Adhesion, Geckos, and Technology

One of our earlier experiences with science comes in kindergarten. The teacher brings out the Elmer's glue and we put macaroni on construction paper. The white viscous stuff acts to permanently bond the paper and pasta. As children we're ignorant of the science beneath this and view glue as magic stuff. But if we could zoom in to resolve the detail, we’d see the long squiggly polymer molecules in the glue are grabbing onto the fibers in the paper as well as the starch fibers in the macaroni. The glue acts as an adhesive.

AWIS 40th Anniversary Meeting, Session Summary

UPDATE: TO BE PUBLISHED

The Frontiers in Sustainability Panel at the AWIS 40^th anniversary conference consisted of three speakers, all from different areas of environmental science.

The first speaker, Ms. Kristen Graf, is the Executive Director of the Women of Wind Energy organization (WoWE). Ms. Graf started out as an engineering major intent on developing wind technology, but realized the technology itself is already developed. However, fossil fuels and nuclear energy still dominate the generation of electricity over renewable energy sources. The relative proportions of nonrenewables and renewables have actually remained fairly stagnant even with all of the media buzz and politicking surrounding renewables. This has happened despite wind power growing in popularity worldwide. Puzzlingly, this stagnation has occurred despite the increase in wind turbine production in the U.S. So why is this?

A classic experiment, explained

Suppose you send a loved one on a small errand. Take out the trash. If you are concerned about his or her propensity to dawdle, it’s easy to calculate his or her average speed to acquire solid evidence. Just take the distance to the curb, multiply by 2 to account for the “to” and “from” portions of the trip. Divide this result by the total time it took and you’ll get the average speed. (If the result is comparable to the land speed of a box turtle, you are in the clear to berate your loved one.) In 1849, Armand Fizeau used this same principle to calculate the speed of light directly: He reflected light off of a mirror a fixed distance away and timed the round trip. This was the first measurement of the speed of light on Earth.

While Fizeau used the same method to calculate the speed of light, it wasn’t quite so easy.

NY = LA, more or less?

This was an exercise (at least the first few paragraphs were) for the Santa Fe Workshop I attended in May.

Geoffrey West wants to let us in on a little-known tidbit. New York and Los Angeles are basically the same city. You probably think that’s preposterous. New York is the land of the subway, L.A. is the land of the freeway. New York has city lights in the nights, L.A. has sunshine-drenched days. They’re different.

West audaciously gives us an additional morsel. Their sameness can be mathematically proven. Now you’re tempted to use this paper to line the birdcage. How could something as human as a city, in all its qualitative complexity, be quantitatively characterized?

A reflection upon hard drives

A few months ago I was having an issue: my laptop’s hard drive was running out of storage space. I was in the heat of a project that I couldn’t put on hold so every day I had to find a few unimportant files to delete. Just five years ago this computer was state-of-the-art and had seemingly endless storage: 100 gigabytes of data. But, like a large purse, I found ways to fill it. The documents and photos didn’t take up so much space, but my music collection took up a large chunk. At the time I didn’t sweat it as the 40 GB or so of free space was surely enough for an eternity. But my music collection bloomed. To compound this, about a year ago I started a video collection and it was only a few weeks before it was filled to the brim.

After my project was done I knew I needed to reflect on the state of my laptop.

How DO bacteria swim with no arms?

You had to skip breakfast today. To compound your misery, a delicious smell
permeates the office. Who ordered pizza? Your stomach growls. You wander around
the hallways and follow your nose to the source of the smell. A few boxes sit unat-
tended in the conference room. A sign in your boss’s handwriting threatens, “DO
NOT EAT.” You sneak a slice anyway, undetected. How do bacteria find food when
they are hungry?

How do you make a nanobot?

Here is an essay I wrote while reflecting on and researching a lecture I heard by Yale Goldman, Professor of Physiology at the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute, and associate director of the NBIC at Penn.


How do you make a nanobot?

Imagine you are playing with a set of Legos. This set is one of the newer
ones. It has all kinds of blocks, gears, wheels, pulleys, batteries, etc. Put different
combinations of them together and you can build a house or maybe if you’re feeling
clever, a machine. Suppose you make a small battery-powered car. Imagine shrinking
this car. As it shrinks, the number of atoms in each Lego block must become fewer.
Eventually, you may reach the limit where each block is one atom. What if we could
make machines like this?