About 170 high school students from around Edmonton learned about nanotechnology and leading-edge research during the inaugural Let’s Talk NanoScience event at the U of A.
The event was put on by the Let’s Talk Science U of A chapter and the U of A Nanotechnology Group [Let’s Talk Science website], with support from the Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Science, and the National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT).
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This year, the group decided to focus on individual institution’s strong points. For the U of A, that means being a leading centre for nanotechnology research.
Electrical and computer engineering PhD student Steven Jim [emphasis mine] from the Nanotechnology Group says raising awareness is especially important when funding is coming from the public.
“As scientists and researchers, we’re basically funded by the government—by taxpayers. So helping the public know what we’re doing is important,” Jim said. [emphasis mine] “It’s something that’s often forgotten when you’re spending your life in a lab.”
The day was kicked off with two lectures. The first from Nils Petersen, director general of NINT [National Institute of Nanotechnology], explored why nanotechnology will be increasingly important. Petersen made three main points: it’s going to be everywhere, it’s going to be transformative within the next 50 years, and it’s going to be here forever. [emphasis mine] He encouraged the students to be conscious of how nanotechnology might affect them.
The second lecture by Jillian Buriak, a senior research officer with NINT, gave an overview of just what nanotechnology is. She engaged the students by hammering home just how small-scale nanotechnology is, as well as describing some of the ground breaking processes that are changing how people look at science and engineering.
After that, the students broke into groups for lab tours and smaller sessions with graduate students where they produced gold nano-particles.
Mr. Jim, I quite agree with you. As for Nils Petersen, I found that bit about nanotechnology “… being here forever” an odd statement and would have liked to have heard it in context. As for the other points, I understand that nanotechnology-enabled products are going to be everywhere (those products are already quite pervasive). I also understand its “transformative” aspects in the same way I understand electricity’s transformative aspects. But nanotechnology will be here forever? I am intrigued.
I’ve been informally collecting information about children’s science education for a few months when yesterday there was a sudden explosion of articles (well, there were three) on the subject.
First off, a science game was launched by the European Commission titled Power of Research. From the March 2, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
A new strategy browser game – the “Power of research” – is officially launched. Supported by the European Commission, “Power of Research” has been developed to inspire young Europeans to pursue scientific careers and disseminate interesting up-to-date scientific information. Players assume the role of scientists working in a virtual research environment that replicates the situations that scientists have to deal with in the real world. The game, which can be played for free under www.powerofresearch.eu, is expected to create a large community of more than 100,000 players who will be able to communicate in real time via a state of the art interface.
They really do mean it when they say they’re replicating real life situations but the focus is on medical science research and I don’t think the game title makes that clear. Yes, there are many similarities between the situations that scientists of any stripe encounter in their labs but there are also some significant differences between them. In any event,
In “Power of Research” players can engage in “virtual” health research projects, by performing microscopy, protein isolation and DNA experiments, publishing research results, participating in conferences, managing high tech equipment and staff or request funding – all tasks of real researchers. The decisive game elements are communication, collaboration and competition: players can compete against each other in real time or collaborate to become a successful virtual researcher, win scientific awards or become the leader of a research institute.
The game connects the players to the real world. It is based on up-to-date science content and players work on real world research topics inspired by the FP7 health research programme that will be regularly updated. Popular science events, real research institutes, universities and European health research projects form part of the game. Players also have access to a knowledge platform, where they can search in a virtual library, zoom-into real scientific images and learn more about Nobel Prize laureates. European science institutions and hospitals will have the possibility to contribute to the game and provide details about their research.
I like the immersiveness and the game aspect of this project very much. I do wish they were a little more clear about exactly what kind of research the player will engage in. From the Power of Research About webpage,
Your researcher
* Become a famous researcher in “Power of Research”
* Research different topics through exciting research projects
* Play together with your friends and other players from all over the world
* Earn reputation, win science prizes and more …
* Gain special skills and knowledge in 9 different main research areas (like Brain, Paediatrics, …)
* Become a leader in your institute and lead it to international ranks
* The game is 100% free and needs no prior knowledge
Children who are taught how to think and act like scientists develop a clearer understanding of the subject, a study has shown.
The research project led by The University of Nottingham and The Open University has shown that school children who took the lead in investigating science topics of interest to them gained an understanding of good scientific practice.
The study shows that this method of ‘personal inquiry’ could be used to help children develop the skills needed to weigh up misinformation in the media, understand the impact of science and technology on everyday life and help them to make better personal decisions on issues including diet, health and their own effect on the environment.
The three-year project involved providing pupils aged 11 to 14 at Hadden Park High School in Bilborough, Nottingham, and Oakgrove School in Milton Keynes with a new computer toolkit named nQuire, now available as a free download for teachers and schools.
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The pupils were given wide themes for their studies but were asked to decide on more specific topics that were of interest to them, including heart rate and fitness, micro climates, healthy eating, sustainability and the effect of noise pollution on birds.
The flexible nature of the toolkit meant that children could become “science investigators”, starting an inquiry in the classroom then collecting data in the playground, at a local nature reserve, or even at home, then sharing and analysing their findings back in class.
Immersive and engaging, yes? I have gone to the nQuire website and while I haven’t downloaded the software, I did successfully log in to the demonstration, in other words, the demonstration is not limited to a UK-based audience.
Meanwhile there’s this project but it seems to be different. It’s spelled differently, INQUIRE, and the focus is on the teachers. From a March 2, 2011 news item on Science Daily,
Thousands of schoolchildren will soon be asking the questions when inquiry-based learning comes to science classrooms across Europe, turning the traditional model of science teaching on its head. The pan-European INQUIRE programme is an exciting new teacher-training initiative delivered by a seventeen-strong consortium of botanic gardens, natural history museums, universities and NGOs.
Coordinated by Innsbruck University Botanic Garden, with support from London-based Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), INQUIRE is a practical, one-year, continual professional development (CPD) course targeted at qualified teachers working in eleven European countries. Its focus on inquiry-based science education (IBSE) reflects a consensus in the science education community that IBSE methods are more effective than current teaching practices.
Designed to reflect how students actually learn, IBSE also engages them in the process of scientific inquiry. Increasingly it is seen as key to developing their scientific literacy, enhancing their understanding of scientific concepts and heightening their appreciation of how science works. Whereas traditional teaching methods have failed to engage many students, especially in developed countries, IBSE offers outstanding opportunities for effective and enjoyable teaching and learning.
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Biodiversity loss and global climate change, among the major scientific as well as political challenges of our age, are core INQUIRE concerns.
That final sentence fragment is a little puzzling but I believe they’re describing their scientific focus.
My favourite of these projects is one I came across in December 2010 when children from a school in England had a research paper about bees published by the Royal Society’s Biology Letters. You still can access the paper (according to another blogger, Ed Yong, open access would only last to the new year in 2011 but they must have changed their minds). The paper is titled Blackawton bees and lists 30 authors.
1. P. S. Blackawton,
2. S. Airzee,
3. A. Allen,
4. S. Baker,
5. A. Berrow,
6. C. Blair,
7. M. Churchill,
8. J. Coles,
9. R. F.-J. Cumming,
10. L. Fraquelli,
11. C. Hackford,
12. A. Hinton Mellor,
13. M. Hutchcroft,
14. B. Ireland,
15. D. Jewsbury,
16. A. Littlejohns,
17. G. M. Littlejohns,
18. M. Lotto,
19. J. McKeown,
20. A. O’Toole,
21. H. Richards,
22. L. Robbins-Davey,
23. S. Roblyn,
24. H. Rodwell-Lynn,
25. D. Schenck,
26. J. Springer,
27. A. Wishy,
28. T. Rodwell-Lynn,
29. D. Strudwick and
30. R. B. Lotto
This is from the introduction to the paper,
(a) Once upon a time …
People think that humans are the smartest of animals, and most people do not think about other animals as being smart, or at least think that they are not as smart as humans. Knowing that other animals are as smart as us means we can appreciate them more, which could also help us to help them.
If you don’t ever read another science paper in your life, read this one. For the back story on this project, here’s Ed Yong on his Not Exactly Rocket Science blog (a Discover blog) in a December 21, 2010 posting,
“We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”
This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a high-powered journal from the UK’s prestigious Royal Society. If its tone seems unusual, that’s because its authors are children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10, the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be published in a Royal Society journal.
Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard, describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with more flexibility than anyone had thought. It’s the culmination of a project called ‘i, scientist’, designed to get students to actually carry out scientific research themselves. The kids received some support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL [University College London], and David Strudwick, Blackawton’s head teacher. But the work is all their own.
Yong’s posting features a video of the i, scientist project mentioned in the posting, images, and, of course, the rest of the back story.
As it turns out one of my favourite science education/engagement projects is taking place right now (this is based in the UK), I’m a scientist, Get me out of Here!, from their website home page,
I’m a Scientist, Get me out of Here! is an award-winning science enrichment and engagement activity, funded by the Wellcome Trust. It takes place online over a two week period. It’s an X Factor-style competition for scientists, where students are the judges. Scientists and students talk online on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
You can view the scientist/student conversations by picking a zone: Argon, Chlorine, Potassium, Forensic, Space, or Stem Cell. The questions the kids ask are fascinating, anything from What’s your favourite colour? to Do you think humans will evolve more? The conversations that ensue can be quite stimulating. This project has been mentioned here before in my June 15, 2010 posting, April 13, 2010 posting (scroll down) and March 26, 2010 posting (scroll down).
ETA Mar. 3, 2011: The scientists get quite involved and can go to some lengths to win. Here’s Tom Hartley’s video from last year’s (2010) event,
I find the contrast between these kinds of science education/engagement projects in the UK and in Europe and what seems to be a dearth of these in my home province British Columbia (Canada) to be striking. I’ve commented previously on BC’s Year of Science initiative currently taking place in a Dec. 30, 2010 posting where I was commenting on a lack of science culture in Canada. Again, I applaud the initiative while I would urge that in future a less traditional and top/down approach is taken. The Europeans and the British are making science fun by engaging in imaginative and substantive ways. Imagine what getting a paper published in a prestigious science journal does for you (regardless of your age)!
A tungsten needle that’s one atom thick got a team of researchers led by Dr. Robert Wolkow, Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) Principal Investigator and University of Alberta Physics Professor, Dr. Jason Pitters, Research Council Officer at NINT and Dr. Mohamed Rezeq, formerly of NINT and currently at the Institute of Materials Research & Engineering in Singapore into the Guinness Book of World Records. From the March 1, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
A very tiny, very sharp object has put Canadian researchers at the National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) and University of Alberta into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Only one atom at its end point, the tip used in electron microscopes is the sharpest man-made object. It is made of Tungsten and fabricated using a patented controlled etching method. It is currently being evaluated for its commercial potential.
“We did not start out to set a world record; we were trying to make a better tool for our research.” Team leader Robert Wolkow said in reaction to the record “Having a world record is a fun achievement, but we are really interested in commercializing this product.”
The needle was first created in 2006. From the Mar. 2, 2011 news article by Mariam Ibrahim in The Edmonton Journal [this excerpt is not from the online version of the article],
Four years ago, Wolkow and his research team created the tiny microscope tip out of tungsten to be used for a scanned probe microscope, which operates similar to the way a record player needle feels bumps and grooves that are imprinted on a record. The extremely sharp point of the tungsten tip can be moved around a surface to feel out the minuscule grooves and bumps, a task that proved difficult and unreliable before his team’s invention, said Wolkow, who is also a physics professor at the University of Alberta.
The imaging gathered from the microscope tip can be mapped to provide scientists a more accurate image of what they’re studying.
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The tip, which scientists continue to refine, was fashioned out of tungsten because of the material’s strength and durability. Since it was created, scientists have realized the tip can also be used to change the topography of a surface on an atomic scale, which could lead to developments in electronic devices such as computer processors, Wolkow said.
“We’re talking about the possibility of making computers that would consume about 1,000 times less energy than today’s computers,” he said.
“It’s really exciting.” Along the way, two new uses for the creation have emerged. The tip is an exquisite source for both ions and electrons and can be used in microscopes that operate using both types of particles, Wolkow said.
Bravo to Robert Wolkow, Jason Pitters, Mohamed Rezeq and NINT!
I first came across the marketing campaign for Intel®’s 2nd generation Core™ Processor Family via a fun fact sheet. From the Feb. 25, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
Last year, Intel unveiled its Core™ processor family that, for the first time, used a full-featured system-on-a-chip 32 nanometer process technology to complement the CPU-specific technology. …
# A nanometer is so small that it takes a billion of them to make a meter. A billion is a huge number. A stack of a billion sheets of paper would be 100 km high. If you could walk a billion steps, you would go around the earth 20 times.
# The original transistor built by Bell Labs in 1947 was large enough that it was pieced together by hand. By contrast, more than 60 million 32nm transistors could fit onto the head of a pin. (A pin head is about 1.5 mm in diameter)
# More than 4 million 32nm transistors could fit in the period at the end of this sentence. (A period is estimated to be 1/10 square millimeter in area)
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# Compared to Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004, introduced in 1971, a 32nm CPU runs over 4000 times as fast and each transistor uses about 4000 times less energy. The price per transistor has dropped by a factor of about 100,000.
The marketing piece that has really excited my interest is The Chase Film,
What I find particularly interesting about this marketing campaign is the number of channels, the variety of materials, the time frame, and the range of audiences being addressed. Apparently the film (which is a remarkably slick production that crosses platforms seamlessly from live action to animation to a game format to Google Earth to Facebook and so on in the context of a ‘chase’ story) was presented yesterday at TED 2011 the same day it started, March 1, 2011 while at least one version of the film was posted on Youtube 2 months ago.
It looks to me like they are simultaneously ‘narrowcasting’ and ‘broadcasting’ to their audiences and this is an approach I heartily agree with. I know it’s fashionable in ‘communications’ circles to say that there is no such thing as a general audience which is why communication should be targeted to specific audiences. Two big issues arise with this kind of thinking (a) a tendency to preach to the converted and (b) a failure to properly identify the audiences.
Taking Intel as my example, that company broke ground when it started advertising its computer chips on television. While dumbfounding the rest of the industry, Intel took the computer chip into daily conversation. I don’t know how they bought the media but I am assuming there was some strategy regarding the programmes they chose for their early advertising breaks. In essence, the advertising was both general and targeted and identified an audience that no one else in the industry though existed.
You could say this new marketing strategy is general and targeted. Placing the video on Youtube is sending it out to the ‘general’ public. The concept behind the video is very engaging and as I noted, this is a very slick cross-platform piece. It’s the type of work you want to look at several times so you can catch everything.
Bringing the video (I gather one of the speakers is from Intel ETA Mar.4.11, I was wrong; it’s one of 10 winners of their “Ads worth spreading competition“) to TED (Technology Education Design) 2011 could be considered narrowcasting since only registrants (able to pay a high registration fee, interested in cutting edge ideas, and innovative thinkers) will see it at this time (these talks are made available for free months later). The registrants and the speakers for an event of this nature could be viewed as ‘influencers’. In other words, people who are ‘cool’ and whom others will follow. As you do, for example, on Twitter which is how I found this video.
I think I’m going to coin a phrase, ‘ripplecasting’ to describe what Intel is doing here. You throw a stone in the water and it causes ripples just like sending a speaker to TED 2011 where a registrant tweets (comments on their Twitter feed) which gets retweeted and so on. Sending a ‘fun’ factsheet to Nanowerk, is targeted communication to the nanotechnology community gets us back to narrowcasting.
ETA Mar.3.11: In rereading the previous passage, I think I wasn’t as clear about my ‘ripplecasting’ concept as I’d thought but then I am in the process of developing it. Here I go again, ripplecasting is a way of describing narrowcasting, broadcasting, and the use of new media and social media. I think Intel’s new product provides an excellent example of ‘ripplecasting’ with its use of tv advertising, outreach to industry media, presentation at TED 2011 which gets tweeted, and so on it goes.
I mentioned time frames earlier, this the 2nd year of Intel’s campaign, they unveiled their new product family in Jan. 2010.
There’s a lot more action on the ‘handheld diagnostic equipment and abolish invasive testing’ front than I realized. (In my Feb. 15, 2011 posting I highlighted the UK’s Argento [physical device and diagnostic tests for athletes] and PROOF [a Canadian group working 0n some new diagnostic tests for kidney patients and others].)
It turns out there’s another device, this one, to be found in the US, is called nanoLAB. From the Feb. 22, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
In 2009, Stanford University faculty member Shan Wang and doctoral students Richard Gaster and Drew Hall demonstrated that they could use the same ultrasensitive magnetic sensors that form the basis of today’s compact, high-capacity disk drives in combination with mass-produced magnetic nanotags to detect small amounts of cancer-associated proteins (click here for earlier story).
Now, in a paper published in the journal Lab on a Chip (“nanoLAB: An ultraportable, handheld diagnostic laboratory for global health”), the three scientists show how they shrunk this technology to create a handheld disease-detection device that any individual should be able to use at home to detect illness and even monitor the effectiveness of anticancer therapy.
In my Feb. 15 posting I wondered about how the samples were actually conveyed to the device. I now know how nanoLab does it, presumably Argento uses a similar approach,
The device, which the researchers have named the nanoLAB, consists of a disposable “stick” that resembles a home pregnancy test, and a handheld magnetic reader that analyzes a patient’s urine, blood, or saliva for the presence of specific disease-associated proteins. In its current design, the nanoLAB can provide simultaneous yes-no answers for up to eight different disease-associated proteins. The handheld sensor unit costs less than $200 to produce, while the sticks capable of making eight measurements cost less than $3.50 each, and could drop to under $1 apiece with improvements already in the works. …
To conduct a test using the nanoLab, a person would add a drop of biological sample – urine or blood, for example – on the stick. They would then add the contents of two premeasured vials to the stick and then wait 15 minutes for results to appear in the form of a lit LED light on the sensor unit.
It’s not quite Star Trek yet but we’re getting there.