June 2007 Archives

UMR's Explosives Camp gets some attention today from the biggest blog in the universe, Boing Boing. Thanks also to Make, where the post about NPR's recent report about Explosives Camp caught Boing Boing's attention.

And just in case you haven't seen enough about Explosive Camp, take a look at this:

Members of UMR's chapter of Engineers Without Borders kept themselves busy during break.

As the final countdown to Independence Day approaches, media seem to have a bigger interest in things that boom (like, for instance, our Explosives Camp).

News 4 St. Louis, aka KMOV, shares its enthusiasm here.

Yes, we may be a little biased toward public radio. After all, our very own KUMR (soon to be KMST) public radio station hosts TechnoFiles, UMR's award-winning radio research program.

But we have other reasons too. For example, NPR recently sent a reporter to campus to cover Explosives Camp. The result: "At Camp, Teens Blow Stuff Up, As They're Told."

During his week at camp, Niels Zussblatt, a teen from St. Louis, helped blast a rock from deep in a mine, obliterated a watermelon, cut steel beams and set off a "wall of fire."

One of his favorites?

"Blowing up the chicken was good," he said. "It flew – forced bits of chicken guts to fly like 40 to 50 feet."

Where else (except for Visions, of course) would you get the scoop on chicken guts? Thanks NPR!

UMR's chapter of Engineers Without Borders talks with TechnoFiles this month about their trips to Guatemala and Bolivia. Grab the mp3 here (25.1 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.

The Associated Press' ASAP news site got wind of our Explosives Camp -- and somehow found a cheesy photo of resident pyromaniac/camp director Paul Worsey -- and decided to write about it. The result -- Blowing up a summer tradition -- is Chicago-based ASAP reporter Caryn Rousseau's summary of the week's events. She chatted with Worsey to get the story, and even quoted fellow Visions blogger Lance Feyh, who plays the role of university spokesman.

It's been a while since we've scoured our blogroll to see what's going on in the world of science, technology and education beyond the virtual borders of the Visions blog. Turns out there's some interesting stuff out there. Here are five:

• Lame. Very Lame. Worst James Bond gadgets ever. Sometimes even the best innovators -- like Bond's pal Q -- miss the mark. Remember radioactive lint or the revolving sofa that swallows whoever sits on it? Link via Wired's Gadget Lab.

• Our favorite science librarian (outside of UMR, of course) concludes a thoughtful, occasional series of posts about the future of library science and what his job will be like in 10 years. Considering that he began this project in June 2005, I guess it's more about what his job will be like in eight years. Either way, it's an interesting exercise -- trying to envision the future -- and all of us ought to take some time to put a little thought into the future of our careers, crafts and professions.

• One of the main challenges of science writing, according to nOnoScience, is "inaccessibility to useful information." A cautionary note to my fellow PR flacks: "The primers, which may be in the form of press-releases and abstracts are not only grossly under-informative, but in most cases frustratingly teasing."

• Virtual tennis, anyone? Just in case you aren't hearing enough about Second Life, read Second Life, Second Sport, about a tennis game on the virtual courts of a virtual Wimbledon.

• Good vibrations. Future Feeder introduces the haptic clock, a program that conveys time through a sequence of vibrations. "Perfect for meetings, lazy people, and people who trying to break the addiction of pulling out their cell phone to check the time." It might also make a pretty cool gadget for James Bond.

That's how UMR chemist Nicholas Leventis describes his invention: cross-linked aerogels. The extremely lightweight and sturdy composite material is four to five times stronger than material currently used in military armor. This week he was named to Nanotech Briefs list of Nano 50 for his work.

Aerogels are nothing new. They've been around since the 1930s, but they were highly brittle and of little practical use. By chemically bonding -- or cross-linking -- strings of tiny glass particles with polymers like polystyrene, polyurethane and epoxy, Leventis created aerogels that are 100 times more resistant to breakage and totally resistant to moisture.

Leventis sees possible uses in military armor, lightweight thermal insulation, fuel transport systems, tiny, but sturdy, drug-delivery vehicles and lighter, more efficient aircraft and spacecraft frames.

Want to see something cool? These videos show the difference between conventional armor-grade material and a cross-linked areogel when they're hit with an impact that is eight times that of a .45 mm bullet. It's pretty impressive.

First, the conventional material:

Now, here's the aerogel:

Fifty-six years ago today, the first commercial computer in the United States was put into service for the U.S. Census Bureau. Dubbed UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer I), the 13-ton behemoth used 5,200 vacuum tubes and could perform more than 1,000 calculations per second. It was the fastest in the world at the time. The following year a UNIVAC correctly predicted Eisenhower would be elected president.

But taking up a whopping 350 square feet of floor space, the UNIVAC was hardly your average PC. And I thought my laptop was too big.

An excerpt from a recent story in National Geographic Magazine:

J. David Rogers, a geological engineer from the University of Missouri-Rolla who investigated the levee failures after Katrina with Bea for the National Science Foundation, concurs with Bea's assessment of the system's weak spots, particularly the eroded levee that is the primary hurricane protection for St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward. Both engineers say a more detailed study of the levee soils is necessary to determine just how weak the MRGO levee is, but Rogers says the image of the eroded structure "certainly doesn't give me any confidence that it would survive eight hours of overtopping—what you would need for a Category 3 storm. It might survive an hour. They've obviously got a problem there. The veneer is not thick enough and the core of the levee is cohesiveless material—organic muck and silt."

Read the whole story here.

Last week, we had video from UMR's Explosives Camp featuring an exploding chicken. This week has been pretty tame so far (it's only Monday) -- except for this: One of our colleagues here in the communications department brought squirrel for lunch today. No kidding. He's eating a squirrel at his desk right now! (Sorry, no video available.)

In non-chicken, non-varmint related news, UMR's plan to extract oil from algae made the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Eric Hand, the Post-Dispatch's science writer, interviewed UMR's David Summers about the research a few weeks ago, and the story ("Fuel from algae?") is in today's edition.

It's pretty obvious that Gene Doty, chair of our department of English and technical communication, has a deep interest in poetry. He is, in fact, a poet himself. He specializes in the writing of ghazals (such as For Rose, a 30th Valentine, which is especially nice), and he publishes the works of other ghazal poets and writers on his website, The Ghazal Page. (Ghazal is pronounced guzzle.) But Doty is also interested in science, and he's written some reflections about a couple of books on science and poetry on his blog.

Doty's latest post discusses some of his recent reading in the area -- namely, Mary Midgley's Science and Poetry -- and contrasts it to Richard Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow. (Dawkins has been in the news more recently for his book The God Delusion.) Doty refers to Midgley's book, published in 2000, as "a rejoinder of sorts" to Dawkins' earlier work.

I say "of sorts" because it isn't clear to me that Midgley has read Dawkins carefully or really understood what he says. There's very little discussion of poetry or quotations of poetry in her book, where Dawkins discusses poetry and quotes a lot. (He's especially fond of Keats.)

There's more good stuff -- about science, poetry and mainly ghazals -- on Doty's blog (which he writes under the "nom d'web" of Gino Perigrino). It's worth a read. He's no science expert, but "has always been fascinated by science and read nontechnical books about physics and evolution especially, as well as technical books on linguistics, information theory, and semiology," so he brings a well-informed lay perspective to the subject. If you're interested in more discussion about science and poetry, Doty promises to blog about Aldous Huxley's Literature and Science, "which," he says, "looks promising."

Sticks of dynamite. Detonators. Huge balls of fire. Exploding chickens. Best. Camp. Ever. Just click on this link. Trust us.

Visions bloggers would like to extend their congratulations to UMR's own Jay Switzer, the Donald L. Castleman Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, for receiving the Presidential Award for Research and Creativity from the University of Missouri.

The award was presented last night during an ceremony hosted by interim University of Missouri President Gordon H. Lamb and his wife, Nancy, in Columbia.

Switzer is an international leader in materials synthesis by electrodeposition, an area at the interface between chemistry, electrochemistry, materials science and solid-state physics. Since joining UMR in 1990, he has produced numerous patents and journal articles, including four Science papers and a Nature paper.

It's a well deserved award. Congratulations, Jay!