Nifty Fifty
USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog
Tag archives for Nifty Fifty
Astronaut John Grunsfeld Tells What Lifting Off in the Space Shuttle is Really Like!
Posted by Joanna Pool on April 25, 2011 The Space Shuttle lifting off and headed for the nether regions of space, although a majestic sight, is one of the most grueling and critical parts of the space mission because of all the raw power and energy expended by the craft. NASA astronaut John Mace Grunsfeld knows the experience well. He’s flown on five…
Good Science Writing: Clear, Engaging Words That Make Us Want to ‘Take a Peek Behind the Curtain’
Posted by Joanna Pool on April 22, 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Natalie Angier has spent her entire career translating complex scientific research information into engaging, stimulating prose that the average person can understand. In fact, says Marcela Valdes of Publisher’s Weekly: “She is the kind of woman you wish you’d had beside you in high school chemistry–tiny, ferociously intelligent, she’d eye you…
Revolutionizing Product Packaging the Eco-Friendly Way — With Mushrooms!
Posted by Joanna Pool on April 18, 2011 We’ve all seen (and used) them: seemingly endless amounts of plastic and Styrofoam material for shipping and packaging everything from televisions and computers to toys and mail parcels. But we often never think about the impact those reams of bubble wrap and blocks of foam will have on our landfills and other parts of the…
Climate Change: Reconstructing the Past to Understand What We May Expect in the Future
Posted by Joanna Pool on April 14, 2011 In her quest to study the fundamentals of climate change, prominent geochemist and climatologist Kim Cobb has sailed on six oceanographic research voyages and led five caving expeditions to the rainforests of Borneo. Her challenge: working out of her primary research base in the tropical Pacific, how to better understand and reconstruct climate variability of…
Motivating Young Minds in Science Through the Magic of BioBus
Posted by Joanna Pool on April 13, 2011 Meet Nifty Fifty speaker Ben Dubin-Thaler. With a refreshing measure of ingenuity, Ben Dubin-Thaler is proving that some of the most exciting lessons in science can occur outside the classroom – in a bus. That’s the Cell Motion BioBus, a self-powered, fully-equipped mobile microscopy lab that Ben developed and operates to bring hands-on science education…
Achieving in Engineering: ‘Work on Things That Are Interesting, Exciting and Important to You’
Posted by Joanna Pool on April 4, 2011 As a young student growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Charles (Chuck) Vest remembers taking endless aptitude tests in school – all of them indicating that he should become a journalist, a psychologist or a historian. Engineer was way down on the list, test results always revealed, strongly suggesting he had little…
Creativity and the Brain: Learning From Jazz Musicians and Rappers
Posted by Joanna Pool on April 1, 2011 How does the brain create and perceive music? More specifically, what goes on inside the heads of musicians when they’re in the groove composing a song or improvising with their instruments or voice? These questions have long intrigued researcher Charles Limb, and to find answers he’s turned to studying the brains of some likely individuals:…
From Viral Electric Car Batteries to Creating More Durable Everyday Materials
Posted by Joanna Pool on March 21, 2011 If researcher Angela Belcher has her way, electric cars of the future will be equipped with lightweight, inexpensive batteries that can store enough electricity to make driving such vehicles even more practical. Also on her laboratory “to do” list: developing tougher electronic material so that you’ll never lose your computer again to an errant glass…
Microbes Rule the World
Posted by Joanna Pool on March 18, 2011 Watch a little about Microbes from the Fall 2010 USA Science and Engineering Festival. The average science student knows that microbiology is the study of bacteria and other microorganisms, especially those that cause disease and other threats to health. But what the public often does not realize is that the work of the microbiologist is…
Inside the Career of the Man Who Gave Us ‘The Inner Life of a Cell’
Posted by Joanna Pool on March 14, 2011 For David Bolinsky – the co-creator, with his talented team, of the highly-acclaimed computer animated science film, The Inner Life of a Cell – the plunge into the wonders of medical animation began at age four when he went to see the movie Fantasia. From that moment, he was hooked. “That did it for me,”…