The No. 13 School of Mines Men’s basketball team went on the road Friday night to UCCS and captured the 77-54 victory bringing them to 13-1 on the season (9-1 in the RMAC). The Orediggers used a stifling defense and all five starters in double digits to regroup after their first loss of the season.
Shortly after the Lady Orediggers basketball team pulled the upset over CSU-Pueblo Saturday night, the 13th ranked Oredigger men’s basketball cruised to a 91-57 win of their own over the Thunderwolves.
The days following Fall Finals are usually met with many hours of sleep by Mines students in an attempt to make up for the lack of sleep accumulated all year. But, with three and a half weeks of winter break between semesters, students find ways to get out and live their breaks to the fullest. This week, Minds at Mines asked returning students, “What was the best part of your break?”
Hanging out on Mount Zion at night can be fun, but no one wants to sit and wait until 3AM for Northern Lights when there is not a realistic possibility of seeing them. Earlier this month, many who read news articles and watched the news found themselves staring at the night sky in disappointment. They had been told there would be perfect conditions for a perfect storm to view the Aurora Borealis, but it was not so.
Last Thursday, Ed Nissen from the Geophysics department crossed Kafadar to deliver a talk on earthquakes to the geologists of Berthoud Hall. Nissen’s research focuses broadly on faulting and LIDAR applications. (LIDAR is a type of satellite mapping that penetrates through ground cover, such as trees, to give detailed bare-Earth topography.) He spoke about the Zagros Mountains, which range across the entire western border of Iran, specifically focusing on an island at the southernmost end of the range called Qeshm Island.
#1: Madison, Wisconsin—Learning Comes at a Cost: Sleep
The purpose of sleep perplexes scientists, and though there are common theories, none of them have been proven as fact. However, a recent study may hold a key to understanding the need for getting enough shut-eye every night. Dr. Giulio Tononi and Dr. Chiara Cirelli, leading sleep scientists at the University of Wisconsin, recently published their findings on the importance of sleep to learning in the journal Neuron. The scientists developed the synaptic homeostasis sleep, or “SHY” hypothesis. SHY states that the importance of sleep is in the abilities to save energy by weakening brain cell connections, avoid stress on the cellular level, and maintain neurons’ ability to respond to stimuli. According to Tononi, sleep is the price the brain pays for learning and memory. “During wake, learning strengthens the synaptic connections throughout the brain, increasing the need for energy and saturating the brain with new information,” Tononi said. “Sleep allows the brain to reset, helping integrate, newly learned material with consolidated memories, so the brain can begin anew the next day.”
Scientists, researchers and engineers hold the responsibility to develop science for the benefit of society. However, what happens when that responsibility is abused and academic misconduct yields false results in research?
Car bomb in Nigeria
17 people died in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri due to a car bomb. Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the attack. This was one of many attacks in Boko Haram’s terrorist campaign. Military forces claimed to have arrested a suspect. Approximately 1,200 Nigerians have died due to radical Islamic activities since the beginning of this campaign.
Dr. Sam Luoma, a fellow of the John Muir Institute of the Environment and a professor at the University of California (Davis) spoke this Friday to the Mines chemistry department about metallic nanoparticle toxicity. By definition, a nanoparticle is a particle 100 nanometers in size or smaller. Nanoparticles (NPs) behave differently from larger particles because of their exceptionally high surface-to-volume ratio.
Can it be possible that there is such a thing as too much data to work with? Sometimes the answer is actually yes. Advancements in data generation and storage capacities have begun to exceed the growth in any given machine’s bandwidth capabilities, causing a bottleneck effect when attempting to move and work with huge amounts of data. What has become particularly troublesome is when one tries to work with multiple massive datasets from more than one source that are stored across more than one location, as is often the case when dealing with satellite or geophysical data. Due to the potential for datasets from this source to reach from thousands to millions of observations each at one time, the cost and difficulty of moving them renders these sets practically immovable. So how, then, can one consolidate all of this distributed data and use it to draw conclusions from the data, especially when inferences are commonly sought over a period time (resulting in even more data points)?