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This paper describes the US Naval Academy's outreach program called Summer Seminar, which offers the opportunity for high school seniors to participate in one of three six-day sessions to experience life as a midshipman, both academically and otherwise. This paper focuses on the workshop on electrical engineering in 2005, wherein approximately 360 of the total 1,855 high school students attended. The electrical engineering workshop began with an introduction to the fundamentals of electrical theory and led to several contemporary signal processing examples. These included digitized music and state-of-the-art biometric systems. The paper briefly describes each individual activities that incorporate active learning in the electrical engineering workshop [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Movements in muscles are generated by the myosins which interact with the actin filaments. In this paper we present an electric theory to describe how the chemical energy is first stored in electrostatic form in the myosin system and how it is then released and transformed into work. Due to the longitudinal polarized molecular structure with the negative phosphate group tail, the ATP molecule possesses a large electric dipole moment (), which makes it an ideal energy source for the electric dipole motor of the actomyosin system. The myosin head contains a large number of strongly restrained water molecules, which makes the ATP-driven electric dipole motor possible. The strongly restrained water molecules can store the chemical energy released by ATP binding and hydrolysis processes in the electric form due to their myosin structure fixed electric dipole moments (). The decrease in the electric energy is transformed into mechanical work by the rotational movement of the myosin head, which follows from the interaction of the dipoles with the potential field of ATP and with the potential field of the actin. The electrical meaning of the hydrolysis reaction is to reduce the dipole moment —the remaining dipole moment of the adenosine diphosphate (ADP) is appropriately smaller to return the low negative value of the electric energy nearly back to its initial value, enabling the removal of ADP from the myosin head so that the cycling process can be repeated. We derive for the electric energy of the myosin system a general equation, which contains the potential field with the dipole moment , the dipole moments and the potential field . Using the previously published experimental data for the electric dipole of ATP and for the amount of strongly restrained water molecules in the myosin subfragment (S1), we show that the Gibbs free energy changes of the ATP binding and hydrolysis reaction steps can be converted into the form of electric energy. The mechanical action between myosin and actin is investigated by the principle of virtual work. An electric torque always appears, i.e. a moment of electric forces between dipoles and that causes the myosin head to function like a scissors-shaped electric dipole motor. The theory as a whole is illustrated by several numerical examples and the results are compared with experimental results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]