Science Cheerleader

We’ve got a few announcements to make this week re: awesome awards for inventors. More on that shortly. In the interim, check out this video from Motherboard TV about the world’s most prolific inventor.  Yoshiro Nakamatsu, better known as Dr. NakaMats has over 3000 patents. If that isn’t impressive enough, things he made up include floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, and the karaoke machine. However, he won’t settle with that. He also invents ways TO invent! Like cutting off the circulation to his brain until he almost dies. Not too shabby for a young man of 82 years.
Watch Dr. NakaMats: Patently Strange here:

Here’s a post I wrote for Discover Magazine.com yesterday about a pharmaceutical ice cream–called ReCharge–New Zealand is producing to counter side effects of chemotherapy. I learned about this in The Scientist. The most important ingredient: Lactoferrin, a protein found in milk that possesses the power to impede tumor growth and improve intestinal immune response. Wow.

This morning, the BBC reports the British Library will interview and record 200 scientists to form a permanent record of the way British science has been practiced.

“This is going to be enormously valuable to future historians because people no longer write letters or prepare archives,” said Sir Nicholas Goodison, chairman of National Life Stories, in an interview with the BBC. “E-mail is very difficult to archive and is mostly deleted by the people that write them.”

In fact, a study prompting this project found that at least nine British Nobel winners have died in the past 10 years “leaving little or no archive of their work”.

This archive will focus on four themes: inventions, climate change, biomedicine and cosmology, and an advisory board will help select the scientists to be interviewed. According to the BBC report, selected scientists and engineers will be interviewed about their “childhood, education, influences, relationships and frustrations to build up a picture of how science has been practiced”.

(Thanks to @mardixon for sharing this with us.)

Thanks, John, for sharing this from Utne.com, “a digest of independent ideas and alternative culture. Not right, not left, but forward thinking. Most interested in creating a conversation about everything from the environment to the economy, politics to pop culture.”   (Or “poop culture” in this case!)

From Utne.com:

Offices around the world struggle for good uses for all the computer paper they waste every day. One company has a solution: Turn it into toilet paper. A company called Oriental is marketing a machine called White Goat that shreds old office paper and converts it directly into ready-to-use toilet paper. Watch a video of it below:

Thanks to The Rugbyologist for sending this.

It was announced today that Barbie’s newest career will be that of a Computer Engineer. Why?

“Girls who discover their futures through Barbie will learn that they – just like engineers – are free to explore infinite possibilities, and that their dreams can go as far as their imaginations take them,” said Nora Lin, President, Society of Women Engineers. “As a computer engineer, Barbie will show girls that women can design products that have an important and positive impact on people’s everyday lives, such as inventing a technology to conserve home energy or programming a newborn monitoring device.”

Barbie® designers worked with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering to “ensure that accessories, clothing and packaging were realistic and representative of a real computer engineer”.

Read the full press release here. GOOOO Barbie!

Occam’s Razor is currently typing from snowed-under Washington, DC, a region that has gotten smacked in the face with a giant Mother Nature snowball so vicious, that pretty much everything has come to a halt (insert your own joke about whether congress is more or less harmful when not in session).  The world has taken on that surreal post-apocalyptic feeling where norms as we previously knew them don’t apply and society breaks down (I thought a few days ago I was going to observe my neighbor and a plow-truck driver get into a fight…but it was disappointingly nothing more than that pseudo-bravado posturing and foot stomping we guys do).  Today I emerged to shovel my driveway – again! -  only to look onto a blindingly white, shapeless landscape that resembled the Hoth ice world from Star Wars.

I’ve essentially barely left my house for five days now, and quite honestly I’m bored!  I’ve watched old movies, dusted, waxed my back (Occam is excessively hairy) and by now I’m just about dying of boredom.  Which, by the way, is no longer just a figure of speech!  Scientists at University College London released the findings of a study of 7500 civil servants that shows that people reporting high levels of boredom (which surprisingly, given that they were civil servants, was not the entire cohort) had a shorter life expectancy than those not reporting being bored.  The reason being, say the researchers, is that those who are bored engage in unhealthy behaviors to help give life some edge, such as drinking and smoking.  Occam has drained a six-pack of Guinness and had three Bloody Mary’s (today) but hasn’t touched a cigarette!  I think I’m in the clear.  Next on my agenda is spending some time with SciCheer’s Sexy Scientists and Engineers Gallery, which will raise my blood pressure, but only for a bit.

Adding to my cabin fever is that I’m in my home with two women, one of whom has mono and the other, my wife, who is pretty.  What is wrong with that, you might ask?  Nothing, except for the fact that the latest from science tells us that attractive women are “more prone to anger, prevail more in conflicts of interest, and consider themselves entitled to better treatment.”  (Find the study here in the Proceedings of the NAS).  That explains a lot of the power dynamics in my marriage!  Five days in a house where I know I’m the lesser partner is stressful.  Maybe I’ll think twice about looking at that sexy scientist and engineers gallery…

Welcome to NASA’s brand new Open Government Web page where the White House’s three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration “form the cornerstone of an open government”. The website’s not NASA’s only astronaut boot planted firmly on-board the Transparency Train…check this out:

The NASA App for the iPhone and iPod touch is now available free of charge on the Apple App Store. Among other cool tricks, the NASA App allows users to track the current positions of the International Space Station and other spacecraft currently orbiting Earth

Why do this? “Making NASA more accessible to the public is a high priority for the agency,” said Gale Allen, director of Strategic Integration and Management for NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington. “Tools like this allow us to provide users easy access to NASA information and progress at a fast pace.”

GOOOO NASA!

h/t Bart

Say wha? Check out Fairytale Fashion where technology is used “to turn make-believe into reality”.  It’s a project former Project Runway participant Diana Eng is working on these days. It’s an “interactive, web-enabled effort to create a collection of magical clothing in real life, replete with blooming flowers, transforming shapes and changing colors”.

In this installment of MotherboardTV, the “fashion geek” demonstrates how easily technology can be incorporated into fashion and she shares a secret about Victoria’s Secret’s bust-enhancing, “smart fabric”. Check it out.

On February 1, 2010, President Obama sent Congress a $3.8 trillion budget request,  $147.7 billion of which is to be used for federal R&D. Susan Morrissey of Chemical and Engineering News says this means “science wins”. Read her report. (Thanks to Paul for sending this.)