Posts Tagged ‘education’
High School Inventors 2011
Ten students who are improving MRIs, cancer treatments and human-robot interaction--between classes, of course
ALLISON DANA BICK
High School: Millburn High School, Millburn, N.J.
Invention: Smartphone water-quality tester
When Alison Dana Bick was in middle school, a downpour swamped the streets of her hometown and flooded its well. Public officials warned that flooding might have carried sewage into the water supply. “My friend called to ask if there was a way to check the safety of the tap water,” Bick says. When a Google search revealed that there wasn’t any fast and easy household test, she decided to create one. Four years later, she completed work on a cellphone application that determines the concentration of bacteria in a photographed sample of water. Unlike current water-testing kits that take 18 hours to evaluate the full chemical and bacterial content of a sample, Bick’s cellphone test provides a simple answer—contaminated or safe to drink—immediately. Bick knew that Colilert-18, one of the most common water-quality testing agents, turned yellow when mixed with bacteria-contaminated water; the more the bacteria, the darker the hue. So she developed an algorithm to read and analyze the yellow-pixel intensity in a low-resolution photo of the chemical water sample. She is currently collaborating with the Millburn Short Hills chapter of the American Red Cross to field-test the system.
College: Bick starts her freshman year at Princeton University this fall. She plans to study chemical engineering.
RYAN ERICKSON
High School: Los Alamos High School, Los Alamos, N.M.
Invention: Portable, solar-powered desalination unit
Ryan Erickson may live on a high desert mesa, but he has big plans for . Last year, he began to develop an interest in large desalination projects—which remove salt and other minerals from seawater to make it drinkable—in countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Australia. But he soon learned that no one had built a portable, automated, affordable desalination system that also treats seawater for harmful bacteria—although millions of people, including those living in coastal nations, lack safe drinking water. His solar-powered device, a three-foot cube easily carried by two people, relies on readily available materials: sand, charcoal, and plastic bottles. Saltwater is filtered through layers of sand and charcoal before entering a boiling chamber. The steam is cooled and collected on a condenser coil and then exposed to a SteriPEN, which kills harmful bacteria with ultraviolet light. Other portable desalination systems are less sophisticated and can remove only salt from the water, not other harmful contaminants. Erickson’s next step is to redesign the system to make it even more compact.
College: This fall, Erickson will enter the University of California, San Diego, where he will study electrical engineering.
PARAM JAGGI
High School: Plano East Senior High School, Plano, Texas
Invention: CO
First Steps of a Cyborg
Austin Whitney didn’t want to graduate from college in a wheelchair. So he and the student engineers at U.C. Berkeley’s “Kaz Lab” built a machine that allowed him to stand up and walk across the commencement stage
Whitney is a paraplegic. For the past four years, he has been bound to a wheelchair, unable to walk. Then he got a call from Homayoon Kazerooni, the director of Berkeley’s Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory. Kazerooni creates robotic exoskeletons, motorpowered devices worn by users to add mechanical might to the movements of muscle and bone. The U.S. military funds most exoskeleton research, with the goal of one day creating a super-soldier, a bionic man who can punch through brick walls or carry 200-pound loads all day long. Kazerooni has built exoskeletons that are now being tested by the Army, but when he contacted Whitney in August 2010, he had other users in mind. He was looking for a research subject to help his students develop an exoskeleton that didn’t give its wearer a superpower but rather a much more basic one: the ability to walk.
On the stage, Whitney’s mortarboard tassel drops in front of his eyes and he flips it aside with a shake of his head. Lurking a few feet behind him in dark glasses and black sport coats are Michael McKinley, Jason Reid and Wayne Tung, graduate students in Kazerooni’s lab. Waiting offstage is another graduate student, Minerva Pillai, and the lab manager, Arun Joshua Cherian. Whitney is about to demonstrate their invention in public for the first time, and the exoskeleton has been bedeviled with technical glitches that persisted until moments before he wheeled himself onstage.
“This in many ways is like a moon launch. When the countdown reaches zero, we hit the stage."Until now, the exoskeletons developed in Kazerooni’s lab have been elaborately engineered test pieces. “All we’ve been doing is making really expensive machines,” Kazerooni says. “We’re making Porsches.” For the current project, Kazerooni challenged the students to invent the Honda of exoskeletons, a bare-bones device that would cost $15,000 or less, not $100,000 or more. Only at that price, he says, will disabled people (and their insurance companies) be able to afford them. Since the project began in January 2009, it has become a steadily consuming obsession for Kazerooni’s students, who powered themselves through 17-hour days with caffeine, candy bars and pirated MP3s. In the month before graduation, most of the students took up unofficial residence in the lab. “This in many ways is like a moon launch,” McKinley says. “When the countdown reaches zero, we hit that stage.”
Whitney grips the handles of a walker placed in front of him. Arms quivering, he pushes himself up from the chair. Cheers swell around him as his right leg, powered by the clacking machinery of the exoskeleton, flexes at the knee and begins to swing forward.on Tuesday at Midnight, four days before graduation, it seems uncertain that the first step will even happen, though the students refuse to voice any doubt. Kazerooni is in China for a conference, the students are running the shop, and the exoskeleton is having problems. The “Kaz Lab,” a windowless, basement-level room in Berkeley’s engineering building, is strewn with wires, circuit boards, Thai food containers and Twix wrappers. McKinley hunches over a computer-controlled machining tool, which cuts into a copper plate with a nails-against-the-chalkboard scream. Pillai works at a sewing machine to modify the exoskeleton’s shoulder harness. Exoskeleton prototypes with gears for hips and thin metal rods for legs hang from ceiling straps around the room’s perimeter.
Crammed against one wall, a treadmill sits covered by a bed sheet. Two sneakered feet jut out from underneath it. They belong to Whitney, who, somehow, amid the pandemonium, is able to nap. Though he isn’t an engineer (double major in history and political science), Whitney’s input is critical to the Kaz Lab team. He has participated in hundreds of tests and provided design suggestions, user feedback and motivation. The students might say they’re working to advance the cause of the disabled, but what they’re really thinking about is helping their friend to walk. The schedule has been so hectic lately that Whitney returns home for only a few hours a night and has taken to napping between exoskeleton tests. A paper-plate sign taped to his treadmill shanty reads “Will pilot exos for food.”
Reid stands up from a computer where he had been tweaking some of the software that controls the exoskeleton. He comes over and taps Whitney on the shoulder. “We’re about ready for you, Austin,” he says. Whitney sits up and rubs his eyes. He hoists himself into a wheelchair that already holds the exoskeleton in a seated position. He cracks open a 16-ounce Monster Energy drink as the team members tighten the bindings that hold him in the machine. The test is about to begin when Whitney calls out, “Oh wait, music. Come on guys, step up!” A student taps at a keyboard, and a beat starts pumping out of desktop speakers. “Some labs run on water, others on honey,” Whitney says. “We run on techno.”
Whitney pushes himself laboriously to his feet, and the exoskeleton experiment is under way. With a safety cord running to a ceiling track, he takes a lurching, clanking step forward, like the Tin Man breaking free from his prison of rust.
General Electric unveiled the world’s first powered exoskeleton—Hardiman, a 1,500-pound, marginally functional beast—in 1965, but it was too bulky and difficult to control to be practical. Exoskeletons now often weigh less than 100 pounds, but they work fundamentally the same way. The user is strapped into a metal framework with articulated limbs and joints that he directs with body movements or electrical stimulation. Motors supply the superhuman power.
Whitney’s exo is named “Austin” in his honor, and its robotic heritage extends back to BLEEX, an exoskeleton that Kazerooni began developing in 2000 with grant money from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). In 2005, Kazerooni co-founded the company Berkeley Bionics to commercialize the devices pioneered in his university lab.
With the goal of developing an exoskeleton that costs close to what a powered wheelchair does, the students were forced to adopt a minimalist approach. Instead of updating earlier models by adding features, they had to strip them out. “Kaz told us, ‘Find a way to use fewer motors and still make this thing walk,’” Pillai says. She and the team employed two motors rather than the four or six motors of previous models. Instead of custom-designing every part, the team members bought some components from Sports Authority, including snowboard bindings and soccer shin guards to secure Whitney’s feet and legs, and shoulder straps from a backpack to hold the exo’s motors and batteries to his back. Reid, who was in charge of the Austin’s computer control systems, had to work with a system that had very few actuators powering joint movements or sensors reporting leg positions to the computer brain, which itself is a $60 microprocessor rather than a $500 one. “It’s been a huge adjustment to get performance out of the machine,” he says.
Seven minutes into the test, Whitney has walked only about 20 feet. The team had completely rebuilt the knees just a few days prior, a major design change equivalent to replacing the wings of the space shuttle a week before takeoff. The good news is that they’re holding firm. But now the machine’s torso framework is out of alignment. “It just doesn’t feel right,” Whitney says. “It’s pushing really hard on my lower back, and that’s causing me pain.” He takes another step, then stops, panting, head hung down over his shoulders and a bead of sweat dripping from his nose. “I can’t make it any further,” he says. “Get the chair."
McKinley and Tung fix the back-angle problem by 2 a.m. But new problems keep cropping up. On Thursday, after working flawlessly for thousands of previous steps, a bolt in the hip joint wriggles loose and locks the legs into a completely straight position. Austin has to be lifted, like a corpse frozen in rigor mortis, back to his chair. At Friday evening’s dress rehearsal, less than 24 hours before the commencement ceremony, Whitney’s black graduation gown gets pinned beneath the pads that hold him in the exo. When he tries to stand up, the tautly stretched fabric breaks one of the plates in the back. This time the Kaz Lab members are up until 3 a.m. machining a replacement.
“It’s like a game show,” McKinley says. “Like someone has written these riddles for us and we have x-amount of time to solve them.” When Whitney stands at graduation, though, the time to solve problems will have expired. If you comb YouTube for exoskeleton videos, what you’ll see are tightly edited demonstrations in clinical settings where every variable, such as the walking surface, can be controlled. Whitney, in contrast, is going to perform live and outdoors. “This will be a very transparent demonstration,” Reid says, “for better or worse.”
On his fourth step across the stage, Whitney stops for just a moment. Until then, he’s been concentrating deeply and ignoring the 15,000 people watching him. Ignoring his mom, dad and the university chancellor on the other side of the stage.
"Someone has written these riddles for us and we have x-amount of time to solve them."Focus is essential. An exoskeleton is true cyborg technology, a partnership between metal and flesh. When Whitney presses a button mounted on the walker, it signals the exoskeleton to drive his legs forward at a predetermined pace. The framework supports his otherwise limp legs. But with its minimalist design, the Austin model doesn’t have sensors to detect Whitney’s upper-body position, or motors to automatically correct his position if he leans too far in any direction. With no feeling whatsoever below his waist, he is a torso slowly flying through the air. “My biggest job in the exo suit is balancing,” he says. His biggest fear is of falling flat on his face.
As traumatic as a face-plant would be, the experience would hardly be the worst of his life. That distinction goes to the car accident that broke his spine in 2007. “I had just graduated from high school and was driving back from a party where I’d been drinking,” he says. “I went too fast around a turn and wrapped my car around a tree.” Now, Whitney says, “whenever I meet someone for the first time, they wonder, Why is he in a wheelchair? And I have to tell them. It’s so hard to be defined forever by the worst moment in your life.”
But here on the stage in Berkeley—this could be another defining moment. The affordable exoskeleton developed by Whitney and the other students allows paraplegics to realistically dream about walking. “Finding redemption,” Whitney says, “is what has pushed me to everything I’ve done since the accident.”
Whitney knows he needs to concentrate on staying upright. But for just an instant, he shifts his focus. He can hear everyone cheering, and he wants to see them. He lifts his head and looks right, realizes that he is getting a standing ovation, and smiles.
The seventh and final step brings Whitney to chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who shakes his hand. Whitney then turns to Kazerooni, who has returned from China, and the two hug, face to face. For a paraplegic, used to people having to bend over to engage him, embracing someone at a standing level is a pleasure that he hasn’t been able to enjoy since the accident. Whitney smiles at the graduating class once more, and then his friends lower him gently back into his wheelchair.
Backstage, the Kaz Lab members hoot, high-five, and debrief. At the beginning of the walk, “I was afraid I was going to fall down,” Whitney tells them. At the end, Kazerooni was an inch away from accidentally flipping the exo’s “off” switch when he hugged Whitney. But even before the adrenaline rush has faded, exhaustion advances. “Now we sleep,” says Pillai. “Kaz Lab out,” McKinley says.
By Monday, though, the students will all be back in the lab. They are working on a new exoskeleton, one that is even more streamlined and affordable than the Austin model. A long vacation would seem well deserved, so what is the urgency to return to work? “What’s the urgency to breathe?” Reid says. “This is what we do. I don’t think we can stop."
Austin Whitney has since landed his first post-collegiate job--as a .
Don't forget to check out our companion piece to Austin's story: .
You Call This School? The 25 Coolest College Labs in the Country
Forget algebra homework: try building spaceships, operating a nuclear reactor or listening in to distant galaxies
Click here to launch a gallery of the coolest labs in America
Check out the 2011 additions to our list in the articles below, or browse the full set of 25 labs in our image gallery above.
Build Your Own Spaceship: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Brew the World's Best Beer: University of California at Davis Pilot Brewery
Probe the Ocean Deep: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Work On the Edge of Earth's Plates: California Institute of Technology Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
Design a Microdrone: U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground
Run a Nuclear Reactor: Reed College
Print New Body Parts: Cornell University Creative Machines Lab
Put Science on the Big Screen: University of Southern California Visualizing Science Initiative
Eavesdrop on Nearby Galaxies: National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Make a Better Soldier: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Human Performance Wing
Video: Robotic Exoskeleton Helps Paralyzed College Student Walk Across the Stage at Graduation
Austin Whitney, a history and political science major at the University of California-Berkeley, spent nine months working with Homayoon Kazerooni, creator of the HULC exoskeleton and the .
Whitney used a controller switch on a walker to direct the exoskeleton, which was strapped around his legs. It swung his legs forward, moving him toward Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and a grinning Kazerooni.
The exoskeleton was a stripped-down, basic version of previous walking machines Kazerooni has designed. It will cost about $15,000, roughly the same as a souped-up motorized wheelchair, according to the . By contrast, the eLegs system unveiled last fall will cost about $90,000. Like the eLegs, it requires the use of a power pack and a crutch or walker. Whitney controlled the system using a switch on the walker, enabling him to take a step, stand up or sit down.
Whitney wrapped his car around a tree in July 2007 after sharing some drinks with his friends, about a month after graduating from high school. His spine was severed above his hips, paralyzing his legs. He quit drinking, and 10 days after his release from the hospital he enrolled in community college, eventually transferring to Cal. He worked with Kazerooni’s lab to improve the prototype — it has flatter feet, telescoping legs and locking hand controls, thanks to his input, the Chronicle reports.
He thought he would never walk again, he said after the ceremony.
“It was truly the greatest gift anyone has ever given me,” he said.
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How One Man Waged War Against Gravity
The story of Roger Babson, gravity's sworn enemy, and his Gravity Research Foundation
As an undergraduate physics student at Tufts, needless to say, I found this monolith intriguing. Who was Roger W. Babson? What was the mysteriously austere Gravity Research Foundation? And above all, what blessings would come forth upon the discovery of a gravity semi-insulator – and what does that even mean?
Mr. America
Roger Babson was the quintessential rich and powerful American businessman. He was born in Gloucester, Mass., in 1875 the tenth-generation Babson born there. Soon after earning an engineering degree from MIT, he founded a financial analysis firm called the Babson Statistical Organization (later renamed Babson's Reports), which made him a millionaire within its first decade and stayed in business for almost a century.
From 1910 to 1923, Babson wrote regular columns about business matters for both the Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times. In January 1929, he even graced the pages of Popular Science with an explanation of how to become a millionaire.
He was frequently used as a source in other Popular Science articles, always introduced as "the eminent statistician" or some similar accolade.
He founded the Babson Institute in 1919, a unique business school for aspiring CEOs that later became Babson College. He also founded Webber College, a Florida business school for women, and Utopia College in Kansas (now closed).
Babson was the first financial forecaster to predict the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent economic depression.. He did so using an economic assessment technique called the Babsonchart, which he largely based on Newton's Third Law – every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Babson liked setting words into stone. During the depression, he created a public works project in the spirit of the New Deal, in which he hired stone cutters to engrave inspiring messages into boulders in a park in Gloucester, Mass. Stones advocating traits such as "KINDNESS" and instructing viewers to "HELP MOTHER" can still be seen there .
In 1940, Babson ran for President of the United States and came in fourth. He was a lifelong friend of Thomas Edison's. Oh, and he also wrote 47 books.
His Crackpot Side
Despite his status as an extraordinarily successful businessman and Mr. American everyman, Babson was also—there's no other word for it—a crackpot. Throughout his life, he had major beef with, of all things, the force of gravity. In a 1948 essay entitled “Gravity – Our Enemy Number One,” he explained that the grudge traced back to his childhood, when his sister drowned in a swimming accident. “Yes, they say she was "drowned", but the fact is that ... she was unable to fight Gravity which came up and seized her like a dragon and brought her to the bottom. There she smothered and died from lack of oxygen.”
Later in the essay, he writes:
Gradually I found that "old man Gravity" is not only directly responsible for millions of deaths each year, but also for millions of accidents ... Broken hips and other broken bones as well as numerous circulatory, intestinal and other internal troubles are directly due to the people's inability to counteract Gravity at a critical moment.
The tragic death of his grandson, also by drowning, in 1947, seemed to send Babson past the point of reason. He became veritably obsessed with the atrocities committed by the weakest fundamental force. Unlike your average eccentric, though, he wasn't content to wallow ineffectually. Babson was an entrepreneur. He was a CEO. He didn't like gravity, so he decided to do everything in his power to get rid of it.
He bought Invention Incorporated, a Washington, D.C.-based company, in order to have three investigators in the U.S. Patent Office at all times scanning through incoming patent proposals. “The investigators were constantly on the watch for any machine, alloy, chemical or formula which directly relates to the harnessing of gravity,” Babson wrote in the second edition of his autobiography, Actions and Reactions. He explained that a gravity harness would most likely take the form of a metal alloy which would act as a “partial insulator.” The eventual discovery of that alloy, he wrote, would be “a great blessing to mankind.”
The year of that writing, Babson established the Gravity Research Foundation (GRF). It operated out of New Boston, N.H., 60 miles north of Boston, Mass., – “a safe distance ... in case [Boston] should be bombed in World War III,” Babson wrote. The GRF was intended as a sort of clearinghouse, which would collect and disseminate gravity-related information as well as fund promising research projects. In short, its goal was to expedite the discovery of a gravity shield.
In the 1960s, the GRF gave grants—and monoliths—to 13 colleges and universities. Some, like Tufts, received $5,000 outright, while others were given shares in the American Agricultural Chemical Company (later part of DuPont). Because the Foundation stipulated that the grants be used for "scientific purposes in the name of the Gravity Research Foundation"—namely, anti-gravity research—it took years or decades for many of the institutions to figure out how to spend them. Many of them ended up using the grants after Babson's death for endeavors that would not have satisfied the initial requirements.
He died in 1967. Needless to say, he did not have the satisfaction of witnessing the blessings forthcoming with the discovery of a gravity semi-insulator.
Enemies No More
The GRF no longer hopes to help rid the world of gravity. After Babson's death, under the direction of his friend and business associate George Rideout, it transformed into a respectable though far humbler institution. Today, its only remaining function is to hold an annual essay contest, now in its sixty-second year. Not surprisingly, in the early years, contestants were asked to propound their ideas for gravity shields; since 1971, they have been free to write about gravity itself. Among physicists, the contest is now extremely highly regarded.
“It is nearly universally known among people working in gravitational theory,” said Steve Carlip, a physicist at UC Davis who won the essay contest in 2007. Though the first place prize carries with it a mere $4,000, the contest has a large impact, Carlip said, because “it encourages people working in the field to step back a little and give a broader overview of their research.” Other past winners include Nobel Laureates Stephen Hawking and George Smoot, as well as Bryce DeWitt and many other famous physicists from around the world.
George Rideout, Jr., who took over from his father as GRF President in 1988, said the Foundation's current goal is to stimulate gravity-related thought and discussion. "Many of our contestants comment that they would never have taken the time to put their thoughts down in writing were it not for the GRF Awards for Essays on Gravitation," Rideout said. "This is what we like to hear." Abstracts of the winning essays can be at the GRF website. The 2011 contest is now open for entries, with an April 1 deadline.
At Tufts, the GRF grant also eventually came to good use. It paid for the establishment of the Tufts Institute of Cosmology in 1989 – today, a prestigious research institution. Cosmologist Alexander Valenkin, director of the institute, wrote about its connection to Roger Babson in his book, Many Worlds in One: “Nobody really expected that Tufts cosmologists would work on antigravity, but strangely enough—they do. Much of the research at the institute is focused on false vacuum and its repulsive gravity, which certainly qualifies as antigravity. So I think Mr. Babson could not have found better use for the money.”
He adds, “We have not succeeded in reducing the number of airplane accidents though.”
When a graduate student earns his doctorate at the Institute of Cosmology, he undergoes a strange ceremony befitting the history of the Institute and the Foundation that paid for it. The graduate kneels down and his advisor drops an apple on his head, in hopes that it might inspire him in the manner of Isaac Newton. They do this in front of Babson's monument.
PopSci’s Guide To The 30 Coolest College Classes in the Country
Here's where you can learn to blow stuff up, scale 150-foot trees, make toys and catch lightning--all for college credit
Over the years, PopSci has pulled together annual lists of the coolest, funnest college labs, the places where we would like to have spent our youth tinkering, exploring, and learning. , we've collected the ultimate list of all the great labs we've ever covered.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/educational/A_Guide_to_the_30_Coolest_College_Labs';
for our full illustrated list of the coolest college labs in the country.
Nature Education’s Scitable goes mobile to bring science education to all
Nature Education — the educational arm of — launched a mobile version of its open-access science library today — bringing its extensive library of science articles and social networking features to any student, teacher, or researcher with a mobile device.
Mobile users are automatically directed to the appropriate mobile site for their device when they visit .
The site, which launched in January 2009, is a social network for science education that also offers course management capabilities for professors. It allows users to read about a wide variety of scientific subjects, collaborate with others, publish their work to the world, and more. It also offers groups — such as public discussion groups, and private groups that professors can use for courses — which can function as virtual study spaces.
The site has gone on to reach 500,000 science students across 165 countries, reports Vikram Savkar, senior vice-president and publishing director at Nature Publishing Group. But despite its success, he wanted a versatile mobile version of Scitable to better reach students in developing countries who don’t have easy access to computers or broadband internet.
“With the launch of our mobile site, any student with a cell phone, even a very basic device, has access to a simplified version of the site that includes a wealth of quality, citable information, ” Savkar said.
The mobile Scitable site will give iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry users a built-in glossary, and some will also have access to its social networking features.
Scitable is the sort of digital stab from old-guard publishing companies that I suspect we’ll see more of. Nature Publishing Group was founded in 1869, and is a division of the publishing behemoth Macmillan Group. If it can manage to create a compelling social network for a niche audience, I imagine many other publishers will give it a go as well.
Companies: ,