分类： 赛事资讯

Origami in Space Engineering: Rediscovering the Meaning of Discovery

Rocket science is a discipline so notoriously difficult that the phrase “It’s not rocket science” is used to mark how easy something is. In space, scientists have to inhabit the uninhabitable with the bare essentials that a rocket can carry. So it can be hard to believe that a skill taught in kindergarten could be the next big discovery in the most difficult discipline in science.

Origami, the ancient art of paper folding, transforms the potential of a piece of material without changing its volume or weight. Folds maximize the functionality of a material, as seen when a piece of construction paper transforms into a standing crane or a jumping frog. In space engineering, origami is applied as a method of organizing luggage for space travel, increasing flexibility of spatial structures, and improving the accuracy of robotic motion.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has the lead in origami space engineering. Origami, with its folds, compresses materials and packs them in the smallest of volumes. In the words of Robert Salazar, an intern at the laboratory, “origami offers the potential to take a vast structure and get it to fit within the rocket,” therefore “greatly magnifying what we are capable of building in space.”

Not only is origami used for compression, but it’s also used for robotic exploration. Starshade, an occulter in NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program, the New Worlds Mission, prevents starlight from interfering with exoplanet pictures that the telescope takes. Its unfolding resembles a flower blooming; the petals spread out from the “stem,” which disconnects from the occulter and transforms into an independent telescope. Jeremy Kasdin, the principal investigator, expects that the mission will “allow us to directly image Earth-size, rocky exoplanets.” Origami makes this expansion possible without investing the energy and resources to have a human astronaut manually perform the mission.

As seen in the Starshade occulter, origami is one of the simplest and most elegant sets of directions scientists can relay to robots. While robots can perform actions humans are incapable of, human instincts cannot be programmed into them. However, the mechanical nature of material folding makes directions far more accurate and precise for robots to understand. Origami serves as a common language robots can easily interpret in space. Self-folding robots, developed by Samuel Felton, an assistant professor at Northeastern University, and his team, are one of the first adopters of this language. Electricity passes through the circuit board like blood running through veins, and the robot walks away after bending its body parts. Dr. Felton believes such robots could be deployed in space missions in the far future.

Origami space engineering teaches us that difficult problems often have simple solutions. Science celebrates discoveries and breaking new ground. Less spotlight is shone on rediscoveries; what we already possess can be given a new lease on life if we believe in its potential. In space, the final frontier, origami engineering serves as a humble reminder for scientists that a kind gaze at our individual potential can unleash the ultimate frontier within all of us.

Works Cited

Callahan, Molly. “New Professor Creates Self-Folding, Origami Robots.” News@Northeastern, 24 Oct. 2016.

Chang, Kenneth. “Origami Inspires Rise of Self-Folding Robot.” The New York Times, 7 Aug. 2014.

Good, Andrew. “What Looks Good on Paper May Look Good in Space.” Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 22 Sept. 2017.

Lee, Elizabeth. “Ancient Origami Art Becomes Engineers’ Dream in Space.” Voice of America, 26 Oct. 2017.

Rodriguez, Joshua. “Flower Power: NASA Reveals Spring Starshade Animation.” Exoplanet Exploration, 24 Sept. 2020.

A Rising Star: These Star-Shaped Polymers May Be Our Last Defense Against Superbugs

The horror starts with a single cut on your finger. Suddenly, your vulnerable insides are continuous with the wide expanse of the universe, and millions of bacteria swarm in. Your immune system puts up a valiant effort, but the bacteria simply multiply too quickly. Like a hydra, one defeated foe is replaced with two more. And as we watch helplessly, the invisible enemy destroys us from the inside. Blood pressure plummets, and multiple organs start shutting down. This is not a fear of the distant past — 700,000 people die annually from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. According to World Health Organization estimates, that number could jump to 10 million by 2050, overtaking the number of cancer deaths.

Bacterial infections are nothing new — they have been a persistent scourge for almost all of human history. But since the first antibiotic was discovered in 1928, killer bacteria have been consigned to the past. Nowadays, bacterial infections seem trivial — just pop a few antibiotics and you’re fine. But our heavy reliance on antibiotics may have taken a toll. Bacteria are living creatures, and they can evolve. As time passes, more and more bacteria are evolving to become resistant to our antibiotics. These antibiotic-resistant bacteria are known as “superbugs,” and we currently have almost no way to defeat them.

So with our antibiotics neutralized, what do we turn to? Luckily, a team from the Melbourne School of Engineering may have developed a new weapon. Named “structurally nanoengineered antimicrobial peptide polymers” (SNAPPs, for short), these star-shaped polymers target antibiotic-resistant bacteria and tear them apart.

As Shu Lam, one of the lead scientists, explained, “Bacteria need to divide and grow, but when our star is attached to the membrane, it interferes with these processes. This puts a lot of stress on the bacteria and it initiates a process to kill itself from stress.” The team found that the star polymers were effective against all Gram-negative bacteria they tested, including several antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The star polymers were also nontoxic to human cells and relatively cheap to produce, making them a good candidate for an antimicrobial drug.

But what if bacteria become resistant to these star polymers too? Scientists have found that this is unlikely to happen. Even after 600 generations, bacteria showed almost no resistance to the star polymers. The team believes that this is because the polymers kill bacteria through multiple pathways, while most antibiotics only kill with a single pathway. SNAPPs can “rip apart” the bacteria cell wall, cause uncontrolled movement of ions in and out of the bacteria cell membrane, and initiate a biochemical pathway that makes the bacteria kill itself. This multipronged approach makes it extremely difficult for bacteria to develop resistance to this new weapon.

There is still much work to be done — these star polymers have yet to be tested on humans and will require years of research and development before they can be widely available. But when the waning sun finally sets on the era of effective antibiotics, these polymers may be the star that lights our way.

Works Cited

Dwyer, Vincent. “Australian Scientists May Have Just Saved Us From Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs.” Vice, 12 Sept. 2016.

Jacobs, Andrew. “U.N. Issues Urgent Warning On The Growing Peril Of Drug-Resistant Infections.” The New York Times, 29 April 2019.

Jacobs, Andrew. “W.H.O. Warns That Pipeline For New Antibiotics Is Running Dry.” The New York Times, 17 Jan. 2020.

Lam, Shu J., Neil M. O’Brien-Simpson, Namfon Pantarat, Adrian Sulistio, et al. “Combating Multidrug-Resistant Gram-Negative Bacteria With Structurally Nanoengineered Antimicrobial Peptide Polymers.” Nature Microbiology, 12 Sept. 2016.

Science News Staff. “Killing Superbugs With Star-Shaped Polymers, Not Antibiotics.” Science News, 13 Sept. 2016.

Seppa, Nathan. “Drug Resistance Has Gone Global, W.H.O. Says.” Science News, 30 April 2014.

Unleash the Tests: The Four-Legged Future of Covid-19 Testing

She’s got pointy ears, a long snout and four strong legs. Meet your new Covid-19 test.

For years dogs have been used to detect bombs and drugs at airports, but our canine friends can also detect certain diseases, such as cancer and Parkinson’s disease, years before the onset of symptoms.

How can they do this? A dog’s nose has between 125 and 300 million scent glands, compared to a human nose, which only has about five million. As a result, a dog’s sense of smell can be up to 100,000 times more sensitive than a human’s. If there were a juicy steak 10 miles away, your dog’s nose could find it. So, when diseases cause people to emit slightly different odors, dogs can detect them.

With Covid-19 occupying the minds of scientists around the world, it was only a matter of time before researchers put dogs to the test to see if they could sniff out the novel coronavirus. Lucky for us, they can. Indeed, researchers have started to train dogs to detect Covid-19 in human sweat samples, and many countries are looking to dogs for cheap, reliable and rapid testing.

It is believed that dogs can recognize a scent produced by volatile organic compounds generated by catabolites, substances produced during replication of the Covid-19 virus. Catabolites exit the body in the form of sweat, which then carries a scent that dogs can detect and be trained to identify.

Dogs in recent trials could pick up the scent of Covid-19 in asymptomatic carriers, and many could even detect Covid-19 earlier than a PCR test could. As Cynthia Otto, the director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, explained to me in an interview: “PCR identifies the RNA associated with the virus. It requires sufficient virus to capture that signal. The dogs pick up the odor of the person’s response to infection. That response could be activated before the virus is in sufficient numbers in the sample collected.”

Another drawback of PCR testing is its speed, often taking several days to get results back. In contrast, dogs could screen hundreds of people in a matter of minutes in busy places such as airports and sports stadiums. Beyond their speed, dogs are also accurate, with the ability to identify positive samples about 95 percent of the time and with a false negativity rate of around one percent in trials. Dr. Otto worries, however, that “If a dog is trained but inadvertently does not actually recognize Covid, then use of this dog would result in false negatives, which would provide inaccurate information and could result in greater spread.”

For this reason, Dr. Otto suggests that “Dogs potentially could be used for screening, rather than diagnosis,” which would allow for “rapid identification of people who need further testing.”

Either way, there is great potential for dogs to help control the pandemic. These inexpensive and quick canine testers could help us get back to a pre-Covid normal.

Works Cited

Hunt, Katie. “Dogs Can be Trained to Detect Covid-19 by Sniffing Human Sweat, Study Suggests.” CNN, 10 Dec. 2020.

Lee, Jack. “New Coronavirus Tests Promise to be Faster, Cheaper and Easier.” Science News, 31 Aug. 2020.

McNeil Jr., Donald. “Dogs Can Detect Malaria. How Useful Is That?” The New York Times, 25 Nov. 2018.

Moysich, Kirsten. “Can Dogs Smell Cancer?” Rosewell Park Cancer Center. 25 Aug. 2020.

Otto, Cynthia. Personal Interview.

Peltier, Elian. “The Nose Needed for This Coronavirus Test Isn’t Yours. It’s a Dog’s.” The New York Times, 23 Sept. 2020.

想象一个我们可以将致癌烟草转化为可再生能源的世界;针头几乎无痛;我们可以重新利用自己的细胞来逆转退行性疾病;以及我们可以使用激光发现埋藏的古代世界的地方。

这听起来像科幻小说的内容，但这些只是青少年为我们的第三届年度STEM写作比赛研究和撰写的一些创新和科学可能性。

我们与《科学新闻》的合作伙伴一起，邀请学生选择科学、技术、工程、数学或健康方面的一个问题或问题，并在 500 字以内进行解释。有些人解决了他们在自己生活中观察到的问题，比如麦齐耀，他在接受手术后想知道什么可以帮助伤口更快地愈合。（一个答案？罗非鱼皮。其他人对周围的世界感到好奇。海伦·罗奇（Helen Roche）想了解颜色如何影响大脑——她甚至在家里的不同颜色的房间里写了一篇文章来找出答案。（“紫色是迄今为止最好的，橙色是迄今为止最差的。还有一些人承担了重大的全球性问题，比如艾米丽·邢（Emily Xing），她想找到解决吸烟的方法（她的祖国中国是世界领先的烟草消费国），最终也找到了应对气候变化的解决方案。

从 3，564 个参赛作品中，我们选出了 8 个获奖者、16 个亚军和 33 个荣誉奖。这些文章不仅向我们介绍了一个有趣的科学或数学概念，而且以一种外行人可以理解的方式进行，并且阅读起来很吸引人。您可以通过以下链接完整阅读八篇获奖文章。

艾米丽告诉我们，写文章帮助她“想象一个人们不怕尝试疯狂想法和承担创造性风险的社会——一个牵强附会的创新可以帮助编织更美好的明天和解决全球问题的地方。我们希望，像我们一样，你能从这些文章中学到一些新的东西，并为这些年轻人描绘的充满希望的未来感到振奋。

恭喜我们的获奖者，感谢所有送作业的老师和学生，以及许多自愿帮助我们选择的具有STEM背景的评委。

STEM 写作比赛获奖者

按作者姓氏的字母顺序排列。

获奖论文

July 15, 2016. The world held its breath as a revolutionary airplane blazed overhead, leaving a silver trail across the sky. Forever changing countless industries, this flight was powered not by conventional fossil fuels, but rather by the world’s leading cause of preventable death: tobacco.

Today’s society faces a devastating smoking epidemic. According to the World Health Organization, tobacco products kill over eight million people annually — more than malaria, influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS and alcohol combined.

Unfortunately, millions of workers also depend on this deadly plant to support their families. A study by researchers at McGill University highlights why these farmers hesitate to switch to alternative crops: Tobacco has always had a readily available market, and its lands are typically unsuitable for any other plant. Completely eliminating tobacco therefore may not be the most feasible solution. So what if we repurposed it for healthy innovations, such as a sustainable fuel for the future, instead?

In 2014, South African Airways, Boeing and SkyNRG launched Project Solaris. The goal? To cultivate tobacco that can send airplanes into the sky.

Aviation is projected to account for over 22 percent of global carbon emissions by 2050, which makes finding eco-friendly energy sources an industry priority. Solaris, a special nicotine-free tobacco strain with maximized seed yield, is one promising solution. Scientists are refining the oil within these seeds to craft bioenergy that, compared to conventional fossil fuels, reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 83 percent!

On July 15, 2016, South African Airways flew its very first tobacco-powered flight. Six thousand three hundred liters of Solaris bioenergy carried the airplane from Johannesburg to Cape Town — a journey that, as Ian Cruickshank, the airline’s environmental affairs specialist, said, “shows the industry is really changing. Four or five years ago biofuel was seen as futuristic, and today it’s here.”

Unlike tobacco, growing common crops like corn for bioenergy generates many problems, from hurting global food security to disturbing local wildlife. But by repurposing the 10.5 million acres of already-existing tobacco farmlands, Solaris cultivation perfectly overcomes these challenges, all while producing more oil!

This creative endeavor has inspired people to see tobacco as “a viable source of energy for the future,” in the words of Robert Mills. The Virginian farmer now dedicates a portion of his land to grow biofuel tobacco every year in partnership with Tyton BioEnergy Systems, an eco-friendly power company.

Besides biofuel, research has found that tobacco has countless other applications, including deterring troublesome pests, serving as paper, and even yielding promising drugs for AIDS and cancer. These innovations take the first steps in providing society with alternative, beneficial uses for the plant, proving its boundless potential outside of smoking.

Just like Tyton’s president Peter Majeranowski said, slowly, but surely, we are “re-imagin[ing] tobacco’s place in the world.” The shift in this crop’s uses — from addiction to aviation and beyond — teaches us that even the most harmful substances can be repurposed for the better. All it takes is a little creativity for change to take off.

Works Cited

Bakalar, Nicholas. “A New Death Toll for Smoking.” The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2016.

Chandran, Nyshka. “Why Getting Farmers to Switch from Tobacco Crops Is a Struggle.” CNBC, 10 Jan. 2017.

“Converting Tobacco to a Bioenergy Crop.” Plant & Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, 15 May 2012.

“The Economics of Tobacco and Tobacco Control.” National Cancer Institute, June 2020.

“Fact Sheet: Malaria.” World Health Organization, 6 Dec. 2021.

“Fact Sheet: Tobacco.” World Health Organization, 26 July 2021.

“Global Health Topics: Tuberculosis.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 3 Apr. 2020.

Grisan, Simone, et al. “Alternative Use of Tobacco as a Sustainable Crop for Seed Oil, Biofuel, and Biomass.” Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 23 Sept. 2016.

Guillory, Ferrel. “Save Our Small Farmers: Keep Subsidizing Tobacco.” Editorial, The Washington Post, 26 June 1983.

“Harmful Use of Alcohol Kills More than 3 Million People Each Year, Most of Them Men.” World Health Organization, 21 Sept. 2018.

Helmer, Jodi. “Meet the US Farmers Turning Their Tobacco Into Airplane Fuel.” The Guardian, 6 July 2016.

Hoshaw, Lindsey. “Tobacco Gets a Makeover as New Source for Biofuel.” KQED, 3 June 2014.

Kilian, Anine. “First Local Seed Selection to Take Place at Project Solaris.” Engineering News, 14 Oct. 2016.

LaGrave, Katherine. “South African Airways Completes Flight Using Fuel From Tobacco.” Condé Nast Traveler, 21 July 2016.

Maragakis, Lisa Lockerd. “COVID-19 vs. the Flu.” Johns Hopkins Medicine, 23 Feb. 2022.

“Solaris Energy Tobacco.” CORDIS | European Commission.

“The Toll of Tobacco in the United States.” Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, 3 Nov. 2021.

Warmflash, David. “From Jet Fuel to Medicine, Tobacco Growers Turn a New Leaf.” Discover Magazine, 27 July 2016.

“Warning: Smoking Can Kill You.” Editorial, The New York Times, 28 Aug. 2012.

Willmott, Don. “Holy Smokes! Tobacco May Fuel Planes in the Future.” Smithsonian Magazine, 12 Nov. 2014.

Womack, Rocky. “Tyton BioEnergy Takes Step toward Marketing Tobacco-Based Products.” Tobacco Journal International, June 2015.

Zandt, Florian. “HIV/AIDS Deaths Continue To Decline.” Statista Infographics, 30 Nov. 2021.