Engineering

A followup to the blog entry of 9/10/09.

This week my new computer showed up. I was excited to get it set up and start using it right away. There was only one problem. Before I could put my new computer on my desk, I had to pull apart all of the wires and cables, sort them out, and decide which ones were needed for the new computer. There was a power cable for the computer, a power cable for the monitor, a cable for the camera attached to the computer, power cables for the computer’s speakers, cables going to and from the USB hub, a cable connecting the computer to the printer and another cable to power the printer, and various cables for plugging in iPods, cameras, etc. There was even a loose cable tangled in with the others that seemed to have no purpose.

They were all in such a twisted mess that I was reminded why I kept them all stuffed down behind my desk and kept out of sight. Untangling all of the cables and then figuring out how to connect them all to my new computer was the most time consuming part of installing the computer. If only someone would invent a way to power a computer and all of the peripheral devices without the need for all of the cables. What if there were such a thing as wireless transmission of electricity? (Read more…)

The New York Times has an interesting article on the science of glass, profiling the newly-opened attraction at the Sears Tower, “The Ledge.”  Only three panes of glass separate you from the street some 1300 feet below.

Needless to say, a lot of thought, engineering, and safety precautions went into building this attraction.  The article has a nice graphic illustrating the engineering that went into building the glass box.

If anyone has been out on the Ledge, I’d be interested to hear about your experience.

It’s worth noting that the Sears Tower Skydeck is part of the Chicago Citypass program, which bundles dicsounted admission to four of Chicago’s best museums (Museum and Science and Industry, Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and the Field Museum) with a visit to the Hancock Observatory or the Sears Skydeck.

An inspiring segment on last night’s episode of 60 Minutes profiled the work of DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) “Revolutionizing Prosthetics” program, a $100 million project intent on advancing a field that, in some respects, hasn’t changed much in more than 50 years.

The piece concentrated on the DARPA-funded DEKA arm, developed by inventor Dean Kamen and his team of 40 engineers. Size and comfort were key issues in designing the limb. The final product is the size of an average person’s arm, weighs around nine pounds, and is buffered from the wearer’s body by small balloons that expand and deflate as pressure on the arm changes (the balloons inflate when the wearer picks up something heavy, and deflate when the arm is at rest).  Controlling the arm using their shoulders and pedals in a specially designed shoe, volunteers demonstrated their ability to pick up and drink from a soda bottle and eat a grape.

The end of the segment touched on the future of prosthetic control, featuring Duke University engineer Jonathan Kuniholm. Kuniholm, who lost his forearm in Irag, demonstrated his ability to control a prosthetic hand using the nerves still intact in the remaining part of his arm. These nerves send out small electrical signals, which a processor in a prosthetic arm can be trained to interpret.

Similar work is being done here by Northwestern faculty member Todd Kuiken and his research team at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. They are using an exciting new procedure called targeted reinnervation to reroute nerves that used to control a missing limb to different, intact muscle areas (rerouting nerves that used to control an amputee’s arm to his or her chest muscles, for example). These reinnervated muscles can then communicate with a prosthesis, again allowing the wearer to control their limb intuitively. Click here to read an SiS article on the Kuiken team’s work.

According to BBC News, testing is currently underway for a treatment of stem cells that can be injected directly into the body and guided to damaged points via magnets and guiding magnetic nanoparticles in the blood stream. By injecting the magnetic nanoparticles into the stem cells, the researchers at Keele University are able to move the stem cells anywhere in the body, solving the problem of how to focus the regenerative aspects of the cells. (Read more…)

Science education has been the subject of much reform and debate over the years, sensitive to national test scores, career statistics, and perhaps most importantly, thw priority of science in many nations’ social and political agendas. Many stress the importance of science education as the best possible hope of solving the multitude of mankind’s problems, because only with a good education can scientific breakthroughs continue to populate news headlines and make their way into the average person’s life. It isn’t often, however, that the younger generation is able to teach the older generation, which is exactly what physics undergrad Xiaohang Quan has done in researching her thesis, according to The Daily Princetonian. (Read more…)

Apologies in advance to the editorial staff and to the larger Science in Society community for this post, but I think it warrants mention that the innovations I proposed in the abstract as a first-grader are finally becoming a reality.  In something that qualifies as vaguely scientific, Topps, the baseball card company, has teamed up with Disney CEO Michael Eisner to create animated 3D baseball cards.  Hold the card up to a webcam and a fully-rendered 3D model appears, complete with animations of stretching, pitching, hitting… the whole nine yards…or innings.

Glass-half-empty, maybe this is a marquee example of the ways in which funds for science and technology are completely misdirected to frivolous endeavors, but I prefer to view it as a testament of science as an innovating force.  Scientists have taken a medium normally limited to low-quality cardboard packaged with stale, flavorless gum and transformed it into a stage on which a digitalized Ryan Howard can clean his cleats and practice his swing.

While it’s entirely possible that I just like cool, animated, 3D baseball cards, I also think that if it is possible for science to so completely transform lighthearted technology such as this one, it also must be possible to make similar revolutions in the development of cancer treatments, embryonic stem-cell research, and perhaps other serious disciplines and technologies.  But it’s true that I still do really like 3D baseball cards.

At the end of my last posting, I promised to tell a bit about my meeting with the makers of TRON 2 at a studio in LA. We met in a beautiful high-tech conference room with loads of food, a videographer recording the proceedings, and what looked to be part of some giant gear system excised from a sunken ship quietly decorating a corner. This lent an air of steampunk to the feel of the room.

The TRON 2 people solicited comments from us on the draft script that we had all read (while under careful watch from a production assistant) and then asked us for help with some specific problems they were having. It was an energetic and intense exchange, the kind where jumping in has to occur at the expense of interrupting someone. This was all done in contracted confidence for obvious reasons, so not much can be said about the specifics of what we discussed.

Participating in the exchange brought many questions to my mind about what ways entertainment industry folks and scientists can help one another.  There are two ways that seem interesting, one I call Truth is Stranger than Fiction and one I call You Gotta Know the Laws to Break ‘Em. (Read more…)

Welcome to the new Science in Society blog.  It’s official. We’re live.

The goal of this blog is to share Northwestern University’s broad range of scientific interest and perspective. Accordingly, we’ve assembled a group of thoughtful individuals representing the university community: scientists & non-scientists, staff, faculty, and students. (Read more…)

Welcome to my corner – or loose confederacy of evanescent electrons – of the Science in Society Blog. My primary charges are issues in brain science and engineering, my main areas of research. I’m an assistant professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. Because two departments means only two Christmas parties, clearly not enough, I’m also adjunct in the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology.

My background is quite varied, with degrees in philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience, and on-the-job training in artificial intelligence and mechanical engineering. A highly abbreviated history is that I started out with the aim of making an artificially intelligent system with human-like capabilities, and I’ve settled for the more practical goal of making an artificially intelligent fish. This work is driven by more general questions about the ways in which the body is clever, and how that fits with more readily recognized forms of cleverness that are identified with the nervous system. The body evolved in close coordination with the nervous system over the past 635 million years, so it should be no surprise that there’s a lot going on in that interaction. The main approaches I use for working on these problems are biological investigations, computer simulations, and robotics.

I’m excited by this opportunity to blog about issues at the intersection of science and society, as I’ve long been interested in bringing research to the broader community. In the past I’ve done this through an interactive art installation project in LA and through working on projects between Northwestern University and the Shedd Aquarium.

Most recently, I was involved with the Science Entertainment Exchange (SEE). SEE is a new program sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, with the goal of connecting entertainment industry folks (thus far, mostly movie types) with scientists. (Read more…)