Rowland Institute Library Blog

The Electronics Engineering lab, under the direction of Winfield Hill, co-author of The Art of Electronics, has designed and built more than 500 instruments for the research groups at the Rowland Institute. Two are exhibited in their site’s Project Highlights. Take a look at the “Tweezer Squeezer,” designed by Chris Stokes for picking up very particular phenomena. The Rowland USB Response Box (RURB) was designed for brain mapping experiments once conducted at the Institute and with MGH, but has atttracted considerable interest from users in other fields. More to come.

The Bacterial Motor Works lab at Rowland has made available software that runs in MATLAB and is useful for tracking fluorescent beads and particles and gliding bacteria. The lab web site also features movies of bacteria in motion, some with fluorescently-labelled filaments. For more than thirty years (and nearly 20 at Rowland and Harvard,) Howard Berg and colleagues have studied bacterial motility and the flagella that propel them.

At the meeting of of the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy on Jan.29-30, there was a declaration advocating a move towards greater access to publicly funded scientific research. It can be found in Annex 1 of this communique, further down the page. Excerpt: “balancing the interests of open access to data to increase the quality and efficiency of research and innovation with the need for restriction of access in some instances to protect social, scientific and economic interests.” (does the last clause trump the previous statement?) The U.S. was one of the signatories. (Source: Open Access News)

Scientists at NIST and Colorado announced that they observed a new
state of matter this week. From the news release: “In
the current experiment, a gas of 500,000 potassium atoms was cooled to
temperatures below 50 billionths of a degree Celsius above absolute
zero (minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit) and then a magnetic field was
applied near a special “resonance” strength. This magnetic field coaxed
the fermion atoms to match up into pairs, akin to the pairs of
electrons that produce superconductivity, the phenomenon in which
electricity flows with no resistance. The Jin group detected this
pairing and the formation of a fermionic condensate for the first time
on Dec. 16, 2003.”

The experiment is published in the Jan. 30th issue of Physical Review Letters.

Update: See also an excellent Physics News Update discussion that explains developments in the field that made the experiment possible.

Update (2/11/04): Dr. Deborah Jin, who made the experiments, 
will  speak at Harvard on Wednesday, February 18, 2004, 4:30 p.m.
at the Joint Atomic Physics Seminar,
Jefferson Laboratory, Room 256, “Making Condensates with a Fermi Gas of Atoms.”

Update (3/3/04); The research is profiled in PhysicsWorld, with speculation on future directions. 

In “How computers change the way we think”, from the January 30 Chronicle of Higher Education (Page B26), Sherry Turkle explores how in terms of privacy, sense of self, sense of reality, “thinking vs. word processing”, “powerful ideas vs. powerpoint” and so forth. (Access restricted to subscribers)

Another study explores inaccurate referencing in scientific literature and attempts to model whether there are patterns; the authors estimate “about 70-90% of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers.” Their bibliometric study is based on “twelve high-profile” papers.

The awards, for “outstanding scientific achievements” will presented at the Academies annual meeting on April 19. (Source: Chemical and Engineering News)