April 2006 Archives

For this week's Friday Five, we offer up five interesting research tidbits with no direct connection to UMR. We found them, of course, on the Internet.

1. How far can you drive on a bushel of corn? This Popular Mechanics article looks at what it would cost to drive from New York to California in a Honda Civil. PM crunched the numbers (PDF), looking at mileage and current costs, and found that gasoline is still the best deal for consumers. Of course, as SciGuy (where we found this story) points out, you can't buy hydrogen, compressed natural gas or other alternative fuels at your local gas station. Plus, it would take a ton of coal to get from New York to L.A.

2. Artificial bug eyes. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have created a series of artificial compound eyes. Using the eyes of insects, such as dragonflies and houseflies, the bioengineering researchers created eyes that may one day be used as cameras or sensory detectors that have a wider field of vision than even the best fish-eye lens.

3. A rock for the ages. From Seed magazine's review of the week in science comes news that the University of Alberta has acquired the Tagish Lake Meteorite -- the only frozen, uncontaminated meteorite in the world. The meteorite was discovered in 2000 after it landed on the frozen surface of Tagish Lake in northern British Columbia. Scientists at the Alberta say the meteorite "will provide an invaluable record of the matter present during the solar system's formation 4.57 billion years ago," Seed reports.

4. A new look at the world. Just for grins, check out NASA's Earth Observatory. The site hosts global data visualizations that can be customized into downloadable animations. Link via Future Feeder.

5. Soon, they'll probably be blogging. Scientists report in Nature that songbirds can do more than sing. They can be taught grammar. "Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language."
   

UMR's Chem-E Car Team grabbed a few moments of fame this morning, at least in KY3's Springfield, Mo., market area. Click here to see the car, powered by magnesium and acid, in action. Read more the project here.

UMR physicists have developed a process to embed tiny particles of semiconducting materials into an ultra-lightweight material, called an aerogel. That in itself is pretty cool. But what's even cooler is that these quantum dots -- semiconducting specks only a few nanometers in diameter -- also emit and absorb light. At the same time.

Massimo Bertino, an associate professor of physics at UMR, is leading the team of researchers developing this method of embedding quantum dots into aerogel surfaces. Recently, Bertino demonstrated the method by embedding a miniature version of the UMR wordmark into an aerogel surface. The photo, taken by UMR graphic designer/photographer Ian Nance, shows how the dots emit light.

Traditional and molecular techniques for describing fungi in streams... A neural network based approach to elephant migration prediction... Why fathers are important to the understanding of drinking behaviors... Skeletal morphology of Blanchard’s cricket frog... This is just a sampling of topics from UMR's 2006 Undergraduate Research Conference. The best student researchers took home $750 bucks each for their prize-winning work.

HGTV is planning to come to Rolla next month to shoot an episode of Small Space, Big Style. The idea is to film UMR student Natalie McDonald in her living environment -- she happens to rent a solar house built for the 2003 Solar Decathlon. We'll let you know when programming plans are announced.

Video from UMR's testing of safe houses will hit TV screens in Springfield, Mo., this evening. Angie Weidinger interviews DJ Belarbi about the large missile tests for the story, which will air tonight on KSFX News at 9 and on KOLR-10 News at 10.

The UMR First Responder Design Team talks with TechnoFiles this month about its win over Georgia Institute of Technology and others in a helicopter design competition sponsored by the Huntsville, Ala., chapter of the American Helicopter Society. Grab the mp3 here (23.3 MB).

Like what you hear? Go ahead and subscribe directly to TechnoFiles in iTunes, Yahoo or supply the following URL to your podcast receiver: www.mst.edu/podcast/sample.rss. Or browse the episode archive and listen online at Yahoo.

Well, UMR's radio-controlled airplane crashed on takeoff this past weekend at the Aero Design East Competition in Marietta, Ga. That was bad. The good news is that the UMR team took first place in the design portion of the contest. Approximately 50 unversity teams were in Georgia for the event. The University of Sao Paulo placed first overall.

It's spring. It's lovely outside. And it's time for the Friday five, a.k.a. a smorgesboard of research goodies.

• "UMR in a Global Society," a panel discussion on the impact of globalization, will begin this afternoon at 4:30 p.m. in the Havener Center on campus. Five panelists – two faculty, two alumni and one student/alumnus – will discuss globalization and its impact on higher education during this event.


• UMR students working on a commuter bus system feasibility study see two main benefits for such a public system. First, because many families stationed at the post have only one vehicle, spouses who would like to work are often unable to do so. A public transit system would give both spouses the option to work by eliminating dependence on a personal vehicle, potentially increasing the number of available workers and positively affecting the regional economy. Second, public transit could help reduce emission levels and prevent congestion on Interstate 44 as the region continues to grow.


• It's Academy time. Read more about the latest inductees in chemical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, engineering management and mines and metallurgy.
  
• A group of UMR students who designed and built an advanced radio-controlled aircraft are in Marietta, Ga., this weekend for the Aero Design East Competition.


• UMR students showed their chemical engineering savvy by placing second in chemical reaction-powered, autonomous vehicle competition in Stillwater, Okla. The car’s performance earned the team a spot in the national competition set for November in San Francisco.
  

Wasn't that tasty?

A new study suggests some people tend to hide the fact that they are interested in science, for fear they will be labeled nerds or geeks. As it turns out, there are more of us than previously thought. (Does this mean it's OK to discuss Kurt Vonnegut novels in public again? Will the president finally announce that he's been devoting a lot of his free time to deciphering hidden messages in pi?) According to a recent article on the study, 60 million Americans were found to be "intellectually curious about politics, the arts and science...Among the intellectually curious group, those who are aware of science-oriented websites tend to visit them frequently. Some 85 percent said they are intrigued by scientific breakthroughs and innovation, compared to 35 percent of those outside the group. And while 72 percent of the intellectually curious say science is relevant to many aspects of their lives, that figure is 26 percent among the rest of the population."

Sometimes, despite what Kermit says, it is easy to be green.

Just ask Leonor Valdez-Sanchez, the state’s first environmental engineering graduate. Four months ago, Valdez-Sanchez graduated with a bachelor of science degree in environmental engineering from UMR, home to Missouri’s first environmental engineering undergraduate degree program.

“What I loved about the UMR program was the variety of the different courses and emphasis areas you can chose from," she says. “We are not just engineers trying to develop solutions to protect the environment, we also develop solutions that can benefit society and protect us all."

Todd Hubing dishes out the shocking truth behind static electricity to LiveScience.Com.

Hubing tells readers:

"As you keep walking across the floor, you become full of electrons. Eventually more electrons don't want to come up on you because you're so charged up. You end up with a high voltage, about 20,000 to 25,000 volts."

That's serious power at your fingertips, considering a normal electrical outlet on the wall is only around 100 volts of electricity.

Read more here. Not enough? Check out Hubing's Q&A on educating electromagnetic compatibility engineers. Completely unrelated but just as interesting.

As Fred Sanford is still saying in re-runs, and we're paraphrasing here, "The Big One is coming." Well, Elizabeth had plenty of reasons to doubt the predictions -- which turned out to be about as reliable as Iben Browning's prediction about the Big One back in 1990. (OK, just to bring everyone up to speed, we've now left sitcoms featuring Redd Foxx and we're about to partake in a discussion on earthquakes).

Browning's information was a little sketchy, but experts tell us it's still just a matter of time before the New Madrid fault really does cause big problems in the Midwest. "It could happen tomorrow," says UMR's Dr. J. David Rogers, who was recently appointed to Missouri’s Seismic Safety Commission by Gov. Matt Blunt. Furthermore, according to Rogers, the New Madrid seismic zone is capable of producing quakes that impact a far greater area than those that frequently shake parts of California and sometimes cause extensive damage.

P.S. Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco.

P.P.S. Uncle Tupelo has a good song called "New Madrid."

Some might consider UMR junior Ryan Sitzes to be a true friend of the water flea.

The Jackson, Mo.-native competed April 7-8 in a WERC design competition, taking on the challenge of removing tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) -- a chemical used in lithography -- from concentrated streams in the semi-conductor industries.

After use, TMAH is discharged to sanitary sewers. Although very little toxicity information exists at the present time, TMAH, which is soluble and dissolves rapidly in water, has been shown to be potentially toxic to ceriodaphnia dubia, commonly known as the “water flea."

Sitzes recieved a Judge's Choice award for his work, competing against teams from Hungary, Canada, Mexico and the United States.

Boeing's Jon Schneider, a UMR graduate, was the keynote speaker at Wednesday's Undergraduate Research Conference on campus. Schneider spoke to the students about innovations at Boeing, research partnerships with universities and the constant need for new ideas. A big proponent of UMR's hands-on learning philosophy, Schneider was also featured in UMR Magazine's latest issue, which was devoted to undergraduate research opportunities. At the conference, UMR students pitched their research to judges during oral and poster sessions. Students from all disciplines participated. Their interests ranged from robotic arms to psychological studies.

Yesterday afternoon Keith Strassner, executive director of the office of technology commercialization and economic development at UMR, spoke to members of University Advancement about his office's new role on campus. His presentation was similar to the one he gave the University of Missouri Board of Curators last month, but my favorite discovery from his talk was this site, which lists UMR patents and disclosures. Enjoy!

Making model airplanes isn't just about sniffing the glue anymore; at least not for a group of UMR students who are designing and building an advanced radio-controlled aircraft for the Aero Design East Competition April 21-23 in Marietta, Ga. UMR's plane will be capable of runway take-off speeds in excess of 30 mph and flight speeds of approximately 40 mph. This year's plane has a wing-span of eight feet, according to contest specifications, but UMR students have built much larger remote-controlled aircraft in the past. The key is to make the plane powerful enough to lift payloads of up to 50 pounds. It's also important not to crash.

UMR is one of the first universities in the country to have an HPLC-ICP-MS system for metal speciation studies. Despite its alphabet-soup name, the cool set-up is so sensitive it can detect toxic species at ultratrace levels. UMR's Jianmin Wang and his students are using the technology in their effort to understand how heavy metals -- think arsenic, lead and mercury -- can leach from fly ash. Read more about their work here.

Dying to know what HPLC-IPC-MS stands for? If you must know, high performance liquid chromatography (that's the HPLC part), linked to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (IPC-MS). Still need more details? Go here.

Blame the Discovery Channel Canada for another great show about UMR, this one featuring Drs. Summers and Saperstein. The program -- on waterjet technology developed at UMR for mining applications -- already aired on television screens north of the border, but you can watch it here.

Some bacteria living in very salty conditions, like those in Soap Lake, Wash., can use iron instead of oxygen to breathe. A new genus of iron-breathing bacteria, discovered by a UMR grad student, could help clean up metal-contaminated environments.

This research project is just one of five presentations UMR biology and geology students are making today and tomorrow at a regional conference of the American Society for Microbiology in Kansas City, Mo.

Good news today from Huntsville, Ala.

UMR's First Responder Team beat out Georgia Tech and several other universities to capture first place in a design competition sponsored by the American Helicopter Society. The team designed a high-performance, vertical take-off and landing unmanned air vehicle (a.k.a. a semi-autonomous, coaxial helicopter with two counter-rotating rotors.)

Bonus: The UMR team will receive $5,000 to design and build the vehicle.

Update: More info about the team's success here.

Thanks to Fathi Finaish for keeping us updated!

In a paper appearing Thursday in the journal Nature, MIT scientists are reporting evidence that suggests planets might be forming in the swirling disk of debris created from a violent supernova explosion. "The discovery is surprising because the dusty disk orbiting the pulsar, or dead star, resembles the cloud of dust from which Earth emerged," writes Alicia Chang of the Associated Press. "Scientists say the latest finding should shed light on how planetary systems form."

Here's the thing, with all due respect to the MIT scientists: UMR's Dr. Oliver Manuel has been saying this forever, or at least since the 1970s. That's when he started telling anyone who would listen -- and many have ignored him -- that the entire solar system was created in a supernova explosion. Now, perhaps, conventional science is catching up with Manuel's unconventional ideas.

In countless papers and at science conferences around the world, Manuel has argued his supernova theory (he has also suggested that the sun is largely made of iron left over from the supernova and is not a giant ball of hydrogen), but scientists have preferred to accept a more friendly theory, which went something like this: Everyone knows the solar system was created slowly in a big but gentle cloud of ambiguous interstellar dust.

Maybe they were wrong? Maybe Manuel is about to finally get his due? More and more it looks like our solar system did, indeed, grow up fast in a rough neighborhood. Of the latest evidence proposed by the MIT scientists, Charles Beichman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says, "This is more Chernobyl than Malibu." Well, fine. But Manuel could have told you that a long time ago.

A couple of years ago, a Scientific American reader, no doubt in need of some conversation starters for a Fourth of July picnic, wanted to know what physical and chemical changes occur when fireworks are set off. The reader submitted the question to SciAm's "Ask the Experts" forum, and SciAm in turn asked UMR's resident pyrotechnics expert, Paul Worsey. Now, Worsey's original response will be published in an upcoming issue of the magazine.

And what, exactly, does happen when a firework gets lit? Here's a condensed version of Worsey's response:

Bill Ankner, director of the Missouri Transportation Institute at UMR, spoke at today's Chancellor's Council meeting about the various projects MTI is involved in.

One project in particular seemed to grab the audience's attention. Ankner described how MTI is working with Delcan Traffic Monitoring to provide real-time traffic information using cell phone signals. A quick Google search served up this article, which gives more detail about the work:

If cell phone signal traffic monitoring technology continues building steam, we all may be acting as traffic probes on the highway.

Missouri is the latest state to implement a program that measures traffic congestion on major roads based on the average time it takes drivers' cell phone signals to pass from cell tower to cell tower along those roads....[I]n February, Missouri became the first to carry out a statewide implementation, covering 5,500 miles of its busiest roads -- generally interstates and numbered routes. ...

The 2006 Missouri Concrete Conference continues today at UMR. The conference offers a little something for everyone, from repair to design to quality control. Attendees will learn more about joint sealing, low volume bridge options and the do's and don'ts of using blended concrete.

On a side note: Later this month, UMR students will take their concrete canoe up to the University of Missouri-Columbia and, assuming the vessel passes the “swamp test," navigate the canoe across several staged race events. This regional event is sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Watch the team's program via their web cam here.

UMR historian Diana Ahmad is an expert on smoking opium. (I guess somebody's gotta be, right?) Apparently she's the nation's top expert on the subject, at least according to producers of the PBS show History Detectives, who flew her to Butte, Montana, this week to tape an episode on the drug.

Someone found what is purported to be a Chinese opium scale and Ahmad is going to help determine its authenticity. Ahmad, who is studying opium consumption for an upcoming book manuscript, Caves of Oblivion: Opium Dens and Exclusion Laws, 1850-1882, says the use of smoking opium -- as opposed to medicinal opium -- became so widespread in the late 19th century that it threatened the social structure of frontier communities and led to exclusionary attitudes toward Chinese immigrants who sought work in the West.

In the manuscript, Ahmad describes how smoking opium came to America along with Chinese immigrants who were looking for employment on railroad projects or hoped to find fortune in the gold fields.

Stay tuned for broadcast details.

Members of UMR's Mine Rescue Team have to be prepared for any number of scenarios that might unfold, but having a film crew underground with them was a new twist. Watch a docu-drama about the UMR team on the Discovery Channel's Daily Planet program.

Several UMR undergraduates are in the state capitol today to show off their research projects to Missouri legislators and to show why this research is important to the state and nation. The trip to Jefferson City is part of the four-campus University of Missouri's Undergraduate Research Day at the Capitol. Organizers of the event hope it will not only demonstrate to lawmakers the benefits of hands-on learning, but will also help students in their leadership development, collaborative problem solving and professional development.

Among the UMR projects to be discussed and displayed today in the Capitol Rotunda are the following:

• A study on the use of nanoparticles to improve drug delivery into the body

• Research on how to secure the nation’s powers systems

• The use of automated systems to detect floods at low-water bridges

• Research into how lead mining affects frog populations in Missouri

For more information on undergraduate research at UMR, visit the UMR Office of Undergraduate and Graduate Studies.

There's also an undergraduate research conference coming up on campus April 12.

UMR's resident hot dog expert, Gerald Cohen, was quoted in this Sunday's Kansas City Star. The Star's J. Brady McCollough spent an afternoon with Cohen in March to get the scoop on the humble sausage's moniker for a feature in the sports section to kick off baseball season.