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Articles by Alex Sein
The data scandal explained
On March 17, The New York Times and The Observer reported on Cambridge Analytica’s use of personal information data harvested by a Cambridge researcher, purportedly for academic purposes, without the consent of the relevant users.As a result, Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, from advertising on its website.
“Black Panther:” a unique addition to the MCU
Marvel’s latest movie, “Black Panther,” is a solid film and a fine addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.“Black Panther” didn’t feel like a traditional Marvel film. It certainly had its share of action, humor and high-tech hovercrafts, but its focus on the culture of the fictional land of Wakanda sets it apart from the other films.
The Post Movie Review
“The Post” is a movie with important themes to convey. Its first goal is to send a message by calling out politicians, reasserting the right to free press within the First Amendment and pointing out the necessity of journalism in a democracy such as ours.Its secondary goal is to entertain.
A&M professor aims to further VR in classrooms
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have been proposed as educational tools for some time, but Darren Hartl, aerospace engineering professor, and Michayal Mathew, a senior in aerospace engineering, have actually been implementing the technology in their departments.Working from the Multifunctional Material and Aerospace Structures Optimization (MAESTRO) Lab, Hartl and Mathew have pioneered VR as a viable tool for inspecting 3-D models imported from programs like Solidworks and...
Professor Kentaro Hara receives grant from Air Force
Kentaro Hara, assistant aerospace engineering professor, recently received the 2018 Young Investigator Research Program Award from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which entails a $450,000 grant over the next three years.Hara said his research will focus on using computational models to understand electron behavior in complex electric and magnetic fields.“I had this idea since I was doing my Ph.D. at Michigan,” Hara said.
Tackling healthcare along the border
Over the past several years, Genny Carrillo has been working to map asthma rates in communities along the US-Mexico border.Carrillo, director of the program on asthma research and education and associate professor in the School of Public Health, has been working on research focused on various measures of asthma rates, and she knew that the data had already been gathered in some capacity.
Teams apply virtual perspectives to practical problems
Last Friday, Aggies Invent opened its doors to 56 students.
Putting stack into perspective
The 1969 Bonfire (right) at Texas A&M University was the tallest bonfire ever built. Reaching nearly 110 feet into the air, it was taller than most current buildings on campus, and in 1969 it was the tallest structure on campus. In the 1940s, when Universal Studios produced the film about Texas A&M, “We’ve Never Been Licked,” they built a model bonfire in a teepee shape, unlike the previous student designs which were essentially large piles of wooden things, including dorm furniture in 1912.
Texas A&M professor advises Congress on windstorm issues
Walter Peacock, architecture professor and director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M served for about eight months on a committee that recently submitted a proposal to Congress regarding windstorms and how to mitigate the losses they often cause.“Windstorm risk includes tornados, hurricanes, when it includes hurricanes, it also then includes surge and inland flooding and also coastal flooding of a great variety of different types,” Peacock said.According to Peacock,...
Setting statistics straight
In a 2016 paper published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Valen Johnson, university distinguished professor and department head of statistics, suggested, along with graduate students Alex Asher and Tianying Wang, that statistical significance should be redefined, or at least refined.The most widely accepted measure for statistical significance is the p-value, according to Wang, which is a measure of how likely a more extreme result is to appear after a set of...
Texas A&M professor watches neutron star merger firsthand
“The hypothesis is that the merger of these two neutron stars is going to generate a lot of radioactive material, elements that are high in the periodic table, so things like gold, for example, or platinum,” Macri said.According to Macri, the proof was in the light detected from the kilonova.
Heavy metal in the high seas
According to Franco Marcantonio, Texas A&M geology professor, there is a chance that iron particles deposited into the Pacific Ocean during the last ice age could have affected global climates.Marcantonio’s research began when he took part in an expedition to the Galapagos Islands to retrieve a core sample — a cutout that contains eons of sedimentary layers detailing the Earth’s geological past — from the bottom of the ocean.
Computational materials science summer school renewed for 2018
For the sixth straight year, Texas A&M hosted the annual Computational Materials Science school over the summer.
Aerospace department makes changes
Of Texas A&M’s 14 engineering departments, aerospace engineering stands out from the rest as the only one that is aligned with an industry rather than a broad field of study. According to the aerospace engineering degree plan, aerospace engineers currently have three options — planes, rockets and spacecraft — for their senior design course, and thus three specializations they can have in the field.
Improving Sedentary Habits with Technology
Sitting is the new smoking — at least, that is, according to James Levine, doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, AZ, who coined the phrase after conducting a study that seemed to prove that sitting for extended periods of time without moving led to an increase in obesity. However, there has been doubt about Levine’s claim.
Detecting damage in aircraft
During flight, airplanes experience significant loads and stresses, and over time these loads can lead to cracks forming in high-stress areas of planes.In the past, these cracks were easy to detect because people smoked on planes — nicotine from the cigarettes got lodged in the cracks, allowing engineers to easily locate them.
Aggie STEM Helping Alleviate Teacher Shortage
Since 2006, Aggie STEM has been helping science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, teachers across Texas by providing them with various professional development tools that improve their ability to teach STEM courses.
Class of 1967 returns to Aggieland - The Battalion: Traditions
“The speaker for the campus Muster is Dr. Ed Davis, who is a classmate of ours, and he was the past head of the A&M Foundation,” Batsell said. “It’s pretty unique, since this is the first time a member of the 50th class has been the Muster speaker.” Batsell said the new and improved Aggieland is significantly different from the campus the Class of 1967 once knew. “For many of my classmates, it will be the first time that they’ve been back to A&M in a very long time,” Batsell said.
A&M initiative to increase engineering enrollment is on schedule
“Our future growth will be primarily retention and online Master's degrees, as well as remote locations,” Banks said. “We don’t expect any growth on this campus in terms of number of students.” According to Banks, the foreign locations include Galveston, Qatar and various engineering academies in Texas like Blinn College in Bryan and El Centro College in Dallas.
A&M researchers develop alternate theory for creation of Earth’s lifeforms
According to Ugaz, the answer can be explained by lava lamps on a microscopic scale. “You heat a fluid from below with a light bulb, and then it causes a density change,” Ugaz said. “The fluid near the bottom is warmer, so it’s lighter, and it rises, and then the fluid near the top is cooler, so it sinks.” Lava lamps, according to Ugaz, are designed to maintain a constant flow of liquid inside them.
The Battalion: Science & Technology
However, the College of Engineering has a plan that circumvents that need — instead of bringing in new students to increase the number enrolled in engineering, it will work to increase retention rates, according to Katherine Banks, vice chancellor and dean of the College of Engineering. “We only have approximately a 57 to 58 percent retention rate,” Banks said.
A&M prof leads team of researchers to investigate Germanwings plane crash
“Through mathematical modeling and the ensued supercomputing, we can visualize from the dynamic video animation how the airliner was totally destructed and fragmented,” Chen said. “This is like a ‘crime scene reenactment’ that is often critical in the investigation of any committed crime.
SpaceX works to fly 2 private citizens to Moon by end of 2018
According to Gregory Chamitoff, professor of engineering practice and former NASA astronaut, with the right preparation, the plan could succeed. “For SpaceX to send a spacecraft around the moon in 2018 is a very ambitious goal, but it is consistent with the company’s long term vision of getting people living and working on Mars as quickly as possible,” Chamitoff said.
A&M student, team, develops app for saying ‘Thank you’
According to Chen, Givenera is based on traditional social media apps but the focus is on thanking people the user meets on a daily basis. “If you search information, you use Google. You shop online, you use Amazon,” Chen said. “You want to say ‘Thank you’ — you use Givenera. It’s to express your gratitude toward others.
Automated rescue
Robin Murphy, head of CRASAR and computer science professor, has assisted in recovery operations for 26 disasters, and is part of ongoing collaborations between CRASAR and the Greek and Italian coast guards. “Our job is to insert these technologies, to learn from the agencies how to best use them, do more research when we find gaps or problems,” Murphy said. The Italian Coast Guard has used these robots to help refugees from Northern Africa get to Italy safely, according to Murphy.
A&M experts question SpaceX plans for satellite internet
However, Walter Magnussen, director of communications at A&M, is not as optimistic about the plan. “What’s happening right now within wireless communications is as the cellular companies and everything else are transitioning, beginning to transition, from 4G to 5G, the cell sizes become very, very small,” Magnussen said. A cell, according to Magnussen, is the area that a single satellite can cover with the same speed of Internet, and that size is rapidly shrinking.
Excitement about Electromagnetic Drive may be premature, according to Texas A&M experts
According to Adonios Karpetis, associate professor of aerospace engineering, its violation of Newton’s Third Law may only be the beginning of the drive’s problems. “When the power is turned off, the force goes to zero exponentially, or, you know, slowly, and that is an indication of thermal response,” Karpetis said.
A&M scientists discuss mystery behind dark matter
A&M physics and astronomy professor and co-creator of one of the original research teams Nicholas Suntzeff said finding a way to detect this dark energy was a challenge the teams had to tackle in 1998. “If you know the brightness of something — say a 75 watt light bulb — you figure out how far away it is, then you know if it’s bright or faint, but you have to know it’s a 75 watt light bulb,” Suntzeff said.
NASA’s budget uncertain despite previous increases
The NASA budget for the fiscal year 2016 was $18.5 billion, according to an official NASA statement. In reality, additional funds that NASA was required to spend on certain projects raised that figure to $19.3 billion — a record amount, but still only about 0.5 percent of the federal budget. Although the budget has increased over the past few years, there is no way to predict what it will be in the fiscal year 2017, according to David Kanipe, associate professor in aerospace engineering.
Navigating a debris-filled orbit
According to Darren DePoy, professor of astrophysics, space junk describes anything in Earth’s orbit that no longer serves any purpose. “It’s just junk — it’s old satellites, sometimes, that no longer function, or debris from satellites that have crashed into something and gotten broken,” DePoy said.
NASA, A&M partner to prevent cancer in space
John Ford, team member and professor of nuclear engineering, works with Nancy Turner, Class of 1978 and research professor, to study how adding certain chemicals to a diet can help repair DNA damaged by exposure to radiation. The team is conducting its research using mice. Turner is the lead researcher on the project, while Ford’s primary focus is radiation biology. “One of the things we’re doing is we’re looking at cells in the intestine of mice,” Ford said.
Mars’ past, Earth’s future
Dozens of missions have left humans an immense reservoir of information about Mars — especially about its past — but substantial advancements remain necessary before humans can be sent there. As said in the emergence of CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars, monumental progress in rocket and space technology must be achieved.
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