What Is the Science of Sustainability?

By Megan Ray Nichols

Sustainability is a word that appears in conversation often these days, especially with the United Nations giving us a looming 2030 deadline to start reducing our carbon emissions. Everyone is talking about sustainability and why it’s so important, but if you ask people why, they won’t have an answer for you. What is the science behind it, and what can we do to live a more sustainable life?

Sustainability Defined

First, what is sustainability? We talk about living a more sustainable life all the time, but it’s helpful to be able to put a definition behind the word.

At its most basic, sustainability is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” according to UCLA. This definition might work well in casual conversation, but there’s so much more to it than just meeting our needs while preserving natural resources for posterity.

Sustainability and sustainable development encompass everything from food production to the health of the ozone. It also includes climate change and its impacts both today and into the future. As much as we dream of going to the stars, we are not a space-faring species yet. That means this little blue marble is the only home our generation and those yet to come will have — and we need to take care of it.

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Best Tips For Teaching Students To Develop Their Scientific Writing Skills

Writing is not an easy skill, no matter how simple it may seem at a first glance. But, you need it to go through your education with success Everything is based on writing when in school and if you have good writing skills, you will do better in everything. Exams, essays and so on, all have a huge impact on your school results and they all require writing.

As a teacher, you need to help every single student improve their skills and acquire new writing skills. Your students will become better people as a result of this.

But, most teachers don’t realize that they will need to provide a lot of help for their students so that they can develop these skills. They have a responsibility to do this. While your students can improve your skills without working hard, you have to be there to make sure that they are doing a good job.

Follow these tips to help your students learn more and better:

Encourage good and penalize bad writing

Some teachers want to get good results but never want to do anything about it. They never motivate their students properly and if they want their students to work well, they have to ask for the results. Let your students know that they will get a reward for good writing and that they will be punished for bad writing. Let them know that those who make great efforts to write well while being thoughtful and clear will be able to get some extra points and better grades and that those who work less and make less efforts to write well will be penalized with negative points or worse grades.

Build their mindset

Clear rules and expectations are not always enough and they might not work on all of your students. So, you have to inspire them to create great papers by letting them know just how important writing skills are. This is motivating them rather than scaring them. “You can make them understand that good writing extends beyond just school and that it’s crucial for success. Give them examples of people who have succeeded in their life because of writing skills and people who failed because they missed out on learning how to write properly” says Delia Plants, copy-editor at Stateofwriting and Australian help.

Allow them to practice a lot

Every skill gets better with practice. Repetitive work makes it better and more high quality. Small changes in your routine will make it easy for you to organize practice lessons and you can do this every day. Ask for a small amount of words on a specific topic so that they can practice being succinct and brief while still going in-depth on a certain subject. It can be boring and tedious for them at first but their skills will definitely improve. They will start writing so much better than they did before and this will create a huge improvement in their life. Diversify topics and genres. They can write non-fiction one day and then put their imagination to good use and write fiction the next day, Involve them in homework, assignments, exams and so on.

Instruct them through the writing process

When you provide your students with an assignment, you should explain how they can start writing it and how they can make it through all of the elements of good writing. Take some time to talk with them and address their concerns and issues. You can emphasize the importance of creating an outline.

You can also give them a good starting points and tell them about techniques, methods and so on that will help them save time and energy. They will be able to memorize these things and their skills will get better with time,” says Jorge Nesbit, editorial assistant at Oxessays and Academized.

Give feedback

You can also give them feedback during this process. You can share with them many different things about when they did well, what they did wrong, what they can still improve on etc.

Become their role model and mentor and share with them useful feedback.

Help them read a lot

Good writers are also experienced readers. You should give your students plenty of time to read and even create one assignments where they have to read a book every week. This will expand their vocabulary and help them write better.

While writing isn’t rocket science, you can help your students learn better and faster if you know how to do that. Use these tips to improve your student’s writing skills.

Nora Mork is an education journalist at Ukwritings and Boomessays. She is often invited to speak at online conferences and to contribute columns to Essayroo blog.

7 Problems with Scientific Translation

Erica Sunarjo

All over the world, scientists are conducting groundbreaking research, writing compelling papers, and educating people on a variety of topics. Everyone benefits when scientific information is disseminated across the Globe. Of course, not all scientists speak the same language. As a result, scientific documentation, texts, research notes, and other materials must be translated, so they are available to anyone who can benefit from them.

Thankfully, there are services that offer scientific translation and localization.  However, the process is not always as simple as one might assume. If translation professionals don’t take special care, mistakes can happen. Here are 7 problems with scientific translations that both translators and members of the scientific community must be aware of.

Lack of Translator Expertise

Scientific and technical translations can cover an exceptionally wide range of industries and academic disciplines. Some of these are quite advanced. Others are simply unique and require very specific skills and background to understand. It can be difficult to find translators with the right expertise to execute accurate and certifiable translations. People who need such translations struggle to find qualified translation professionals and often fail to get final translations that are accurate.

In these situations, translation services and their clients must take extra steps to ensure accuracy. This might include having subject matter experts in addition to translation professionals verify documents, provide needed details, and assist those involved in the product to ensure accuracy.

Unclear Source Documents

Even scientific documents can contain idioms, jargon, and phraseology that can make translation challenging. In addition to this, scientific workers and researchers may use different words and phrases to reference scientific and clinical terms. There’s also the issue of false friends. These are words that sound very similar in two languages but are actually distinct. This can be further confused by the fact that in scientific research many false friends have some similarities. Something as simple as the term ‘medical device’ can cause refusing results due to the false friends phenomenon.

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The Principles of Building Indestructible Sand Castles

Introduction

If you had a formal education that touched even a little bit of composite materials in the course, you will immediately be able to recall what these amazing materials can do. For others, Composite materials, as the name suggests, are materials that are composed of two or more different kinds of materials.

In a simple case think of your body, which is, in a broad sense, a combination of skin material and bone material. These materials are designed to take advantage of the contrasting properties of, say two different materials. For simplicity’s sake, skin is soft and bone is hard. The bone gives body a solid structure, while the skin and muscle tissues enables this hard skeleton to make fluid movements – flex or bend – and still be together.

Individually the materials that make up a composite material are not very capable. But when they come together, composite materials can blow your mind. To appreciate how this simple coming together of two humble materials can create a super material, and to appreciate the mind blowing properties it can have, let us first look at what most of us have heard of – “Carbon Fiber”. We will get into the more mind bending aspect of composites after that.

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRP)

Now carbon fiber itself isn’t a composite material. As the name suggests, it is a fiber of carbon. The fiber is composed of strands of carbon each of which are much thinner than a single human hair. Hundreds of these come together to form a thicker fiber. This fiber can be woven to make sheets or the carbon fiber itself can directly be used in a composite material.

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5 Things You Didn’t Know About Water Repellent Technology

Water repellent technology has advanced a lot since it was first introduced. Durable water repellent is a coating which is received by the products to make them water resistant and is made from nano structures. These nano structures are the result of the advancement in the modern chemicals and thus offer far more protection than any other thing. Here are some of the facts which makes explains how this new water repellent technology uses the concept of nano technology to help your car remain cleaner:

The Lotus Effect

The nano structures are byproducts of nanotechnology which are used to give protection to your car’s windows, windshields, rims and to the whole body. The main function of the hydrophobic coating is to act as water repellent agent making your car waterproof and increase the car’s auto wash cycles. The mechanism from which it was inspired is itself found in nature and therefore called as “Lotus effect”. This is named after lotus leaf which has self cleaning properties and insects such as butterflies and dragonflies also exhibit such properties.

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The Cocktail Party Effect

Introduction

The term cocktail party effect was coined by a British Cognitive scientist Colin Cherry, in the 1950s. He was interested in understanding how people listened, by conducting a few experiments. In his first experiment, he played two different overlapped messages recorded in the voice of the same person, through headphones. The participants were asked to listen carefully and try to write one of the messages on paper. If they put in enough concentration, the participants usually succeeded.

Now, if someone asks you to describe the cocktail party effect. The formal Cocktail Party effect definition is as follows:

Cocktail Party Effect Definition:

The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. Continue reading The Cocktail Party Effect

Everything You Should Know About Machine Learning

Programming Computers: Then and Now

I find it fascinating that today you can define certain rules and provide enough historical data to a computer, reward it for reaching closer to the goal and punish it for doing bad, which will get it trained to do a specific task. Based on these rules and data, the machine can be programmed to learn to do tasks so well that we humans have no way of knowing what steps it is explicitly following to get the work done. It’s like the brain, you can’t slice it open and understand the inner workings.

The days when we used to define each step for the computer to take are now numbered. The role we played back then, of a god to the computers has been reduced to something like that of a dog trainer. The tables are turning from commanding machines to parenting them. Rather than creating code, we are turning into trainers. Computers are learning. It has been called machine learning, for quite a while now (defined in 1959 by by Arthur Samuel). Other names being artificial intelligence, deep simulation or cognitive computing. However now, it really has picked up and based on the amazing things it can help computers do now, it is clearly going to be the future of what the IT industry will transform into.

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Fact vs Factoid

By Anupum Pant

Fact is something that’s unquestionably true. A universal truth that can’t be denied. Like, the sun rises from the east.

Factoid, like a duckling, seems to be like a quick fact. It isn’t. It’s important to remember that it is very different from a fact.

A factoid is something that’s repeatedly used wrong at many places. It is a word that is believed to have been coined in the biography of Marilyn Monroe, by Norman Mailer. As the Guardian puts it…

A true factoid should sound credible, and be assumed to be true by a significant number of people (if you are the only person who believes it, it may simply be a delusion). The Washington Times defined a factoid as “something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact”. An example is the belief that the Great Wall of China is visible from the moon, which according to Wikipedia would be possible only if your eyesight were 17,000 times better than 20/20.

The Scientifically Right Way to Pee

By Anupum Pant

Any man who has used a common urinal knows how splashy urinating in them can be. Men have tried for ages to do it the right way, but the right way has remained elusive. Now, science has stepped in to save the day.

Splash lab, Brigham Young University’s famous fluids lab studied the physics of urinal usage and presented their learnings in a conference recently. To reduce the significant splash back that is produced, they suggest some scientifically proven techniques of aiming.

1. Aim for the vertical surfaces. Horizontal ones will produce a much bigger splash back.

2. At closer distances the stream remains continuous. However, turbulence kicks in quickly and the stream separates into individual droplets. (which also is the reason peeing on an electric fence won’t kill you). You don’t want these separated droplets to hit the surface of water. So go closer, as close as you can get.

3. Try to make low angles with the surfaces at which the stream hits surfaces.

4. Splash reducing inserts are put in there for a reason. Aim there.

As splash lab puts it – always remember “Haphazard urinal usage can have devastating consequences.”

The Fencing Response

During the first few years, human babies display interesting reflex actions. One such reflex action is the moro reflex. That is, when a baby’s head is lifted a few inches up and then is dropped, the baby extends its arms outwards as if trying to find a support and is reaching out to stabilize itself. Here’s a video of a baby’s moro reflex.

When the baby grows, this response usually goes away because the brain starts to learn to suppress reflexes. But they sometimes still do appear. For instance in the case of a minor head injury – usually during sporting events. In this case, even adults can reactivate the infantile reflex due to a trauma to the brain stem. When this happens the person extends his arm in a peculiar position – like the “en guarde” position – and falls down. Wikipedia describes it as:

The fencing response is a peculiar position of the arms following a concussion. Immediately after moderate forces have been applied to the brainstem, the forearms are held flexed or extended (typically into the air) for a period lasting up to several seconds after the impact. The fencing response is often observed during athletic competition involving contact, such as American football, hockey, rugby and martial arts.

Here’s a video compilation of players in sporting events falling down with a fencing response after an injury to their head. This of course is rare, but when it does happen, a referee is trained to stop the play because it is an overt indicator of serious injury to the head. It’s nice to know and it will be fun to notice this in the upcoming superball.

Why Are Chillies Hot

By Anupum Pant

We’ve had chillies for more than 6000 years. Over time, by using clever growing techniques people have come up with chillies that are absurdly hot. While others like bell peppers are not hot at all. Capsaicin is the chemical that is present in chillies which makes them feel hot and we found that out only recently (as compared to its 6000 year history).

Capsaicin in theory is actually a neurotoxin which is inherently unpleasant to humans. Most of us who’ve tried quelling the heat from a pepper using water know that Capsaicin doesn’t dissolve in water. On the other hand, it readily dissolves in fats and oils. That is the reason, a traditional remedy to quelling the heat from a pepper is by washing it off using milk, yogurt or cream.

The hottest parts of a chilli is neither its skin nor the seeds. It is the central white flesh to which seeds are attached. When humans, or for that matter, any mammal eats a chilli, their bodies are able to digest the seeds and it doesn’t really serve any purpose for the chilli plant. So, to keep humans and mammals at bay, they are believed to have evolved to produce capsaicin.

Even the hottest chillies produced using clever growing techniques have taken this defensive response of a chilli plant to encourage it to make more capsaicin.

But there’s more. The hotter a chilli is, the better are its defences against harmful fungus and bacteria. So, capsaicin helps chilli plants to deal with, not just mammals, but also fungus and bacteria.

Parrots and other birds however aren’t bothered by capsaicin. Birds also aren’t able to digest the seeds and spread the chilli seeds all around through their droppings. And this serves a great purpose for the parent plant.

Mathematician Died on The Predicted Date

By Anupum Pant

Abraham de Moivre was a famous French mathematician who’s known even today for his  de Moivre’s formula. Besides that he’s also known for his work in  normal distribution and probability theory.

Moivre’s another area of interest involved making mortality tables. He spent a considerable amount of time connecting death with numbers and was said to have formulated a theory that could predict the day on which a person would die.

When he was 87 years old he noticed a slight change in his sleeping duration. He found that he had started sleeping for 15 minutes more than his usual duration. Each night he was sleeping 15 minutes longer. Putting the math together, he calculated that his sleeping time would add up to 24 hours on November 27th 1754. According to him, when that would happen he would never wake up again. And that is what happened.

De moivre died on November 27, 1754!

Actually, since he had predicted this, out of stubbornness and an obdurate desire to keep up his name as a great statistician, he voluntarily tried everyday to keep up with this 15 minute increase in the sleeping duration everyday. And the day when his total sleep duration added up to 24 hours, he did die. But the official cause of his death was Somnolence (or “sleepiness”).

If luck (or bad luck, if you may call it that) hadn’t favoured him, he would have slept for 24 hours and 15 minutes the other day. In reality, it was his stubbornness and probably sheer luck which put him to an eternal sleep, not math.

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How to Survive for Three Days Under Water

By Anupum Pant

Harrison Okene was a 29-year-old chef on Jascon 4 – a big oil company boat. On one unfortunate day, due to a bad storm in the sea, off the coast of Nigeria, the boat capsized. With the 12 crew members of the ship, Okene went down with the boat. He got trapped under water and survived in there for three days, while none of the other mates survived.

The man found a big air bubble trapped underneath the shipwreck and lived in there for more than 2 and half days. He had nothing to eat or drink except coke. Here’s a full video shot by a rescue diver.

The diver’s voice sounds funny because they use a mixture of helium and air to breathe in their equipment. And Helium makes your voice sound like that.

The Blue Blood of a Horseshoe crab is Precious

By Anupum Pant

Not-so-good Bunnies

Several years back large colonies of cute little rabbits were being maintained by pharmaceutical companies. These rabbits were used to find contamination in solutions that would be used to treat human beings. If the rabbits fell sick due to fever after being injected, the solutions were labeled as contaminated and were not injected into humans. If the rabbit had no fever after 2 days, the solution was deemed clean and could be used on humans.

However, pharma companies hated this process – not because they felt bad about harming cute bunnies, but the process was expensive and took about 2 days to give results.

A new discovery

A few years later, a scientist named Fred Bang was studying the circulatory system of a horseshoe crab – half a billion year old specie. He accidentally discovered some amazing properties of the horseshoe crab’s blood when one of his crabs died because its whole blood turned into a semi-solid mass.

He found that when the crab’s blue colored blood came in contact with a certain kind of bacteria, it got clotted into a semi-solid mass and completely trapped the bacteria.

And ultimately with the help of a scientist, Jack Levin, he developed a  process that could be used to detect bacteria contaminated solutions (contaminated with endotoxin). This process proved to be a boon to us humans.

The replaced test

Today the old bunny test has been completely replaced. Pharmaceutical companies love the new test because it takes about just 45 minutes to complete and costs much lesser.

Every year thousands of live Horseshoe crabs are made to bleed blue to take advantage of their blood’s unique properties. About 30% of these crabs die. The miracle blue liquid can detect contamination in solutions that are extremely tiny (even if the contamination is as tiny as some parts-per-trillion). 

The several liters blood extracted from these live crabs is used to save human lives by protecting them from contaminated solutions.

Every single person who has ever had an injection, has been protected because the blood of a horseshoe crab ensured that you got clean injections. Had there been no horseshoe crabs, we’d have been killing bunnies. Salute to the crab.

 

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