Tech & Science
Technology and Science news from Boulder, Colorado
WHITE HOUSE NAMES CU-BOULDER PROFESSOR ONE OF TOP YOUNG 100 SCIENTISTS IN 2010
Nov 8th
The PECASE awards are the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent careers. President Barack Obama announced the awards on Nov. 5. The award includes $600,000 of funding from the National Science Foundation over five years.
Smalyukh, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder’s physics department and a member of the university’s Liquid Crystals Materials Research Center, and his students are studying the organization of nanoparticle andmolecular self-assembly related to precisely controlled structures in liquid crystals. The research is expected to help scientists develop new electrically and optically controlled materials that could lead to a number of technological breakthroughs, including more efficient conversion of solar energy into electricity using inexpensive solar cells and the development of flexible display and data storage devices.
“As a scientist and educator, I receive this great honor with deep gratitude,” said Smalyukh. “The PECASE award is a strong encouragement for me and for my students. It will help us in achieving many important and ambitious research goals.”
Established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, the awards are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President. Awardees are selected on two criteria — the pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and a commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education or community outreach.
Smalyukh also was a winner of the 2009 National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER award, the agency’s most prestigious awards to junior faculty members around the nation. The NSF nominated Smalyukh for the 2010 PECASE awards.
He also is a founding fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, a joint center of CU-Boulder and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Nine federal departments and agencies join together annually to nominate the outstanding young scientists and engineers for the PECASE awards. The recipients are researchers whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for strengthening America’s leadership in science and technology and contributing to the awarding agencies’ missions, according to the White House.
This year’s recipients will be honored at a White House ceremony with Obama in early 2011.
SOURCE: CU MEDIA RELEASE
‘Catching Your Future’ college fair set for Nov. 13
Nov 3rd
What: Catching Your Future college fair
When: Saturday, Nov. 13, 11:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Where: Front Range Community College, 2121 Miller Drive, Longmont
The fair offers five workshops for families, all of which will be presented in English and Spanish:
• Funding Your Future, assistance with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and scholarship opportunities
• Take Action Now, learn about concurrent enrollment opportunities
• Making Your Statement, help in writing scholarship essays
• Paving Your Way to College, educating students about civic engagement and the importance of volunteering
• College for All Students, nontraditional pathways and opportunities for college
Participants attending a minimum of three workshops will be eligible to win prizes, including Netbooks, iPods, and scholarships totaling more than $2,000.
SOURCE: BOULDER COUNTY NEWS RELEASE
Local colleges and universities will participate, including Colorado, Colorado State, Mesa State, Northern Colorado, Regis and more. Families can also visit with local agencies that support students in reaching their educational goals.
The fair is organized by Sharing Achievement For Student Success in Education, a student-led organization whose focus is to help Boulder County’s low-income, minority, and first-generation students achieve their goals for higher education.
Last year’s fair reached more than 250 county families and awarded more than $3,000 in scholarships.
ORIGIN OF SKILLFUL STONE TOOL SHARPENING METHOD PUSHED BACK MORE THAN 50,000 YEARS
Oct 29th
A highly skillful and delicate method of sharpening and retouching stone artifacts by prehistoric people appears to have been developed at least 75,000 years ago, more than 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The new findings show that the technique, known as pressure flaking, took place at Blombos Cave in South Africa during the Middle Stone Age by anatomically modern humans and involved the heating of silcrete — quartz grains cemented by silica — used to make tools. Pressure flaking takes place when implements previously shaped by hard stone hammer strikes followed by softer strikes with wood or bone hammers are carefully trimmed on the edges by directly pressing the point of a tool made of bone on the stone artifact.
The technique provides a better means of controlling the sharpness, thickness and overall shape of bifacial tools like spearheads and stone knives, said Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and a study co-author. Prior to the Blombos Cave discovery, the earliest evidence of pressure flaking was from the Upper Paleolithic Solutrean culture in France and Spain roughly 20,000 years ago.
“This finding is important because it shows that modern humans in South Africa had a sophisticated repertoire of tool-making techniques at a very early time,” said Villa. “This innovation is a clear example of a tendency to develop new functional ideas and techniques widely viewed as symptomatic of advanced, or modern, behavior.”
A paper on the subject was published in the Oct. 29 issue of Science. Other study co-authors included Vincent Mourre of the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research in France and Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway and director of the Blombos Cave excavation. The research was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation of New York.
“Using the pressure flaking technique required strong hands and allowed toolmakers to exert a high degree of control on the final shape and thinness that cannot be achieved by percussion,” Villa said. “This control helped to produce narrower and sharper tool tips.” The bifacial points, known as Still Bay points, likely were spearheads, she said.
The authors speculated that the pressure flaking technique may have been invented in Africa and used sporadically before its later, widespread adoption in Europe, Australia and North America. North American archaeologists have shown that Paleoindians used the pressure flaking technique to fashion stone points likely used to hunt a menagerie of now-extinct mammals like mammoths, mastodons and ancient horses.
With the exception of obsidian, jasper and some high-quality flint, few stone materials can be pressure flaked without first heating them, Villa said. While there is evidence of silcrete heating some 164,000 years ago at the Pinnacle Point site in South Africa, the Blombos Cave artifacts are the first clear evidence of the skillful pressure flaking technique being used to carefully shape, refine and retouch tools, said Villa.
There are several ways to confirm whether silcrete has been heat-treated, Villa said. Archaeologists at Pinnacle Point used two common methods called thermoluminescence and archaeomagnetism that require the destruction of stone tool samples, as well as a non-destructive technique known as maximum gloss analysis.
Villa, Mourre and Henshilwood used a visual method for the Blombos Cave artifact analysis based on the contrast between heated and unheated tool surfaces observed microscopically at low magnification. While the removal of flakes from unheated silcrete produces scar surfaces with a rough, dull texture, heat-treated silcrete scar surfaces have a smooth, glossy appearance, said Villa.
The researchers analyzed 159 silcrete points and fragments, 179 other retouched pieces and more than 700 flakes from a layer in Blombos Cave linked to the so-called Still Bay industry, a Middle Stone Age tool manufacturing style that started roughly 76,000 years ago and which may have lasted until 72,000 years ago. The researchers concluded that at least half of the ancient, finished points at Blombos Cave were retouched by pressure flaking.
In addition to the microscopic analysis of the tools, the team also used experimental replication to show that pressure flaking was used in the final retouching phase of the points. The shaping of both heated and non-heated tools — known as knapping — was done by Mourre using silcrete chunks collected by Henshilwood from outcrops roughly 20 miles from Blombos Cave.
The silcrete samples used in the replication stage of the study were heated by Henshilwood in collaboration with Kyle Brown of Arizona State University, who published a 2009 paper in Science on the heat-treatment of silcrete in South Africa.
The team members compared attributes of points and flakes created for the experiments by percussion and pressure with points and flakes found in Blombos Cave, finding that unheated silcrete chunks first shaped with quartzite stone hammers and further worked on with wooden hammers known as billets could not be pressure flaked.
“Pressure flaking adds to the repertoire of technological advances during the Still Bay (period) and helps define it as a time when novel ideas were rapidly introduced,” wrote the authors in Science. “This flexible approach to technology may have conferred an advantage to the groups of Homo sapiens who migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago.”
SOURCE: CU MEDIA RELEASE