#Laboratory Technology

[freshinkdaily]

Innovations in Science Laboratory Technology: A New Era of Research

Innovations in Science Laboratory Technology A New Era of Research Science Laboratory Technology” The future of lab research shines bright, with emerging technologies set to revolutionize how we conduct experiments and analyze data. From artificial intelligence and machine learning to the integration of green technologies, these advancements promise to make our labs more efficient,…

[stone-cold-groove]

NASA’s Echo 1 communications satellite - 1960.

[kirby-the-gorb]

[dragonflavoredcake]

Xisuma: Dude, come on, you're sick. Go see a doctor. Ren: Nope. I hate doctors. Will not be going to one, no thank you, the door is that way— Xisuma: Ren, there are two people on this server with professional medical experience. You know who they are? Gem and Doc. Xisuma: If you cooperate, I'll call Gem. If you insist on not taking care of yourself, I'll call Doc. Ren: Ren: I'll call Gem.

[lonestarflight]

"View of the Saturn V S-IC-5 (first) flight stage static test firing at the S-IC-B1 test stand at the Mississippi Test Facility (MTF), Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Begirning operations in 1966, the MTF has two test stands, a dual-position structure for running the S-IC stage at full throttle, and two separate stands for the S-II (Saturn V third) stage. It became the focus of the static test firing program. The completed S-IC stage was shipped from Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) to the MTF. The stage was then installed into the 407-foot-high test stand for the static firing tests before shipment to the Kennedy Space Center for final assembly of the Saturn V vehicle. The MTF was renamed to the National Space Technology Laboratory (NSTL) in 1974 and later to the Stennis Space Center (SSC) in May 1988."

Date: August 1, 1967

NASA ID: 6758560

[burikumu]

Sharing my "ideal" study schedule weeks before the MTLE March 2024 (Board Exam)

Of course this didn't happen/ there were some adjustments made 😅

Also I'm not sure what I was doing. I might go on a little bit of more detail about the schedule on the NEXT POST.

What I did basically:

SCHEDULING

I've allotted Sunday as my rest day and scheduled my breaks.

Each subject, supposedly covers 4 hours (but I miscalculated the other times of the day and only became about 3 hrs, hence the adjustments)

INTERLEAVING

Since I had a lot of subjects to cover I've tried to incorporate this method instead of blocking.

Videos that helped me in Scheduling and Interleaving:

How to study MANY SUBJECTS without crying from stress & regret 😭 by fayefilms

A Science based System for Learning ANYTHING quickly by Python Programmer

How to study multiple subjects by Koi Academy

Videos that help me to understand revision and other study methods:

Lecture #9: How to Read so that you *Retain* Information by Jeffrey Kaplan

Spend 1 Hour Studying to Save 20 Hrs Later by Justin Sung

Study With Me (Live) - Guided Technique Walkthrough by Justin Sung

How to Revise EFFICIENTLY | STUDY CLINIC by Justin Sung

The Ultimate Speed Learning Tutorial (Learning in Layers) by Koi Academy

How Do You Revise for an Exam? (Live Coaching | JUST-IN-CASE) by Justin Sung

[jcmarchi]

Interactive mouthpiece opens new opportunities for health data, assistive technology, and hands-free interactions

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/interactive-mouthpiece-opens-new-opportunities-for-health-data-assistive-technology-and-hands-free-interactions/

Interactive mouthpiece opens new opportunities for health data, assistive technology, and hands-free interactions

When you think about hands-free devices, you might picture Alexa and other voice-activated in-home assistants, Bluetooth earpieces, or asking Siri to make a phone call in your car. You might not imagine using your mouth to communicate with other devices like a computer or a phone remotely. 

Thinking outside the box, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Aarhus University researchers have now engineered “MouthIO,” a dental brace that can be fabricated with sensors and feedback components to capture in-mouth interactions and data. This interactive wearable could eventually assist dentists and other doctors with collecting health data and help motor-impaired individuals interact with a phone, computer, or fitness tracker using their mouths.

Resembling an electronic retainer, MouthIO is a see-through brace that fits the specifications of your upper or lower set of teeth from a scan. The researchers created a plugin for the modeling software Blender to help users tailor the device to fit a dental scan, where you can then 3D print your design in dental resin. This computer-aided design tool allows users to digitally customize a panel (called PCB housing) on the side to integrate electronic components like batteries, sensors (including detectors for temperature and acceleration, as well as tongue-touch sensors), and actuators (like vibration motors and LEDs for feedback). You can also place small electronics outside of the PCB housing on individual teeth.

Play video

MouthIO: Fabricating Customizable Oral User Interfaces with Integrated Sensing and Actuation Video: MIT CSAIL

The active mouth

“The mouth is a really interesting place for an interactive wearable and can open up many opportunities, but has remained largely unexplored due to its complexity,” says senior author Michael Wessely, a former CSAIL postdoc and senior author on a paper about MouthIO who is now an assistant professor at Aarhus University. “This compact, humid environment has elaborate geometries, making it hard to build a wearable interface to place inside. With MouthIO, though, we’ve developed a new kind of device that’s comfortable, safe, and almost invisible to others. Dentists and other doctors are eager about MouthIO for its potential to provide new health insights, tracking things like teeth grinding and potentially bacteria in your saliva.”

The excitement for MouthIO’s potential in health monitoring stems from initial experiments. The team found that their device could track bruxism (the habit of grinding teeth) by embedding an accelerometer within the brace to track jaw movements. When attached to the lower set of teeth, MouthIO detected when users grind and bite, with the data charted to show how often users did each.

Wessely and his colleagues’ customizable brace could one day help users with motor impairments, too. The team connected small touchpads to MouthIO, helping detect when a user’s tongue taps their teeth. These interactions could be sent via Bluetooth to scroll across a webpage, for example, allowing the tongue to act as a “third hand” to open up a new avenue for hands-free interaction.

“MouthIO is a great example how miniature electronics now allow us to integrate sensing into a broad range of everyday interactions,” says study co-author Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering and leader of the HCI Engineering Group at CSAIL. “I’m especially excited about the potential to help improve accessibility and track potential health issues among users.”

Molding and making MouthIO

To get a 3D model of your teeth, you can first create a physical impression and fill it with plaster. You can then scan your mold with a mobile app like Polycam and upload that to Blender. Using the researchers’ plugin within this program, you can clean up your dental scan to outline a precise brace design. Finally, you 3D print your digital creation in clear dental resin, where the electronic components can then be soldered on. Users can create a standard brace that covers their teeth, or opt for an “open-bite” design within their Blender plugin. The latter fits more like open-finger gloves, exposing the tips of your teeth, which helps users avoid lisping and talk naturally.

This “do it yourself” method costs roughly $15 to produce and takes two hours to be 3D-printed. MouthIO can also be fabricated with a more expensive, professional-level teeth scanner similar to what dentists and orthodontists use, which is faster and less labor-intensive.

Compared to its closed counterpart, which fully covers your teeth, the researchers view the open-bite design as a more comfortable option. The team preferred to use it for beverage monitoring experiments, where they fabricated a brace capable of alerting users when a drink was too hot. This iteration of MouthIO had a temperature sensor and a monitor embedded within the PCB housing that vibrated when a drink exceeded 65 degrees Celsius (or 149 degrees Fahrenheit). This could help individuals with mouth numbness better understand what they’re consuming.

In a user study, participants also preferred the open-bite version of MouthIO. “We found that our device could be suitable for everyday use in the future,” says study lead author and Aarhus University PhD student Yijing Jiang. “Since the tongue can touch the front teeth in our open-bite design, users don’t have a lisp. This made users feel more comfortable wearing the device during extended periods with breaks, similar to how people use retainers.”

The team’s initial findings indicate that MouthIO is a cost-effective, accessible, and customizable interface, and the team is working on a more long-term study to evaluate its viability further. They’re looking to improve its design, including experimenting with more flexible materials, and placing it in other parts of the mouth, like the cheek and the palate. Among these ideas, the researchers have already prototyped two new designs for MouthIO: a single-sided brace for even higher comfort when wearing MouthIO while also being fully invisible to others, and another fully capable of wireless charging and communication.

Jiang, Mueller, and Wessely’s co-authors include PhD student Julia Kleinau, master’s student Till Max Eckroth, and associate professor Eve Hoggan, all of Aarhus University. Their work was supported by a Novo Nordisk Foundation grant and was presented at ACM’s Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

[deeplovelydark]

battlestar galactica: razor (2007)

[upsurgecomic]

[katiajewelbox]

The confocal microscope at Imperial College's Sir Alexander Fleming Building lab is used for imaging the interior of living plant and animal cells.

During my PhD project, I used the confocal microscope to view the interior of Nicotiana benthamiana plant cells which were expressing Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) tagged genes of interest. I aimed to find out where the proteins encoded by the genes of interest were localised in the plant cell, which turned out to be in the cytoplasm.

From Wikipedia's entry on Confocal Microscopy: "Confocal microscopy, most frequently confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) or laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM), is an optical imaging technique for increasing optical resolution and contrast of a micrograph by means of using a spatial pinhole to block out-of-focus light in image formation. Capturing multiple two-dimensional images at different depths in a sample enables the reconstruction of three-dimensional structures (a process known as optical sectioning) within an object. This technique is used extensively in the scientific and industrial communities and typical applications are in life sciences, semiconductor inspection and materials science. Light travels through the sample under a conventional microscope as far into the specimen as it can penetrate, while a confocal microscope only focuses a smaller beam of light at one narrow depth level at a time. The CLSM achieves a controlled and highly limited depth of field."

Music by the Fiechter Brothers

Images by Katia Hougaard & the Facility for Imaging by Light Microscopy at Imperial College London

[stone-cold-groove]

Rare earths for better magnets. Ad for Bell Laboratories - 1970.

[misterradio]

kind of a milf. reblog

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

COMPUTER-SOFTWARE ENGINEERING RISING IN THE AMERICAN SPACE PROGRAM.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on American computer programmer Margaret Hamilton (b. 1936), at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, during her time as lead flight software engineer for the Apollo space mission, c. 1969.

MINI-BIO: "She and her team wrote the code for the inflight software of the spacecraft, and her work contributed to the safe landing of Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969."

Sources: www.thenation.com/article/archive/peoples-history-of-personal-computing-joy-lisi-rankin-review-silicon-valley-bros & X.

[lonestarflight]

Space Shuttle Main Engine Lifted onto Test Stand A-1

"Space Shuttle Main Engine or SSME, weighing 6339 pounds, is lifted onto Test Stand A-1 at the National Space Technology Laboratories, marking the beginning of a new test phase. The huge stand is 238 feet tall -- the equivalent of a 16-story building. Following completion of facility activation and engine checkout by the NSTL team, the test program commenced May 19, 1975."

Date: 1975

Boeing Images: BI230657

[thepastisalreadywritten]

NEW YORK (AP) — Leap year. It’s a delight for the calendar and math nerds among us.

So how did it all begin and why?

Have a look at some of the numbers, history and lore behind the (not quite) every four year phenom that adds a 29th day to February.

BY THE NUMBERS

The math is mind-boggling in a layperson sort of way and down to fractions of days and minutes.

There’s even a leap second occasionally, but there’s no hullabaloo when that happens.

The thing to know is that leap year exists, in large part, to keep the months in sync with annual events, including equinoxes and solstices, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

It’s a correction to counter the fact that Earth’s orbit isn’t precisely 365 days a year.

The trip takes about six hours longer than that, NASA says.

Contrary to what some might believe, however, not every four years is a leaper.

Adding a leap day every four years would make the calendar longer by more than 44 minutes, according to the National Air & Space Museum.

Later, on a calendar yet to come (we’ll get to it), it was decreed that years divisible by 100 not follow the four-year leap day rule unless they are also divisible by 400, the JPL notes.

In the past 500 years, there was no leap day in 1700, 1800 and 1900, but 2000 had one.

In the next 500 years, if the practice is followed, there will be no leap day in 2100, 2200, 2300 and 2500.

The next leap years are 2028, 2032, and 2036.

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WITHOUT A LEAP DAY?

Eventually, nothing good in terms of when major events fall, when farmers plant and how seasons align with the sun and the moon.

“Without the leap years, after a few hundred years we will have summer in November,” said Younas Khan, a physics instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

“Christmas will be in summer. There will be no snow. There will be no feeling of Christmas.”

WHO CAME UP WITH LEAP YEAR?

The short answer: It evolved.

Ancient civilizations used the cosmos to plan their lives, and there are calendars dating back to the Bronze Age.

They were based on either the phases of the moon or the sun, as various calendars are today. Usually they were “lunisolar,” using both.

Now hop on over to the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar.

He was dealing with major seasonal drift on calendars used in his neck of the woods. They dealt badly with drift by adding months.

He was also navigating a vast array of calendars starting in a vast array of ways in the vast Roman Empire.

He introduced his Julian calendar in 46 BCE.

It was purely solar and counted a year at 365.25 days, so once every four years an extra day was added.

Before that, the Romans counted a year at 355 days, at least for a time.

But still, under Julius, there was drift. There were too many leap years.

"The solar year isn’t precisely 365.25 days. It’s 365.242 days," said Nick Eakes, an astronomy educator at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Thomas Palaima, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said adding periods of time to a year to reflect variations in the lunar and solar cycles was done by the ancients.

The Athenian calendar, he said, was used in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries with 12 lunar months.

That didn’t work for seasonal religious rites. The drift problem led to “intercalating” an extra month periodically to realign with lunar and solar cycles, Palaima said.

The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the tropical year, so errors in timekeeping still gradually accumulated, according to NASA. But stability increased, Palaima said.

The Julian calendar was the model used by the Western world for hundreds of years.

Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who calibrated further. His Gregorian calendar took effect in the late 16th century.

It remains in use today and, clearly, isn’t perfect or there would be no need for leap year. But it was a big improvement, reducing drift to mere seconds.

Why did he step in? Well, Easter.

It was coming later in the year over time, and he fretted that events related to Easter like the Pentecost might bump up against pagan festivals.

The pope wanted Easter to remain in the spring.

He eliminated some extra days accumulated on the Julian calendar and tweaked the rules on leap day.

It’s Pope Gregory and his advisers who came up with the really gnarly math on when there should or shouldn’t be a leap year.

“If the solar year was a perfect 365.25 then we wouldn’t have to worry about the tricky math involved,” Eakes said.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH LEAP YEAR AND MARRIAGE?

Bizarrely, leap day comes with lore about women popping the marriage question to men.

It was mostly benign fun, but it came with a bite that reinforced gender roles.

There’s distant European folklore.

"One story places the idea of women proposing in fifth-century Ireland, with St. Bridget appealing to St. Patrick to offer women the chance to ask men to marry them," according to historian Katherine Parkin in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Family History.

Nobody really knows where it all began.

In 1904, syndicated columnist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, aka Dorothy Dix, summed up the tradition this way:

“Of course people will say ... that a woman’s leap year prerogative, like most of her liberties, is merely a glittering mockery.”

The pre-Sadie Hawkins tradition, however serious or tongue-in-cheek, could have empowered women but merely perpetuated stereotypes.

The proposals were to happen via postcard, but many such cards turned the tables and poked fun at women instead.

Advertising perpetuated the leap year marriage game. A 1916 ad by the American Industrial Bank and Trust Co. read thusly:

“This being Leap Year day, we suggest to every girl that she propose to her father to open a savings account in her name in our own bank.”

There was no breath of independence for women due to leap day.

SHOULD WE PITY THE LEAPLINGS?

Being born in a leap year on a leap day certainly is a talking point. But it can be kind of a pain from a paperwork perspective.

Some governments and others requiring forms to be filled out and birthdays to be stated stepped in to declare what date was used by leaplings for such things as drivers licenses, whether February 28 or March 1.

Technology has made it far easier for leap babies to jot down their February 29 milestones, though there can be glitches in terms of health systems, insurance policies, and with other businesses and organization that don’t have that date built in.

There are about 5 million people worldwide who share the leap birthday out of about 8 billion people on the planet.

Shelley Dean, 23, in Seattle, Washington, chooses a rosy attitude about being a leapling.

Growing up, she had normal birthday parties each year, but an extra special one when leap years rolled around.

Since, as an adult, she marks that non-leap period between February 28 and March 1 with a low-key “whew.”

This year is different.

“It will be the first birthday that I’m going to celebrate with my family in eight years, which is super exciting, because the last leap day I was on the other side of the country in New York for college,” she said. “It’s a very big year.”

[burikumu]

Things I did when I was studying for the boards:

Removed distractions. My phone has a mode where I can choose which apps to use for the time being without uninstalling all of them.

Isolated myself. I went to places where no one can order me around. I also concentrate more if it's a bit quiet. So, if not in my room, I went to the school library (I don't want to waste money on cafe foods).

Watched tips on how to study effectively cause I was apparently lacking at that. I tend to day dream whenever I can and nothing retains even if it has been taught before. Pag dating sa mga exams, palagi akong "Ay familiar".

The "schedule"

From the very beginning I actually did NOT wake up very early just to start studying. Before starting though, I freshen up and eat breakfast to have the energy to start.

I set my timer for 4 hours for the 1st subject and started reading (YES, reading. I don't really memorize because my brain just can't???). I DON'T read for 4 hours straight. I take 5-10(max) mins breaks every 20-30 mins of studying. Pomodoro technique is that you 🍅 During those breaks, I stretch, drink some water, or just day dream, sometimes I watch yt shorts but got to have some discipline not to.

Then during the ACTUAL break - lunch and dinner - which is an hour, I don't take a lot of time eating. So, during the free time left, sometimes I do flashcards on quizlet and knowt and organize my study materials. Sometimes I do the blurting method just to recall what I've read so far.

In the schedule, from 7pm - 12 midnight it is allotted for Practice / Summarize. What I do here is flashcards and mind maps by learning in layers (video link on previous post) for summarization. I used the app Concepts: Sketch, Note, Draw because I don't have an ipad, it has a semi-infinite canvas so you can add so much information! For the flashcards, I used knowt because it has spaced repetition, i guess quizlet has it too but you have to pay premium or smthing 👎🏾.

My take

Interleaving actually helped because instead of reading only one subject for days, I have read most of the subjects even if I was not able to finish them all I have covered a lot of the topics.

The mind maps saves a lot of time because it's already a summary of the subjects. If you are a visual learner, I think mind mapping is a good way for you to actually recall because you made it yourself. Like I said, I was not able to finish reading all the subjects, so I also didn't finish mind mapping. I also unfortunately deleted my mind maps ): if only I could share it.