Why no new posts?

I haven't completely given up on blogging after a couple of months. I'm just focusing a lot of time into my job hunt, since I plan to graduate this year, while still getting enough lab work done to actually graduate this year. Blogging ranks pretty low in the priority list.

I have a few posts in the works, and I plan to post more regularly in the near future.

Weekly Links

3D printing used to replace woman's jaw
This is really cool. Doctors were able to create a titanium jaw using a 3d printer to replace a woman's infected one.

Eureka!
Ten-year-old Clara Lazen built a model of a never-before-seen molecule in a science class. Her teacher passed it along to a chemist at Humboldt State. It turns out to be similar to nitroglycerin, but with a different structure. Clara is a co-author on the paper.

Science depends on engineering
I touched on this concept in Is engineering science? Scientific progress is made possible through engineering advancements.

Hell yes!

Proposition 8 has been ruled unconstitutional!


This decision is limited in scope to California, and will likely be appealed, but it's nice to get a win!

I'll be watching Poliglot today for all the legal details.

Is engineering science?

Science, technology, engineering, and math get mashed together into “STEM” pretty often.
But they are separate fields. And while some engineers identify themselves as scientists, others say outright that engineering isn’t science.

So do I think that engineering is science?

Sometimes.

I know; that’s a cheater answer.

In their pure, Platonic forms, Science and Engineering do have somewhat different purposes. Science is fundamentally about answering a question, while Engineering is fundamentally about solving a problem.

Even in these pure, separate forms though, the two areas necessarily interact.

Scientists use technology to conduct experiments in order to figure out how the world works. Engineers use scientific principles in order to create better technology. I almost feel like you can’t even have one without the other. There’s only so many gedankenexperiments you can do before you have perform a physical experiment using, say, a microscope, a spectrometer, or a position sensor. And engineers are going to have a hard time making any technological advancements without concepts from science directing them.

But the line between science and engineering is lot blurrier than even this explanation makes it sound.

Take nanowires as an example. Keeping up with Moore’s Law requires us to make circuitry smaller and smaller, to the point where we’re now looking at transistors that are about 20 nanometers and wires only a couple of nanometers wide. This seems like it’s obviously engineering. It’s new, cutting-edge technology.

But we’re still figuring out how physics works for components this small. You have to start worrying about quantum effects. Heck, you even need to confirm if Ohm’s Law works at this scale.

You can’t study this technology without studying the physics, and you can’t study the physics without studying the technology. I don’t see a clear division between the science and the engineering.

It’s true that the typical engineer working in industry probably doesn’t do what we would call science. But I don’t think that the typical chemist working in industry is necessarily doing science either. And I think any academic research in engineering is almost always science, since it’s nearly impossible to do that kind of cutting edge work without being at the edge of what we know about how things work.

So, as a field, is engineering science?

At the very least, there’s a whole lot of overlap.

I apologize for the paywalls. I'll try to find some good open access sources on nanowires to update this post.

Shame on you, Susan G. Komen Foundation

The Susan G. Komen Foundation has halted all grants to Planned Parenthood totaling well over half a million dollars. These grants were used for breast cancer screenings.

Shame on SGK for putting politics ahead of their stated mission of fighting breast cancer.

Here are some suggestions of what you can do.

I just made a donation to Planned Parenthood, and I'm a starving grad student. What can you do to help?

Weekly Links

Hooray for science!

Coughs, colds, and the "appealing but mistaken concept of boosting the immune system"
Erik Davis explains how there is no evidence that it's possible to generally boost your immune system. (Vaccinations, of course, can specifically boost your immune system's ability to fight off a particular virus.)

Five shots against global warming denialism
Phil Plait goes over current events in the fight against climate change denialism.

Why blocking roads can speed up traffic
Jesse Galef demonstrates the incredibly counterintuitive Braess' Paradox. It's actually possible to reduce traffic by closing off a connecting road. The math looks sound!

Okay, but how do touch screens actually work?
Great explanation of the various mechanisms for touch screen technology. I actually hadn't heard of the frustrated total internal reflection design, which allow for much larger touch screens.

FYI: How long-running is the longest-running lab experiment?
Eighty-five years as it turns out. A professor at University of Queensland set up a funnel of tar pitch to prove to his students that it was a liquid. So far, nine drops have fallen.

Aw, man

You may have read about how the Wall Street Journal published a climate change denial editorial signed by 16 scientists, while rejecting a climate change editorial signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Scientists.

Roy Grubb reveals the backgrounds of those 16 scientists who signed the WSJ letter.

You probably know where I'm going with this.

Yes, there are two electrical engineers, as well as an aerospace engineer on the list. Plus, one of the physicists works in optics, which actually makes him the one I'm most likely to come across at a conference.

Needless to say, the typical EE does not have any particular expertise in climate science. Aside from being a logical fallacy, I'm not even sure how the argument from authority is supposed to work when you quite clearly aren't an authority in the area.