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DENA HEADLEE: Engineering students at the University of
Oklahoma have developed an iPad app that makes learning weather
fun! Aimed at elementary and middle school students, Storm
Evader puts kids in the pilot seat to navigate a plane during
weather events. The app challenges players to route
airplanes from one U.S. airport to another while avoiding
pitfalls like difficult weather patterns and long routes that
waste fuel. The app features two modes of interactive game
play. Free play allows players to fly during actual recorded
severe weather events including tornados. Career mode
challenges students to research weather forecasts before
deciding the safest route. Amy McGovern and her NSF-funded team
hope the game encourages kids to see meteorology and computer
science as problem-solving tools rather than just a segment on
the evening news. A fossilized pygmy locust has been
discovered, buried in a massive collection of
20-million-year-old amber at the Illinois Natural History Survey
at the University of Illinois. NSF-funded paleontologist Sam
Heads believes this tiny grasshopper specimen lived 18-20
million years ago. He says it is remarkable because it represents
an intermediate evolutionary stage for this group of insects.
The most ancient of the locust family had wings, while the
modern counterparts do not.
SAM HEADS: This specimen is particularly significant because
it does have vestigial wings. You're looking at
that earlier stage in the evolution of the group,
so that's very interesting.
DENA HEADLEE: The team found specimens buried in a massive
collection of amber that was originally found in the
Dominican Republic in 1959 by entomologist Milton Sanderson.
The 160 pounds of amber is just now being screened for fossils.
Heads believes the collection will be a great resource for
understanding the ancient world, its ecosystem and even climate.
SAM HEADS: They're extraordinarily valuable. It's
like having a little window into an ancient world. You can sort
of look through this lens and see a glimpse of life as it was
at that time, 20 million years ago.
DENA HEADLEE: Once the screening is finished, the
collection will be the largest and most complete Dominican
amber collection in the world. The origami robot comes to life.
NSF-funded researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering
and Applied Sciences, the Wyss Insitute for Biogically Inspired
Engineering at Harvard, and MIT created a self-folding machine
from flat sheets of plastic and paper. When heated above 100
degrees the sheets change shape and transform into a functional
machine. The process takes about four minutes and the robot
is able to crawl away unaided. Researcher Rob Wood says that
the folding allows you to avoid the nuts and bolts of assembly
approaches typically used for robots. The technology lets
researchers quickly and efficiently mass-produce
complex robots that are very strong for their weight and
scalable to different sizes.
ROBERT J. WOOD: The primary challenge we were addressing is
manufacturing robots in a very accessible way, very cheap
and very quick.
DENA HEADLEE: The process begins with a flat sheet paper.
SAM FELTON: And so one way to do this is to make a flat
composite. You have flexible circuit boards you make out of
paper and polystyrene. You simply put it through a laser
machining system and come out with a fold pattern. You
take your composite and fold it up into a functional machine.
And what we do is we mechanically preprogram this
composite with features at each hinge which tell it how far to
fold along each line.
DENA HEADLEE: Wood and his team see promising applications for
this technology to assist search and rescue, space exploration,
and self-folding shelters that rapidly assemble in disaster
zones. They hope this transformer technology will
revolutionize how materials can function in the future.
The research was reported in the August 8 issue of the journal
Science. NSF-funded scientists at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research and partner organizations just completed the
Front Range Air Pollution and Photochemistry Experiment or
FRAPPE. This major field project tracked the origins
of summertime ozone across the northern front
range of Colorado.
GABRIELE PFISTER: What we really want to do is a very
targeted, very, very comprehensive measuring and
monitoring. Figure out what are the factors that cause high
ozone pollution and what are the ways that this issue can be
addressed effectively and with the least impact on the economy
and everything else.
DENA HEADLEE: Unlike the protective ozone layer in the
stratosphere, ozone at ground level is an invisible but
harmful pollutant. The project employs specially equipped
aircraft, mobile radars, balloon-mounted sensors, and
sophisticated computer simulation to measure local and
far-flung pollution sources.
PATRICK REDDY: It could help us do a much better job at planning
for the future and also issuing more targeted air quality
advisories for people along the Front Range and across Colorado.
DENA HEADLEE: Results from the study will provide needed
information to officials seeking to ensure that air in the region
is healthy to breathe. NSF-funded researchers recently
published a paper confirming that the waters and sediments of
a lake that lies 2,600 feet beneath the surface of the West
Antarctic ice sheet support viable microbial ecosystems.
The finding has implications for life in extreme environments,
both on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. Brent C.
Christner, the paper's lead author and a researcher with the
NSF/ARRA-funded Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access
Research Drilling project or WISSARD says that hidden beneath
a half-mile of ice in Antarctica is an unexplored part of our
biosphere. WISSARD has provided a glimpse of the nature of
microbial life that may lurk under more than five million
square miles of ice sheet. The team says analysis of the
samples taken from subglacial Lake Whillans shows that the
water contains a diverse microbial community, the WISSARD
findings are published in the August 21 issue of the journal
Nature. For more information about these stories, visit us at
NSF.gov. This is NSF Science Now, I'm Dena Headlee.
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