Follow the "Green" Brick Road

New bricks made from fly ash--fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants--may revolutionize the construction industry. Once colored and shaped, these "green" bricks are similar to their red clay counterparts, both in appearance and in meeting or exceeding construction-material standards.

"Manufacturing clay brick requires kilns fired to high temperatures," said Henry Liu, a longtime NSF awardee and the president of Freight Pipeline Company, which developed the bricks. "That wastes energy, pollutes air and generates greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. In contrast, fly ash bricks are manufactured at room temperature. They conserve energy, cost less to manufacture, and don't contribute to air pollution or global warming."

Supported by NSF's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, Liu has been working since 2004 on engineering bricks to be resistant to freezing and thawing.

"Green manufacturing is a focus for the nation," said Tom Allnutt of NSF's SBIR program. "Liu's innovation use of fly ash to manufacture high quality building materials will potentially decrease some of the negative environmental impact of coal-fired power generation while meeting increasing demands for greener building materials."

In fact, the agency anticipates supporting $215.11 million of astronomy research in FY 2007.

Recently, NSF astronomy research funding helped support the discovery of 28 planets. The planets were discovered by the California and Carnegie Planet Search and Anglo-Australian Planet Search teams--the world's largest team of planet hunters. Together, these teams have discovered more than half of all known exoplanets.

The teams' latest finding increases the number of known planets outside our solar system to 236 and the number of objects discovered by the team in the past year to 37. For more information, see the press release from the University of California, Berkeley.

Speech is arguably our most valuable social skill. Yet, perceiving speech and language requires intricate neural pathways to decode, interpret, and perceive information. Currently, NSF-supported researcher Josef Rauschecker of Georgetown University is studying speech perception in mammals. By using non-invasive techniques in primates, he has discovered that different areas of the brain process distinct sounds. He is "mapping" how different sound information travels through the nervous system to the brain, and which cortical regions, or areas of the brain, interpret and process distinctive sounds. His work will give more insight into the organizational principles of higher auditory pathways in humans as well as the organizational structure of the brain.

Another NSF-supported researcher, Dr. Lisa Davidson, studies the production of unfamiliar sounds. She studies why non-native speakers have trouble eliminating their native accent when learning a new language. Her research suggests that coordination and timing are language-specific. Hence, non-native learners have difficulty producing sounds such as the "vl" in the German pickle brand, "Vlasic," which sounds more like "Velasic" in non-native speakers.

According to a recent NSF report, "not only must speakers learn which sounds can be combined into sequences, but they must also learn how such sequences are temporally coordinated." Davidson will be using acoustic recordings and ultrasound imaging of tongue movements, to investigate why foreign language learners have difficulty pronouncing words like a native.

Science Teacher Awarded Scholarship for Graduate Work -- Rapid City Journal (06/13/07) -- The National Science Foundation is funding the Life Sciences for a Global Community program at Washington University in St. Louis. The program will provide up to 100 teachers with scholarships to pursue degrees intended to boost secondary biology education.

Investing in Education -- Dunn County News (06/13/07) -- The new Innovation Agenda bills that passed through the House last week will boost funding for the NSF, which in turn will benefit university research efforts. To help achieve a goal of producing more engineers, the Innovation Agenda will provide enhanced scholarship opportunities to educate an additional 25,000 K-12 math and science teachers.

Higher Pay Urged to Fight Dearth of Math and Science Teachers -- Washington Post (06/12/07) -- The Business-Higher Education Forum has released a report urging higher starting salaries and increased teacher training to draw math and science teachers to the U.S. education system. The release of the report coincides with the debate over the NSF budget.

Powershift -- Government Computer News (06/09/07) -- With the help of funding from NSF, researchers at MIT have come up with a way to transmit power wirelessly. The researchers reported that they had transmitted 60 watts over a distance of two meters with 40 percent efficiency. The trick? Something called magnetically-coupled resonance.

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