the initial “infection.”
Click HERE to read the entire article…
latimes.com 14 July 2010 http://www.latimes.com/news/health/la-heb-sadness-happiness-infectious-diseases-20100708,0,3088234.story
Graduate students win prizes for scholarly paper submissions
June 17th, 2010In order to recognize and encourage excellence in applied mathematics and computational science, SIAM awards at its annual meeting up to three prizes for submissions to the SIAM Student Paper Competition. Papers considered for the award must have been submitted for publication prior to the contest by students in pursuit of PhD degrees.
Selection is based on caliber and content of each student’s contribution to the paper. This year’s selection committee, comprising Kelly Black, John Geddes, and Reza Malek-Madani, was chaired by SIAM Vice President for Education Peter Turner.
Recipients of the 2010 SIAM Student Paper Prize include Bubacarr Bah of the University of Edinburgh, Russell Carden of Rice University, and Karin Leiderman of the University of Utah.
Bubacarr Bah’s winning paper, “Improved Restricted Isometry Constant Bounds for Gaussian Matrices” explores a relatively new area of random matrix theory, providing a derivation for the smallest known bounds on Restricted Isometry Constants for large rectangular matrices. The paper, which was co-authored with his PhD advisor, Professor Jared Tanner, is a quantitative assessment and accounts for interdependencies between submatrices. Bah is currently Vice President of SIAM’s Edinburgh chapter, the second student chapter in the UK, which he helped found.
Russell Carden’s research sheds light on the structure of the field of values associated with matrices, and devises an algorithm to solve the inverse field of values problem. Titled “A Simple Algorithm for the Inverse Field of Values Problem,” Carden’s paper solves the problem in the two-dimensional case and offers a simpler deterministic approach than that proposed in the field previously. Carden is pursuing a PhD in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University under the supervision of Professor Mark Embree.
siam.org 17 June 2010 http://siam.org/publicawareness/panews.php?id=1744
Click HERE to read the entire article…
Thieme’s Atlas of Anatomy Sample Content Now Available for iPad
June 7th, 2010New York/Stuttgart – Thieme Publishers announced today that a free sampling of anatomy illustrations and clinical content from the bestselling Atlas of Anatomy is now available for use on iPad, via the newly released modalityBODY App. This sampler highlights the exquisite illustrations and unique features of the Atlas, including schematics, multiple image views, muscle facts, and radiographs. More of Thieme’s award-winning anatomy content will be available for In-App purchase within modalityBODY in the coming weeks.
“Thieme’s Atlas of Anatomy and related products have received rave reviews from students and teachers alike,” says Anne Vinnicombe, Thieme vice-president and director of educational publishing. “We are excited to see them become available for iPad users.”
The free modalityBODY App, created by Modality, Inc., offers a groundbreaking anatomy and medical image reference and training solution for health sciences professionals.
“The iPad is a revolutionary device for showcasing the work of our artists, authors, and editors,” according to Vinnicombe. “Thieme customers have come to expect exceptional interactive adaptations of our products, such as WinkingSkull.com and the Thieme Teaching Assistant web-based products. The modalityBODY application adds a compelling mobile dimension to our anatomy content.”
To read full article click HERE…
thieme.com 7 June 2010 http://www.thieme.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=280:the-definitive-reference-for-pediatric-epilepsy-surgery&catid=73:2010&Itemid=91
New American Chemical Society video podcast examines making plastics without oil
June 4th, 2010WASHINGTON, May 25, 2010 –— With the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and growing concern about the global oil supply, the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) latest ChemMatters video podcast couldn’t have a timelier topic: Using food crops instead of petroleum to make plastics.
The high-definition video podcast, entitled “Plastics Go Green,” is based on an article about bioplastics featured in ChemMatters, the ACS’ award-winning high school chemistry magazine. It is available at www.bytesizescience.com and on the Bytesize Science podcast on iTunes.
Viewers can expect an entertaining and educational saga about an important facet of green chemistry. The episode explains how scientists are making plastics with sugar from corn, sugar cane or sugar beets as a substitute for oil. These natural, renewable crops make bioplastic production more environmentally friendly than traditional plastics manufacturing as well as save petroleum.
ChemMatters has been demystifying the chemistry in our everyday lives for more than 25 years. Released quarterly, each issue contains readable articles about the chemistry used in everyday life, and is of interest to high school students and their teachers.
portal.acs.org 4 June 2010 http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=CNBP_024971&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=c627bed3-9c6d-4e8a-926f-bbde0c6839ee
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