Tag Archives: University of Texas at Dallas

Science comic books

Some time before Christmas I came across (via Twitter, sorry I can’t remember who) a listing of comic books that focus on science. The list is on a University of Texas at Dallas web space for their CINDI educational website. From the CINDI home page,

The Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation (CINDI) is a joint NASA/US Air Force funded ionospheric (upper atmosphere) plasma sensors built by the Center for Space Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. This instrument package is now flying on the Air Force’s Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast Satellite (C/NOFS) launched in spring 2008. On this site you will find a collection of teaching and education resources for grades 6-9 about the CINDI project, the Earth’s atmosphere, space weather, the scale in the Earth-Moon system, satellites and rockets and more.

Amongst other outreach initiatives, they’ve produced a series of ‘Cindi’ comic books. Here’s a copy of one of the covers.

)”]This particular issue is intended for students from grades 6 – 9.

The Cindi series was featured in an article by Dan Stillman for NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration). From the article,

… Cindi, a spiky-haired android space girl, and her two space dogs, Teks and Taks, are stars of a comic book series that just released its second installment. With more than enough colorful pictures to go around, the comic books serve up a hearty helping of knowledge about the CINDI mission and the ionosphere, with a side of humor.

“Science is threatening to a lot of people. And even if it’s not threatening, most people have this misconception that ‘science is too hard for me to understand,'” said Hairston, [Mark Hairston]who together with Urquhart [Mary Urquhart] dreamed up the Cindi character and storyline. “But a comic book is not threatening. It’s pretty, it’s entertaining, and it’s easy to understand. So we can get people to read — and read all the way to the end.

“It grabs their interest and attention, and once we have that, we can then smuggle an amazing amount of scientific ideas and concepts into their minds.”

Even for Cindi, it’s no easy task to explain how atoms become ions and what NASA’s CINDI instruments do as they fly aboard an Air Force research satellite. The first Cindi comic book — “Cindi in Space,” published in 2005 — breaks the ice with an analogy involving Cindi’s dogs.

Getting back to where I started, the organizers have created a list of other science-focused comic books including a series from the Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory (STEL) at  Nagoya University (Japan),which are manga-influenced. At this time, nine have been translated into English. Here’s copy of the cover from their latest,

Cover for What is the Sun-Climate Relationship? manga (STEL project at Nagoya University, Japan)

The Cindi folks also mention Jim Ottaviani and G. T. Labs, which has produced a number of graphic novels/comic books including, Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards about 19th century dinosaur bone hunters and a very bitter feud between two of them, and Dignifying Science which features stories about women scientists. I went over to the G. T. Labs website where they were featuring their latest, Feynman which was published in August 2011 (from the Feynman webpage),

Physicist . . . Nobel winner . . . bestselling author . . . safe-cracker.

Feynman tells the story of a great man’s life, from his childhood in Long Island to his work on the Manhattan Project and the Challenger disaster. You’ll see him help build the first atomic bomb, give a lecture to Einstein, become a safecracker, try not to win a Nobel Prize (but do it anyway), fall in love, learn how to become an artist, and discover the world.

Anyone who ever wanted to know more about quantum electrodynamics, the fine art of the bongo drums, the outrageously obscure nation of Tuva, or the development and popularization of physics in the United States need look no further!

Feynman explores a wonderful life, lived to the fullest.

Ottaviani’s Dec. 14, 2011 blog posting notes this about Feynman,

Though come to think of it, the context is sort of crazy, as in Feynman is nominated for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s [AAAS] SB&F Prize, and it was also featured on Oprah.com’s “BookFinder” last week.

Congratulations to Ottaviani and G. T. Labs. (Sidebar: The AAAS 2012 annual meeting will be in Vancouver, Canada this February.)

Aussies, Yanks, Canucks, and Koreans collaborate on artificial muscles

I received a media release (from the University of British Columbia [UBC]) about artificial muscles. I was expecting to see Dr. Hongbin Li’s name as one of the researchers but this is an entirely different kind of artificial muscle. Dr. Li works with artificial proteins to create new biomaterials (my May 5, 2010 posting). This latest work published in Science Express, Oct. 13, 2011,  involves carbon nanotubes and teams from Australia, Canada, Korea, and the US. From the Oct. 13, 2011, UBC media release,

An international team of researchers has invented new artificial muscles strong enough to rotate objects a thousand times their own weight, but with the same flexibility of an elephant’s trunk or octopus limbs.

In a paper published online today on Science Express, the scientists and engineers from the University of British Columbia, the University of Wollongong in Australia, the University of Texas at Dallas and Hanyang University in Korea detail their innovation. The study elaborates on a discovery made by research fellow Javad Foroughi at the University of Wollongong.

Using yarns of carbon nanotubes that are enormously strong, tough and highly flexible, the researchers developed artificial muscles that can rotate 250 degrees per millimetre of muscle length. This is more than a thousand times that of available artificial muscles composed of shape memory alloys, conducting organic polymers or ferroelectrics, a class of materials that can hold both positive and negative electric charges, even in the absence of voltage.

Here’s how the UBC media release recounts the story of these artificial muscles (Aside: The Australians take a different approach; I haven’t seen any material from the University of Texas at Dallas or the University of Hanyang),

The new material was devised at the University of Texas at Dallas and then tested as an artificial muscle in Madden’s [Associate Professor, John Madden, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering] lab at UBC. A chance discovery by collaborators from Wollongong showed the enormous twist developed by the device. Guided by theory at UBC and further experiments in Wollongong and Texas, the team was able to extract considerable torsion and power from the yarns.

The Australians, not unnaturally focus on their own contributions, and, somewhat unexpectedly discuss nanorobots. From the ARC (Australian Research Council) Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) at the University of Wollongong news release (?) [ETA Oct. 17, 2011: I forgot to include a link to the Australian news item; and here’s a link to the Oct. 16, 2011 Australian news item on Nanowerk] ,

The possibility of a doctor using tiny robots in your body to diagnose and treat medical conditions is one step closer to becoming reality today, with the development of artificial muscles small and strong enough to push the tiny Nanobots along.

Although Nanorobots (Nanobots) have received much attention for the potential medical use in the body, such as cancer fighting, drug delivery and parasite removal, one major hurdle in their development has been the issue of how to propel them along in the bloodstream.

An international collaborative team led by researchers at UOW’s Intelligent Polymer Research Institute, part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES), have developed a new twisting artificial muscle that could be used for propelling nanobots.   The muscles use very tough and highly flexible yarns of carbon nanotubes (nanoscale cylinders of carbon), which are twist-spun into the required form.  When voltage is applied, the yarns rotate up to 600 revolutions per minute, then rotate in reverse when the voltage is changed.

Due to their complexity, conventional motors are very difficult to miniaturise, making them unsuitable for use in nanorobotics.  The twisting artificial muscles, on the other hand, are simple and inexpensive to construct either in very long, or in millimetre lengths.

Interesting, non?

There’s an animation illustrating the nanorobots and the muscles,

In the animated video below, you first see a few bacteria like creatures swimming about. Their rotating flagella are highlighted with some detail of the flagella motor turning the “hook” and “filament” parts of the tail. We next see a similar type of rotating tail produced by a length of carbon nanotube thread that is inside a futuristic microbot. The yarn is immersed in a liquid electrolyte along with another electrode wire. Batteries and an electrical circuit are also inside the bot. When a voltage is applied the yarn partially untwists and turns the filament. Slow discharging of the yarn causes it to re-twist. In this way, we can imagine the micro-bot is propelled along in a series of short spurts.

I think the graphics resemble conception complete with sperm and eggs but I can see the nanorobots too. Here’s your chance to take a look,

ETA Oct. 14, 2011 11:20 am PST: I found a copy of the University of Texas at Dallas news release posted on Oct. 13, 2011 at Nanowerk. No mention of nanobots but if you’re looking for additional technical explanations, this would be good to read.

University of Texas at Dallas lab demos cloaking device visible to naked eye

Invisibility cloaks have been everywhere lately and I’ve been getting a little blasé about them but then I saw this Oct. 4, 2011 news item on physorg.com,

Scientists have created a working cloaking device that not only takes advantage of one of nature’s most bizarre phenomenon, but also boasts unique features; it has an ‘on and off’ switch and is best used underwater.

For the first time, I was able to see an invisibility cloak in action, here’s the video,

For the curious here’s how it works (from the Oct. 4, 2011 news release on the Institute of Physics website),

This novel design, presented today, Tuesday 4 September [Tuesday 4 October?], in IOP [Institute of Physics] Publishing’s journal Nanotechnology, makes use of sheets of carbon nanotubes (CNT) – one-molecule-thick sheets of carbon wrapped up into cylindrical tubes.

CNTs have such unique properties, such as having the density of air but the strength of steel, that they have been extensively studied and put forward for numerous applications; however it is their exceptional ability to conduct heat and transfer it to surrounding areas that makes them an ideal material to exploit the so-called “mirage effect”.

The most common example of a mirage is when an observer appears to see pools of water on the ground. This occurs because the air near the ground is a lot warmer than the air higher up, causing lights rays to bend upward towards the viewer’s eye rather than bounce off the surface.

This results in an image of the sky appearing on the ground which the viewer perceives as water actually reflecting the sky; the brain sees this as a more likely occurrence.

Through electrical stimulation, the transparent sheet of highly aligned CNTs can be easily heated to high temperatures. They then have the ability to transfer that heat to its surrounding areas, causing a steep temperature gradient. Just like a mirage, this steep temperature gradient causes the light rays to bend away from the object concealed behind the device, making it appear invisible.

With this method, it is more practical to demonstrate cloaking underwater as all of the apparatus can be contained in a petri dish. It is the ease with which the CNTs can be heated that gives the device its unique ‘on and off’ feature.

Congratulations to Dr. Ali Aliev (lead author) and the rest of the University of Texas at Dallas team!

ETA Oct. 5, 2011: I added the preposition ‘of’ to the title and I’m adding a comment about invisibility cloaks.

Comment: Most of the invisibility cloaks I’ve read about are at the nanoscale which means none of us outside a laboratory could possibly observe the cloak in action. Seeing this video demonstrating an invisibility cloak in the range of visible light and at a macroscale was a dream come true, so to speak.

US-Mexico transnational view of nanotechnology and other issues

The University of Texas at Dallas has announced its 11th annual series of lectures from the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies starting tonight (Sept. 22, 2011) and occurring intermittently until March 2012. Of special interest to me are the lectures on nanotechnology. More information can be found on the lecture series page,

“The Nanotechnology Business Incubator of Nuevo Leon
Dr. Francisco Servando Aguirre-Tostado

The University of Texas at Dallas,
Natural Science and Engineering Research Lab (RL) 3.204
Nov. 4, 10.30 a.m.

F. Servando Aguirre-Tostado is director of the Nanotechnology Incubator of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, and professor at CIMAV-Monterrey.  After his postdoctoral training with the Electronic Materials Group at UT Dallas, he occupied a research scientist position to develop more stable and efficient semiconductor interfaces for next generation integrated circuits. Servando Aguirre is author and co-author of more than 30 research papers and is participating in more than 20 projects related to nanotechnology product development.

“Nanotechnology Applications in Nano, Micro and Macro-electronic Devices” Dr. Manuel Quevedo

  • Research Center for Advanced Materials (CIMAV), Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Nov. 24
  • Hermosillo, Sonora, Dec. 16

Manuel Quevedo-Lopez received his doctorate in Materials Science from the University of North Texas. In 2002, he joined the Texas Instruments Silicon Technology Development Group as a Member of Technical Staff (MTS). In 2007, he joined UT Dallas as a senior research scientist, and in 2008 he was appointed research professor at the Materials Science and Engineering Department in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. His interests include materials and integration issues for flexible electronics, including organic and inorganic-based devices

It’s very gutsy of the institutions and the academics to do this in light of the professors in Mexico who were injured in bombing incidents that took place in early August 2011 (my Nanotechnology terrorism in Mexico? posting).