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For more information on these science news and feature story tips, please contact the public information officer at the end of each item at (703) 292-8070. Editor: Amber Jones Contents of this News Tip:
Students Compete to Create Cleaner-Burning VehiclesStudents from 15 top engineering schools tested their grit, creativity and engineering knowledge in the race to create a "greener" vehicle for the FutureTruck 2000 challenge. The contest, which concludes at the General Motors Desert Proving Ground in Tempe, Ariz., this month, is a hands-on test of vehicle engineering sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) along with the Department of Energy, GM and other partners. Hundreds of students are competing in 15 teams to re-engineer new Chevy Suburban sport utility vehicles for better fuel efficiency and reduced emissions without sacrificing comfort, safety or performance. The teams can choose from a variety of strategies, including different fuels, engine modifications, weight reduction, better aerodynamics, computer-based energy management and advanced energy storage devices. "We're training the engineers of tomorrow with a challenge that faces industry today," said NSF program manager George Hazelrigg. The students will describe their innovations in a live webcast on Yahoo! on Monday, June 12. The awards ceremony, with TV science personality Bill Nye, will be webcast on Thursday, June 15. [Amber Jones] For more information and live webcasts, see: http://www.futuretruck.org/ New England Experienced "Ice Age" El NiñoThe New England region underwent El Niño-like climate changes during the Ice Age, NSF-supported researchers have found. Scientists define El Niño as a disruption of the ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific, which has important consequences for weather around the globe. A weakening of the trade winds allows unusually warm currents in the western Pacific to flow eastward to the western coast of South America. This exceptionally large area of warm surface water occurs cyclically, often causing significant changes in weather patterns. The team's findings show a strong three-to-five-year cycle of El Niño activity during the latter part of the last Ice Age--the same frequency with which El Niño occurs today. The research focused on the era when the Laurentide Ice Sheet was slowly receding northward across New England, leaving Glacial Lake Hitchcock in its wake. At its peak, the glacial lake filled much of the Connecticut Valley. The report offers scientists a clearer understanding of El Niño's persistence at a time when climate conditions were very different from today's conditions. "El Niño-like climate change can happen under all sorts of conditions, even when the Northern Hemisphere is covered with large ice sheets," said lead researcher Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts. "It's not just a warm-weather phenomenon. Knowing this will help scientists in determining what drives El Niños." The project was funded by NSF, the National Geographic Society and the University of Massachusetts. [Cheryl Dybas] Berkley Researcher Testing Synthetic Pattern Recognition at the NanoscaleResearch at the University of California at Berkeley could help scientists develop nanoscale separation devices, sensors and "designer antibodies" faster and less expensively. Chemical engineering professor Arup K. Chakraborty has identified ways of eliciting pattern recognition in man-made substances--in a way that mimics the biological process that took millennia to evolve. In nature, recognition of specific patterns on cell surfaces is the basis of vital cellular functions, including cell-to-cell signaling and immune system response. Chakraborty predicts that in synthetic materials, pattern recognition can be elicited via statistical matching, rather than the specific matching exhibited by living systems. Scientists wanting to design molecules that recognize a target pattern could use the model to speed up the search through "libraries" of synthetic molecules. "You could use these principles to do an inexpensive screening to find
the molecules that are statistically most likely to have the binding properties
you need," said Chakraborty.
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