Interest of the day

Cambridge University is doing research to build artificial bone. The process requires a repetitive process of dunking samples into different compounds. The researchers used the Lego Mindstorm system to build a dunking robot. It's really cool and was a relatively quick way to prototype the fabrication system.

The Department of Education has posted an article on Open Education and announced a video competition on the importance of open education. The grand prise is $25,000. There are a number of sites offering college level open source text books as well. These include:

• ck-12.org: K-12 STEM texts for teachers and students.
• cnx.org: statistics text book
• OpenStaxCollege.org: books on physics, sociology, and biology to be published in spring of 2012.

Brian Greene's PBS special Fabric of the Cosmos is now available on line.

I ran across several DIY motor projects that look easy to construct.

• My Buckyballs electric motor on YouTube.
• How to make the simplest electric motor at Evil Mad Scientist.
• MHD I: Demonstrate Magnetohydrodynamic Propulsion in a Minute at Evil Mad Scientist.

Ian Stewart is a Mathematics Professor at Warwick University and has a short slide show explaining the wave equation. He is also author of the book Seventeen Equations That Changed the World.

NASA is offering a week long Summer Rocket Workshop June 16-21 to learn how to build and launch a scientific experiment to space for students and facility. The registration is open through May 1 and will be held at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility.

PhET at the University of Colorado at Boulder posts a wide assortment of physics simulators on dozens of topics. The simulators are designed for education and teaching purposes, and are free. They are run from a browser running JAVA and Flash. The image below shows a band structure simulation output.

The new website Download The Universe is dedicated to review of science e-books. I'm a big fan of science books and began reading a number of these books my kindle. I've found that the publishers are not very careful about exponents (1012 should be 10^12 or 10¹²) or figures are hard to read. I, thus, look forward to their reviews and hope that these reviews will make science e-books and text e-books better.

Neat interactive web site showing the scale of the universe from neutrinos to the known size of the universe.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK have posted a video of a T-cell killing a cancer cell. The video is a stop motion so it's 92 time faster than real time. Showing how the immune system works at a cellular level is an impressive work.