Watch the video above to see a very recent advance in molecular science — the kind that would take months or years to reach classrooms before the edge of human knowledge moved online.

A Chemistry World post this week explains:

The researchers placed a thin film of water containing single stranded DNA molecules between a glass surface and a metal-coated base. By heating a spot on the base with an infrared laser a thermal gradient is created in the fluid layer, with cooler fluid at the top. This pushes the DNA molecules towards the top of the film. The laser is then scanned in a radial pattern from the centre; as the laser spot moves it heats up the fluid locally causing changes in viscosity which result in contraction and expansion of the fluid either side of the moving spot, which causes the fluid to flow outwards, away from the centre. The layer of fluid above this moving ‘belt’ moves in the opposite direction to conserve mass. In this way, the molecules, which have been drawn to the upper layer of the fluid by the initial heating, are pulled towards the central spot, where they accumulate.

Weinert and Braun showed that high concentrations of DNA can be accumulated within a few seconds when carried on the conveyor. ‘The mechanism does not require microfluidics, electrodes, or surface modifications,’ the researchers say. ‘As a result, the trap can be dynamically relocated. The optical conveyor can be used to enhance diffusion-limited surface reactions, redirect cellular signalling, observe individual biomolecules over a prolonged time, or approach single-molecule chemistry in bulk water.’

Find more selected chemistry links in the GoldenSwamp Study Subjects.

It is stunning that this first of its kind image and description of how it was taken can be studied by anyone with an internet browser — almost immediately upon its discovery. It will be many months at least before this new insight into and picture of molecules will be delivered to students in a printed textbook.

The machine in the illustration is an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) explained by physicist Ethan Siegel at his StartsWithABang blog. Siegel describes how the AFM works: “Basically, you make a tiny, sharp, atomic needle that you move over the top of a molecule. When you approach different atoms in a molecule, the electric forces either attract or repel the needle. As the needle moves up and down, the handle that it’s attached to feels forces and torque. So, all you have to do is measure these tiny changes in force and torque, and you can image the molecule beneath it.”

The gray inset image is what the AFM let’s us see. Siegel comments that: “You can even see that the electrons like to live on the outside edges of the carbon rings, and that there are fourteen tiny hydrogen atoms bonded to the carbon atoms at various points. What an amazing picture; the entire molecule is only 1.4 nanometers across!”

The inset image is from BBC’s report of 8/28/09 titled “Single molecule’s stunning image.” Several developing concepts are highlighted in the BBC report, each of them offering potential for nano technologies where work will be done at the molecular level. A post at Gizmodo by Jack Loftus explains why what is displayed in the inset images is a stunning breakthrough: “That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the ’specimen’—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.”

It has been fascinating for me to go through the links I have collected in the past. Almost all of them are still active, and I would say most of them have been well kept up over the years. Many were at the cutting edge when they were first created years ago — and remain so. Clearly their keepers are individuals or teams of expert Web developers and content devotees.

Since the CIA is so much in the news today, I have picked them as an example of edgy Web folks. Their World Factbook has been online since 1997. It is a standard source that only gets better over time. CIA for Kids is fun, and a little spooky.

“‘The Law-Baseball Quiz’ debuted in the New York Times on April 4, 1979. Created by law professor Robert M. Cover, it compared baseball players and Supreme Court Justices.” Thus begins the web page about the The Oyez Project’s digital version of the game.

OYEZ BASEBALL online is integrated with the OYEZ project that provides extensive materials about the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS). How was the brilliant Justice Benjamin Cardozo like Golden Glove winner 1983-88 Ryne Sandberg? When you play OYEZ BASEBALL, you can figure out trivia like that from the authoritative biographies of the justices that are linked to the game from the larger OYEZ project. Its something of a sneak play to teach some biography.

New Mobile Learning Content Community Resource Available
mLearnopedia.com partners with TechEmpower to provide information source for mobile learning

Greenville, WI February 16, 2009: With an increasingly mobile society and the need for instant information for employees and students everywhere all the time, mobile learning and mobile performance support are growing at a rapid pace. Ambient Insight recently reported that the US market for Mobile Learning product and services is growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.7%.

To provide access to the latest news and best practices a new content community has been created at http://cc.mlearnopedia.com. Content is aggregated from sites such as Cell Phones in Learning, GoldenSwamp, mLearning is Good, mLearning World, mLearnopedia, moblearn, Mobile Commons, and MobileDot. “The mlearnopedia project is a terrific idea at the right time! I look forward to being part of it,” states Judy Breck from Golden Swamp. Ben Bonnet from mLearning is Good commented “The cc.mlearnopedia.com community has already benefited me by providing exposure to content I normally would have missed.” The aggregation technology, called BrowseMyStuff, comes from Tony Karrer of TechEmpower with the support of Judy Brown from mLearnopedia.com.

The Connected Graph detail image enters the WolframMathWorld through a cluster of Small World Network subjects, which are part of graph theory, in discrete mathematics. The Small World cluster provides the math behind six degrees of separation, the Kevin Bacon Game, and hyperlinking patterns in the internet.

A half century ago when I was a student at El Paso, Texas’ Austin High School, Mrs. Emma Burtis taught a class called 7B English. Mrs. Burtis was also sponsor of the school’s club for student writers. Mrs. Burtis had her own word-of-the-day, on steroids! We rushed to get seated in her classroom as early as we could, because each class session began with seven words written on the blackboard (no green or white boards in those days). The first ten minutes or so of the class was, for us students, taken up by the challenge of looking up the words and writing a sentence using each of them. Class discussion ensued.

We came to refer among ourselves to “7B words.” Most of the words were hard, like frigorific. The result of the exercise Mrs. Burtis imposed was not to create a bunch of sixteen-year-olds walking around calling cold days “frigorific” — a word BTW that my spellchecker keeps underlining in red. What it did teach us was the there was more to vocabulary that the limited expressions teenagers, thinking they are hot, or cool, or whatever. The 7B exercise created curiosity in us about words, and got me into the life-long habit of looking up words that I do not know when I come across them.

7B English on steroids: Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is Mrs. Burtis virtually. It is only one word at a time, but it is every day, free, automatically popping up on my desktop. Just as she would do in the class discussion, Word of the Day provides the precise definition of the word, uses it in sentences. And as Mrs. Burtis would have done for us, you can hear the word correctly pronounced and used in a sentence, along with some discussion of its origin.

Austin High was a great school when I was there, at a time when public education was at its best. Mrs. Burtis was a superb teacher. Yet for awakening the yen for words, the Merriam-Webster daily offering adds a powerful new dimension we did not have in 7B English. The daily word is even available in kids’ pockets on their mobile phone internet browsers. Today, when there are many students whose schools offer very little opportunity for vocabulary stimulus, Word of the Day is very, very cool — downright frigorific.

Quarked Adventures in the Subatomic Universe teaches particle physics in simple terms. There are games and other activities for small children, but the Subatomic Universe Roadmap and the Glossary integrated with the map are an excellent introductory primer for anyone on the subatomic structure of the world around us and the cosmos.

A more extensive glossary can be found at the CERN ATLAS experimental site.

Obviously, there is no way to build schools by 2011 or 2015 for these billions of people who do not have an education. They will essentially all, however, have a mobile phone. At the least, the mobiles the new internet participants have can provide the literacy input Abe Lincoln (born 1809) was limited to as a boy in the rugged pioneer settlements of Kentucky and Indiana. In his biography Lincoln, David Herbert Donald describes the poverty of education available to the youngster:

. . . his teachers, transient and untrained as they were, helped him master the basic tools so that in the future he could educate himself. Dilworth’s Spelling Book, which he and [his older sister] Sarah had begun to use in Kentucky, provided his introduction to grammar and spelling. Beginning with the alphabet and Arabic and Roman numerals, it proceeded to words of two letters, then three, and finally four letters. From these the student began to construct sentences like: “No man may put off the law of God.” Dilworth’s then went on to more advanced subjects, and the final sections included prose and verse selections, some accompanied by crude woodcuts — which may have been the first pictures Abraham Lincoln had ever seen. Other readers, like The Columbian Class Book and The Kentucky Preceptor, expanded and reinforced what he learned from Dilworth’s.

As Lincoln grew through his childhood and adolescent years he had very little schooling. He read books when he could get them, but they were rare in the rough farming environment where he remain until he was in his twenties.

Today, 200 years later, many of the third, fourth, and fifth billion who will come online in the next six years are strikingly similar in their experience with education to young Lincoln. The huge difference is that today’s billions will have mobile phones that will provide them with everything Dilworth’s gave Lincoln, all the books they could possibly read, and much, much more.