Monthly Archives: September 2012

Two Towers, Two IP Stories

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Chad Haney is a scientist at the University of Chicago. He earned his Ph.D in Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As a graduate student he started out researching artificial blood. He did his postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago, learning medical imaging and cancer biology.  He now uses many medical imaging techniques to assess response to therapy in cancer research.

A lot of people can tell you exactly what they were doing on historic dates, like September 11, 2001. Some can even tell you what they were thinking. I can tell you that I was thinking about intellectual property (IP) on September 11, 2001. While the news was focused on trying to understand what was happening with the twin towers, I was meeting people from the Technology Transfer Office (TTO) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I was talking to the TTO people and filling out the necessary paperwork to disclose (claim) the work in my Ph.D. thesis. Continue reading →

Why is the Higgs Boson Called the ‘God Particle’?

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Jim Baggott is author of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ and a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to pursue a business career, where he first worked with Shell International Petroleum Company and then as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Atomic: The First War of Physics (Icon, 2009), Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (OUP, 2003), A Beginner’s Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), and A Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (OUP, 2010).

Read his collection of blog posts, celebrating the launch of his new book, over at the OUPblog. 

On 4th July 2012, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility in Geneva announced the discovery of a new elementary particle they believe is consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson, also known as the ‘God Particle’. Our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter – everything in our visible universe and everything we are – is about to take a giant leap forward.

So, what is the Higgs boson and why is it called the ‘God Particle’? Science writer Jim Baggott, whose book Higgs: the Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’, provides some of these answers. Continue reading →

A lesson from ENCODE about the limits on Human Reason

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untitled.bmpDavid Ropeik is an international consultant in risk perception and risk communication, and an Instructor in the Environmental Management Program at the Harvard University Extension School. He is the author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts and principal co-author of RISK A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You. He writes the blog Risk; Reason and Reality at Big Think.com and also writes for Huffington Post,  Psychology Today,  and Scientific American.

He founded the program “Improving Media Coverage of Risk,” was an award-winning journalist in Boston for 22 years and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

The post below was written in the days immediately after the release of the ENCODE papers and includes both a foolish factual error and a tone which, upon reflection and with feedback from many critics, is harsh. A subsequent post at Risk: Reason and Reality “New Evidence About DNA, and Old Patterns of Resistance to New Ideas”    attempts to rectify the error and make my argument more respectfully.  

In what should be another blow to the hubris of human intellect, we have a new entry in the long and ever growing list of  “Really Big Things Scientists Believed” that turned out be wrong. This one is about DNA, that magical strand of just four amino acids*, Adenine paired with Thymine, Cytosine paired with Guanine, millions of those A-T and C-G pairs linked together in various combinations to make the genes that spit out the blueprints for the proteins that make us. Or so science believed. Continue reading →

Socially Assistive Robots that Care: Surprisingly likeable and, hopefully soon, surprisingly helpful

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Maja Mataric´ is a professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics at the University of Southern California, founding director of the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab and Vice Dean for Research in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1994, MS in Computer Science from MIT in 1990, and BS in Computer Science from the University of Kansas in 1987. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the IEEE, and recipient of the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics & Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM), the Okawa Foundation Award, NSF Career Award, the MIT TR100 Innovation Award, and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award. She served as the elected president of the USC faculty and the Academic Senate. At USC she has been awarded the Viterbi School of Engineering Service Award and Junior Research Award, the Provost’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship, the Mellon Mentoring Award, the Academic Senate Distinguished Faculty Service Award, and a Remarkable Woman Award. She is featured in the science documentary movie “Me & Isaac Newton”, in The New Yorker (“Robots that Care” by Jerome Groopman, 2009), Popular Science (“The New Face of Autism Therapy”, 2010), the IEEE Spectrum (“Caregiver Robots”, 2010), and is one of the LA Times Magazine 2010 Visionaries. More details here.

The recently released movie “Robot & Frank” features an elderly, and quite curmudgeonly, thief named Frank, whose family provides a caregiving robot to take care of his needs.  The robot’s capabilities in the movie are well beyond the current engineering state of the art, but, ironically, most people won’t find the robot unrealistic (though it is), but they may find the bond that forms between the robot and Frank hard to believe (yet it is realistic according to latest research). Continue reading →