Mechanical Empathy

Balding? Eat your Soy.

According to new research eating soy can block the functionality of the DHT hormone that is linked to baldness and prostate growth.

"Directly binding and inactivating DHT without influencing testosterone gives equol the ability to reduce many of the harmful effects of androgens [male hormones] without affecting the beneficial ones."

Bring on the Tofu! [via BBC]

Scirus = Scientific Search Powerhouse

I often have the need to search for science and engineering related information on the internet and frequently Google doesn't suffice because of commonalities between unrelated search terms. Furthermore, top rated sites in Google and other more pedestrian search engines are not often the in-depth, technically focused sites I'm looking for. Enter Scirus: for scientific information only. I've been trying out Scirus for a few weeks and I'm impressed. I think the slightly oxymoronic breadth and selectiveness of the database speaks for itself:

The Range of Scientific Content Scirus Covers
Scirus returns results from the whole Web, including access-controlled sites that other search engines don't index. Scirus currently covers over 167 million science-related Web pages, including:

• 58.5 million .edu sites
• 18 million .org sites
• 6.8 million .ac.uk sites
• 18.6 million .com sites
• 5 million .gov sites
• Over 45 million other relevant STM and University sites from around the world

In addition to Web pages, Scirus indexes the following journal sources:

• 12.7 million MEDLINE citations
• 4.5 million ScienceDirect full-text articles
• 1.2 million patents from the USPTO
• 785,000 Beilstein abstracts
• 261,000 e-prints on ArXiv.org
• 3,653 BioMed Central full-text articles
• 10,600 NASA technical reports
• 1,800 e-prints on e-prints on CogPrints
• 1237 preprints from the Mathematics Preprint Server
• 765 preprints from the Chemistry Preprint Server
• 452 preprints from the Computer Science Preprint Server

Dragonfly TV

I really liked Bill Nye as a kid - he pulled off a unique geeky cool that, well frankly, somewhat eluded me for most of my childhood. I once ran into him at the Adler Planetarium just looking at the exhibits. My friend Greg and I were mortified in the presence of such star power and managed only some sort of nervous point/giggle/whisper combination, which solicited the response from Nye of "Hi Guys."

Fast forward seven years - I spent the day being interviewed by Dragonfly TV, a hip kid's science show on public television, about my involvement with the University of Minnesota Solar Vehicle Project for a "scientist profile." I am no Bill Nye, but I appear to have managed a guest appearance on a science show. Besides a little bit of sunburn from my unexpectedly long stint outdoors, I'm no worse for wear. Television production is certainly a bit tedious, but it was fun to do for a day.

APOD: Mars Opportunity Rover Photo

If you don't have NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website on your daily list of visits it deserves a spot. Today's picture is a very neat photo from Opportunity. Also, if you're running OS X, you can use APOD Grabber from RailheadDesign.com to view, browse and archive the images.

Carnegie Mellon "Red Team" Robot Racing

The Carnegie Mellon Robot Racing team has an interesting website about their autonomous vehicle development project. They have been building a heavily modified HumVee for entry in DARPA's "The Grand Challenge" competition. The site is light on engineering info (very disappointing) but the general content is informative and there are a lot of good pictures from the development. I also mentioned another entry for the challenge in this post.

New Hubble Discovery

I was reminded about the crises surrounding the Hubble Space Telescope by a BBC Article outlining the recent discovery of the farthest object yet seen. I'm solidly behind the continued development of the space program as stated recently by our President, but I worry that the decisions for goals are being made by people more interested in headlines, re-election, and career progress, than scientific and engineering progress.

The Hubble appears to be of ongoing benefit and the James Webb Space Telescope replacement scheduled for deployment in 2011 will not come soon enough to provide continuous astronomical observation.