Helping You Help Yourself – A new approach to learning

Posted on November 30, 2016 by | Leave a comment

Can a frequently asked questions (FAQ) list without any answers help you solve your problem?

You might scoff at the idea at first and wonder to yourself, “if there are no answers, what’s the point of an FAQ list?”

Surprisingly, a recent study from the University of British Columbia conducted by Dr. Sarah Burke has found that university students were able to solve problems more effectively when given just a list of frequently encountered problems.

In her study, Dr. Burke – a physics and chemistry professor at UBC – offered a “help menu” to first year students during their physics lab exam. The menu contained a list of commonly encountered problems, and students were given the option of requesting for help with specific tasks at the expense of some of their exam grade.

Over 20% of the students were able to solve their problem simply by looking at the list of areas to ask help for and did not request for actual help from the instructors.

So how does this “help menu” work?

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Image Courtesy: Motley News

Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting is a process of problem solving, which is often applied in technical fields to repair failed products, machines, or systems. It is a search for the source of the problem in a logical manner by following a series of steps to determine the root of the problem and learn how to go about solving it.

Although you might not realize it, you already use troubleshooting skills on a daily basis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qE2BKqxDDM&feature=youtu.be

Why is troubleshooting important?

Problem-solving and troubleshooting go hand-in-hand helping us see different solutions to problems from a number of different perspectives. Troubleshooting may effectively strengthen our capacity to think intelligently and flexibly when faced with unfamiliar problems that not only school, but life as a whole throw in our direction.

After the interview with Dr. Burke about her recent study, she made it evident that in today’s ever-changing world, one of the most important criteria for success is having the ability to think and work independently.

“Those are life long skills, right, if you know very general strategies on how to tackle a problem, you can tackle problems in many different fields.”

– Dr. Sarah Burke

Image Courtesy: cqrollcall.com

How do you encourage troubleshooting?

So we’ve seen why troubleshooting is important, and how it can help us solve our problems. But how do we learn to troubleshoot independently instead of simply relying on our friends or the teaching assistants for help?

Image Courtest of: uberhumor-images.leendu.com

Image Courtesy: Pinterest.com

This is the idea behind the “help menu”.

Dr. Burke compares the use of a help menu to a scratch card. She mentions the analogy of points being deducted for every time you scratch an answer, as a penalty. The same method was used in her study, as students were incentivized to troubleshoot and solve the problem themselves to avoid point deductions on the exam for asking for help.   

The following video, outlines a snippet from what may occur in a physics laboratory with, and without the use of a help menu.

So the next time your iPhone stops working, instead of checking the FAQ list for a quick solution.

Pause for a second.

Look at the list of potential problems and try to solve the issue yourself. You might be surprised by your own ability to troubleshoot while strengthening a crucial skill for other areas of your life at the same time.

Group 3: Justin Tao, Harmen Tatla, Zimeng Li, Kelvin Au

 

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Magnetism Everywhere!

Posted on November 30, 2016 by | Leave a comment

How many of you have some of your most important information or precious memories stored on a computer? In modern society, technology has become a vital part of how we live and how we choose to store and process information. However, there is one key concept that is applicable to many of the technology we use, it’s called magnetism.

Many technological breakthroughs of various different fields are based on the concept of magnetism (the attractive and repulsive force between objects). Magnetism is used almost everywhere in our society; from little gadgets to medical apparatus, these all involve the fundamentals of magnetic forces.  To gain a better understanding of what magnetism is, listen to the podcast below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To07hEn84hY

Now you know better what magnetism is, consider how it’s being studied today.

Applications to Current Research

Dr. MacFarlane and a team of scientists ran a study where they investigated the magnetic properties of a mineral called hematite. One of the things that they focused on in their study was the surface molecular orientation of a magnet. Different surface orientations result in an object with varying levels of magnetic forces. Which is interesting, because the strength of a magnetic force allows it to attract or repel different objects!

A major component affecting the surface orientation of a magnet is something called Phase Transitions.

Phase transitions are used to describe the change between different states of an object. An easy example of this is the change of states of water.

Freezing water into ice is a phase transition between its liquid state and its solid state. For magnets, the phase transition is between the paramagnetic and the ferromagnetic state. The difference between the two is mainly shown with the application of an magnetic field, the area surrounding the magnet that is able to experience the magnetic forces (shown in the diagram below).

Hand drawn diagram of phase transitions in water and in magnets

Hand drawn diagram of phase transitions in water and in magnets

Caption: Diagram of Phase transitions inspired by images found on

The paramagnetic state of a magnet is when the material loses its magnetism after the magnetic field around it is removed. Conversely, the ferromagnetic state is when the material keeps its magnetism even after the magnetic field is removed.

If an object is in the paramagnetic state, it will not be able to attract or repulse any other objects. For an object in ferromagnetic state, it has the ability to attract other objects just by itself without any magnetic forces affecting it. Most magnets are of ferromagnetic state which is why they are always able to attract other objects!

According to Dr. MacFarlane, during Paramagnetic state, the molecules (ions) in the object are moving randomly around rapidly. So, every time you look at them you would see a different arrangement of the molecules (magnets). After cooling to a certain temperature, you would get the ferromagnetic state where the molecules would gradually line up parallel to each other in a lattice and freeze into a magnetic structure.

Moreover, another version of the ferromagnetic state is the anti ferromagnetic state. The anti ferromagnetic state is when the molecules are lined up opposite to each other instead of parallel to each other.

By this point you may be thinking that all of this information is a lot to grasp, but don’t forget that research done about magnetism is important for the current way our world works! Remember when we asked about the information you store on your computer? It wouldn’t be possible without magnetism.  Watch the video below to find out how:

https://youtu.be/Kfs1fkaPDWQ

Generally speaking, aspects of magnetism and phase transitions may still be rather abstract to us…but at least we all now realize that these concepts surround us everyday!

-Group 2: Beth B, Kayleigh B, Delia M

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A Greener Approach to Developing Gels

Posted on November 30, 2016 by | 1 comment

UBC researcher’s serendipitous discovery could influence a greener method in the gel production industry.

Graduate student Lev Lewis of the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia unexpectedly developed a simple method to form gels from cellulose nanocrystals.

First off, let’s break down what a cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) actually is. Cellulose is one of the most, if not the most abundant molecule produced by plants. It is responsible for the strength, structure, and form that allows you to hold a flower up by its stem. Next in order, a nanocrystal is basically a small crystal. Now how small are we talking? A nanocrystal, is a crystal smaller than 200 nanometers. To put this value in perspective, the diameter of a hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers across. In other words, these CNCs that Lev is working with are really really small crystals.

 

Graphic representing the molecular structure of CNCs which is composed of chains of individual cellulose molecules. Image courtesy of yalescientific.org via the Keten lab.

Graphic representing the molecular structure of CNCs which is composed of chains of individual cellulose molecules. Image courtesy of yalescientific.org via the Keten lab.

Lev found that by simply heating a CNC-water mixture under high pressure, this would yield the liquid to thicken into a gel.

Gel made using CNCs under high pressure and high temperature. Picture courtesy of Lev Lewis.

Gel made using CNCs under high pressure and high temperature. Picture courtesy of Lev Lewis.

He attributes this unexpected formation of gel to the desulfation of CNCs (or the removal of sulfur groups) which causes the crystals in the mixture to become unstable, thus forming a gel. The following audio clip describes the process of desulfation using a candy analogy we all can understand.

Constructing gels using this method is an attractive objective because it’s easy, it’s green, and it uses cellulose which is renewable resource. These gels are used in a wide variety of products including diapers, contact lenses, insulation, and tissue scaffolds to list a few. Perhaps one of the most possibly important applications of these gels is in drug delivery. Lev explains that gels could be used to treat cancer instead of the traditional method of chemotherapy. Due to the physical properties of a gel, we could inject them into the cancerous area of the body needing treatment and expect them to stay put. This allows treatment to be localized as opposed to chemotherapy that wreaks havoc on the entire body. The following video elaborates on CNCs and their applications.

YouTube Preview Image

Currently, CNCs can be obtained from wood pulp. Seeing as the world is increasingly making the shift from paper to digital, there’s a lot of wood pulp, which is used to make paper, going to waste. Due to the ease and accessibility of materials of Lev’s method of gel formation, large scale industries that use gels in their products could adopt this method, thus providing an outlet for all the unused wood pulp being produced.

~Lindsey Belsher, Jennifer Jung, Uzair Ahmed

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Image

A Greener Approach to Developing Gels

UBC researcher’s serendipitous discovery could influence a greener method in the gel production industry.

Graduate student Lev Lewis of the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia unexpectedly developed a simple method to form gels from cellulose nanocrystals.

First off, let’s break down what a cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) actually is. Cellulose is one of the most, if not the most abundant molecule produced by plants. It is responsible for the strength, structure, and form that allows you to hold a flower up by its stem. Next in order, a nanocrystal is basically a small crystal. Now how small are we talking? A nanocrystal, is a crystal smaller than 200 nanometers. To put this value in perspective, the diameter of a hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers across. In other words, these CNCs that Lev is working with are really really small crystals.

Graphic representing the molecular structure of CNCs which is composed of chains of individual cellulose molecules. Image courtesy of yalescientific.org via the Keten lab.

Lev found that by simply heating a CNC-water mixture under high pressure, this would yield the liquid to thicken into a gel.

ll2-26b-cnc-120-2wt_3

Gel made using CNCs under high pressure and high temperature. Picture courtesy of Lev Lewis.

He attributes this unexpected formation of gel to the desulfation of CNCs (or the removal of sulfur groups) which causes the crystals in the mixture to become unstable, thus forming a gel. The following audio clip describes the process of desulfation using a candy analogy we all can understand.

Constructing gels using this method is an attractive objective because it’s easy, it’s green, and it uses cellulose which is renewable resource. These gels are used in a wide variety of products including diapers, contact lenses, insulation, and tissue scaffolds to list a few. Perhaps one of the most possibly important applications of these gels is in drug delivery. Lev explains that gels could be used to treat cancer instead of the traditional method of chemotherapy. Due to the physical properties of a gel, we could inject them into the cancerous area of the body needing treatment and expect them to stay put. This allows treatment to be localized as opposed to chemotherapy that wreaks havoc on the entire body. The following video elaborates on CNCs and their applications.

VIDEO HERE

Currently, CNCs can be obtained from wood pulp. Seeing as the world is increasingly making the shift from paper to digital, there’s a lot of wood pulp, which is used to make paper, going to waste. Due to the ease and accessibility of materials of Lev’s method of gel formation, large scale industries that use gels in their products could adopt this method, thus providing an outlet for all the unused wood pulp being produced.

~Lindsey Belsher, Jennifer Jung, Uzair Ahmed

 

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Posted on November 30, 2016 by in Issues in Science, Outreach Project

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The Legendary Leaf Jacket: Cuticular Wax

Posted on November 29, 2016 by | Leave a comment

As humans, we have different ways to prepare ourselves from changing weather conditions such as bringing out our winter coats in the cold, umbrellas when it rains, and sunglasses when it’s sunny. Plants have a similar feature that can do all of this, plus more! The outermost layer of plants is called the cuticular wax, has the ability to protect against many different environmental and physical factors including: water loss, disease, ultra-violet (UV) light, and air pollution.

Knowing what we do about the various functions of cuticular wax, one may wonder how cuticular wax responds to climate change. An ecologist from Southwest University, Yanjun Guo, had a similar question in mind. He conducted research on alpine meadow plants at the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in Northwest China in hopes of finding a correlation between cuticular waxes and climate change.

Source: Yanjun Guo

Yanjun Guo and his research team. Source: Yanjun Guo

Alpine plants are found at very high latitudes and are mostly isolated from human activity. Therefore they are influenced by climate factors exclusively, which makes them extremely sensitive to climate change.

Alpine meadow in the North Cascades, Washington, United States. Source: Wikipedia

Alpine meadow in the North Cascades, Washington, United States. Source: Wikipedia

We had the opportunity to meet with Guo to further discuss his research. In the video below, he explains his study on cuticular waxes in alpine meadow plants and his prediction for the relationship between plant waxes and climate change.

YouTube Preview Image

In the podcast below, we explained Guo’s major findings on cuticular waxes of alpine meadow plants.

YouTube Preview Image

In summary, alpine meadow plants respond to climate change as a community but not necessarily on an individual plant species level. Cuticular wax composition is an important adaptation that is essential for plants to defend themselves against the effects of climate change.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Yanjun Guo for his time and assistance in this project, we admire your passion in science research. We also wish to thank the University of British Columbia and Dr. Ed Kroc from the Science 300 teaching team for his guidance and support throughout the project.

SO Group 4: Samantha Chan, Rashmeen Kambo, Ashley Shepherd, George Gu

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Does Pressure Affect People’s Hair Color?

Posted on November 14, 2016 by | Leave a comment

In recent years, many people have started to pay attention to the changes of their hair color. Lots of parents are worried about their children as many teenagers have started to grow white or gray hair. Many people hold the view that high stress is responsible to this transformation of hair color from normal black, red, brown or gold to white or gray. Some even claim that Barack Obama, the President of the USA, is a evidence of this opinion as his hair color has turned from fine black to gray obviously in a few years after being elected. However, is stress the key factor that can affect people’s hair color?

A combination photo shows President Obama on April 29, 2009 and on August 5, 2012. Obama's hair has become visibly greyer since he was first sworn into office on January 20, 2009 as a 47-year-old. 

Credit:(JASON REED AND JONATHAN ERNST)

To fully understand how stress may affect people hair color, we have to learn some basic knowledge about our hair. We can imagine our scalp as a factory and our hair is the product. The hair follicles on the scalp are workers that are producing hair along with melanin cells. Healthy melanin cells can  protect people from oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is known as an imbalanced status of oxidation and antioxidation in human’s body. It is also regarded as an important cause of aging and diseases. When people reach around 30 years old,  the hair factory will start to waste. Oxide like hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) will start to accumulate in scalps. This change in our body will weaken and kill melanin cells. The hair factory will start to produce white hair because of the shortage of melanin cells. Therefore, the primary cause of the change of hair color is oxidative stress.

Can mental stress cause oxidative stress to affect people’s hair color? In fact, researchers lack the experimental evidence to answer this question as ethicists will not allow scientists to artificially let subjects feel high pressure in a long period for the researching purpose. However, many scientists have been studying the problem of  hair loss and change in hair color. They claim that hair color can be influenced by several factors, such as endocrine dyscrasia, psychological trauma, tension and disturbance of blood circulation. Also, earlier in 2016, a England research group found a kind of gene (IRF4) that is related to the change in hair color. Moreover, scientists also remind people that some external factors, including smoking, air pollution and bad dietary habit can also increase the chance that hair color turns to white.

 

 

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Synthetically made humans become reality

Posted on November 14, 2016 by | Leave a comment

Have you ever thought about what a world would be like if scientists created human clones? In early May 2016, 130 individuals consisting of scientists, entrepreneurs and policy leaders met at Harvard University to secretly discuss the creation of a synthetic human organs in order to revolutionize biotechnology which creates prosthetics and reduce the cost for human organ transplants. Essentially the meeting was to discuss instead of scientists reading human DNA sequences, they will be writing the sequence to make human organs.

The project already has a substantial amount of support, $100 million that is, from public and private sources located around the world. Scientists of the project predict it will cost roughly $3 billion to fully analyze, assess and create genomes.

human-genome

Picture amino acids aligned across a human figure symbolizing a synthetically created human.

However, along with the making of human organs consequently a long list of ethical issues arises. These synthetically produced human organs would be made too resistant to viral contamination, which may create social upheaval in consumer demand if this meant humans could live longer. This project was also named “Genome Project-Write,” from the “Human Genome Project-Write” to ensure scientists will be looking at a variety of genomes, not just specific to humans to ease conversations of an entire human body being synthesized. One of the most pressing concerns for this project is who is taking ownership for these synthetically made organs? If someone were to negativley react to the implantation and die, who would be at fault? These issues have not yet been discussed by the 25+ team of scientists working on the project. 

Here is a short video done by the New Scientist touching on a few of the ethical questions many of us are thinking.

YouTube Preview Image

A summary of the meeting held in May was released late October stating the overall pilot projects, and additionally with a video that talks about the overview of the execution.

 

 

Elizabeth J. Baguley

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Bonobo Eyesight Worsens with Age

Posted on November 14, 2016 by | Leave a comment

As we age, we lose the ability to focus on things up close. Perhaps you have a grandparent who needs to hold birthday cards at arm’s length to read them? In this case, the lenses of their eyes have lost their flexibility and ability to focus on near objects. This is a condition called presbyopia, or more commonly known as farsightedness, and it has been thought to be from living in a world focused on objects up close. But if this were true, wouldn’t we only see this condition in humans?

Adult with Presbyopia

Adult with presbyopia; source: SkinSight

Researchers in Japan have been studying wild bonobos for more than 40 years, and a recent study from Kyoto University shows that bonobos who are older need to extend their arms a greater distance to groom their partners effectively. Grooming involves picking out small bits of dirt and bugs, and is a daily task that bonobos perform their entire lives. Some bonobos were studied over many years, and as they aged they groomed their companions at a farther distance, attesting to their deteriorating eyesight. As shown in the pictures below, a young bonobo extends her arms much less than an older bonobo grooming his companion.

Old bonobos have bad eyesight - just like us

Left: young (17-year-old) bonobo grooming her mate. Right: older (45-year-old) bonobo grooming his mate. Source: WildThings

Bonobos can live up to 40 years in captivity, and even longer in the wild, so their eyesight has a long time to disintegrate, just like human eyesight. Researchers found that the oldest bonobos, at age 45, needed to keep their partners as much as five times as far away as young bonobos for successful grooming.

Learning that farsightedness is a condition that bonobos suffer from with age

Evolutionary Tree of Hominoidea; source: Spirituality Science - The Human Species

Evolutionary Tree of Hominoidea; source: Spirituality Science – The Human Species

shows that there is a genetic component to the degeneration of the eye lens. We can say this because humans and great apes – chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos – have a common ancestor and share much of the same DNA. This is illustrated with the (simplified) evolutionary tree:

Presbyopia is a condition that our common ancestor may have had, but it isn’t necessarily the only one. For example, aging and fertility studies have been done on chimpanzees and bonobos that show some conservation of reproductive behaviour throughout evolution. Evolutionary studies are fascinating because genetics is employed in our everyday lives from agriculture (genetically modified organisms or GMO’s) to medicine (antibiotic resistance).

Great apes are useful for genetic and evolutionary studies because if humans and great apes show similar conditions or behaviours, like farsightedness, it is likely that our common ancestor exhibited them as well.

 

Ashley

 

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If you keep doubling your stake once you lose, will you win the gamble eventually?

Posted on November 14, 2016 by | Leave a comment

If you keep doubling your stake once you lose, will you win the gamble eventually?

Well, that sounds like an exciting question. Every people go to Casino for a chance of gaining huge profit or success with the little amount of money. However, in most cases, people get a result of the loss. To avoid the risk, people have considered so many ways to guarantee a win. Among of these ideas, doubling your stake every time you lose seems to be quite reliable.

Suppose we have a simple gambling game with expected value of 0, or the expected value is just equal to your input. Let’s set a scenario, where you use 1 dollar as the stake. If you win, you get 1 extra dollar, and if you lose, you will lose your stake. Also, here we assume you will double your stake if you lose, and the game ends when you win.

Table showing the game

Table showing the game

To better show this, here is a table showing some possibilities:

From this table, we can easily observe that the actual profit is only 1 if you win, but the loss will be larger and larger as the stake doubles. Indeed, you will win the gamble and get all your cost back by doubling your stake. Although the risk is small here, the input and return do not really match in this case.

When people want higher returns, they go to casinos. Winning the jackpot is always a great incentive for gamblers. However, the casinos are not set to benefit gamblers, but for earning money. To make sure they are not running a deficit, casinos will never provide you a chance to play a fair game. In this case, the probability of winning is too small. Moreover, if you keep doubling your stake, your number of stake will follow 2^n, where n is the number of trials. As we all know, this function grows rapidly.

The value of 2^n

The value of 2^n Source: http://image.slidesharecdn.com

From the table we can see, 2^10 is about a thousand, but 2^20 is around 1 million! If the probability of winning is 1/20, which is actually large in casinos, then you need at least a million to guarantee that you are not making a loss.

Here is a video using this strategy in a gambling scenario:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwjk99DdYMk

The “Martingale” in the video is the fancy term for doubling your stake, and it’s widely used in the research of Statistics as well as Mathematics.  In these subjects, researchers’ studies are based on computing variables such as expected value. When they consider the case of casinos or gambling in real life, the expected value can even be negative, which means 1 additional dollar will cause you to lose several cents or even more.

Obviously, doubling the stake is not a good idea. There is no strategy for easy winning, and hard-working is the only secret behind success.

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