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Mars Base

Claims of fairness in apes have critics crying foul | Zoology | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/..._apes_have_critics_crying_foul

scibyte78

shared by Mars Base on 16 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Chimpanzees often share and share alike when cooperating in pairs, suggesting that these apes come close to a human sense of fairness, a controversial new study finds.
  • chimps tend to fork over half of a valuable windfall to a comrade in situations where the recipient can choose to accept the deal or turn it down and leave both players with nothing
  • Yerkes National Primate Research Cente
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • just as people do, chimps turn stingy when supplied with goodies that they can share however they like
  • But psychologis
  • of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  • considers the new results “far from convincing.
  • In Proctor’s experiments, pairs of chimps interacted little with each other and showed no signs of understanding that some offers were unfair and could be rejected
  • study suggests that there is no fairness sensitivity in chimpanzees
  • coauthored two earlier studies in which chimps given food generally shared as little as possible with partners, who accepted most offers
  • Apes on the receiving end affirmed an offer by pulling food within reach using a mechanical device or refused an offer by doing nothing for 30 seconds.
  • In the new study, chimps and preschool children were tested in a way that Proctor contends is closer to a cooperation task known as the ultimatum game that is used in experiments with adults.
  • In the game’s standard version, one player splits a pot of money with another player
  • If the receiver accepts the proposer’s offer, both players keep their shares.
  • If the receiver rejects the offer, both players get nothing.
  • Proposers fork over 40 percent to 50 percent of the pot in most human cultures
  • A concern with fairness and a fear of retaliation for lowball offers prompts these generous offers
  • Her group studied six adult chimps at an outdoor research facility and 20 preschool children ages 2 to 7
  • Four pairs of chimps and 10 pairs of kids played a modified ultimatum game, in which a proposer can offer one of two tokens to a receiver
  • Accepted tokens got handed to an experimenter in exchange for rewards
  • Proposers opted for even splits much more frequently when a partner could reject offers
  • Two pairs of chimps split banana slices equally substantially more often than expected by chance
  • In both species, receivers exchanged all tokens for rewards, even those for unfair deals.
  • Neither chimps nor kids were trained that refusal was an option, but the mere threat of a partner’s retaliation motivated proposers to share equally
  • Jensen disagrees with that conclusion. Receivers’ acceptance of all offers “suggests that they were not sensitive to unfairness but were motivated only by getting rewards,
  • undermines any suggestion that chimp or child proposers assumed that their offers could be rejected
Mars Base

Numbers Games Devised to Aid People with "Dyscalculia": Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte78 Dyscalculia

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • By developing treatments for dyscalculia
  • to test competing theories about the cognitive basis of numeracy. If,
  • dyscalculia is at heart a deficiency of basic number sense and not of memory, attention or language, as others have proposed, then nurturing the roots of number sense should help dyscalculics
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It may be the case that what these kids need is just much more practice than the rest of us
  • starts with a game involving a number line
  • “What is the number that is right in the middle between 200 and 800? Do you know it?
  • A classic sign of dyscalculia is difficulty in grasping the place-value system,
  • A soft computer voice tells Christopher to “find the number and click it
  • The game involves zooming in and zooming out to rescale the number line
  • talks through each move — a strategy that Babtie encourages
  • but it takes him more than a minute to locate 210. His classmates, meanwhile, are learning to multiply two-digit numbers.
  • Butterworth
  • made his name probing obscure speech and language disorders
  • tested 31 eight- and nine-year-old children who were near the bottom of their class in mathematics but did well enough in other subjects.
  • Compared with normal children and those with dyslexia, the dyscalculic children struggled on almost every numerical task, yet were average on tests of reading comprehension, memory and IQ.
Mars Base

Numbers Games Devised to Aid People with "Dyscalculia": Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte78 Dyscalculia

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • team now has tentative plans to evaluate its software with researchers at the Cuban Neurosciences Center and the University of Pedagogical Sciences in Havana next year
  • also placing the game in other countries, including China and Singapore.
  • Cubans, curiously, are putting money into this, even though they've got very little
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • hopes that Number Sense — if it can improve dyscalculia — will help him in the academic debate over the cognitive basis of numeracy.
  • the interest of the children was to have a fun game full of ideas and variety, and that was not very compatible with an analytic approach
Mars Base

Numbers Games Devised to Aid People with "Dyscalculia": Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte78 Dyscalculia

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Three months on, Christopher seems to be faring better at the number-line game, going so quickly that Babtie asks him to slow down and explain his reasoning for each move
  • dyscalculic children tend to learn much more quickly when they talk through what they do
  • also believes that Christopher's maths anxiety, a near-universal trait of child and adult dyscalculics, is fading
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Tetris-like game called Numberbonds, in which bars of different lengths fall down the screen
  • select a block of the correct size to fill out a row
  • emphasizes spatial relationships, which some dyscalculics also struggle with.
  • The Number Sense games, including a snazzy-looking iPhone version of Numberbonds, are intended to nurture the abilities that
  • contends, are the root of numerical cognition and the core deficit of dyscalculia — manipulating precise quantities.
  • In a game called Dots to Track, for example, children must ascribe an Arabic numeral to a pattern of dots, similar to those on dice.
  • When they enter the wrong value — and they often do — the game asks the children to add or remove dots to achieve the correct answer.
  • Other students are improving more slowly, but it is not easy to say why
  • Dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder are common among dyscalculics, and it can be difficult to untangle these problems,
  • with the right practice and attention from teachers and parents, dyscalculic children can thrive,
  • computer games are a supplement, not a replacement, for one-on-one tutoring.
  • in 2009 that Number Race, a game his group developed, modestly improved the ability of 15 dyscalculic kindergarten children to discern the larger of two numbers, but that it had no effect on their arithmetic or counting
  • a Swiss team reported in 2011 that a game that involves placing a spaceship on a number line helped eight- to ten-year-old dyscalculics with arithmetic
  • studied the children in an fMRI scanner during a task that involved arranging numbers.
  • one month after training, the children showed increased activation in the intraparietal sulcus and reduced neural activation elsewhere in the parietal lobes — a hint that their improvements in arithmetic were related to changes involving brain areas that respond to number.
  • hopes to monitor the brains of students such as Christopher as they practice Number Sense, to see if their parietal lobes are indeed changing
  • turned down by every funding source he has applied to
  • dyscalculia, like other learning disabilities, takes a toll on productivity
  • it doesn't attract much attention or money
  • In the United States, for example, the National Institutes of Health spent $2 million studying dyscalculia between 2000 and 2011, compared with more than $107 million on dyslexia.
Mars Base

Numbers Games Devised to Aid People with "Dyscalculia": Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte78 Dyscalculia

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The study confirmed for Butterworth that developmental forms of dyscalculia are the result of basic problems in comprehending numbers and not in other cognitive faculties
  • determining exactly what those problems are would prove challenging
  • approximate number sense, distinguishes larger quantities from smaller ones, be they dots flashing on a screen or fruits in a tree.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • A second ancient number system allows humans and many other animals to instantly and precisely recognize small quantities, up to four.
  • People who are poor at distinguishing approximate quantities do badly in maths, suggesting that the approximate-number system is crucial.
  • some work shows that dyscalculics are poor at recognizing small numbers, suggesting that this ability is also fundamental to numeracy
  • scans of people with dyscalculia suggest that their intraparietal sulci are less active when processing numbers and less connected with the rest of the brain compared with numerate children and adults.
  • views such results as consequences, not causes, of the poor numerical abilities that characterize dyscalculia.
  • argues that another cognitive capacity is even more fundamental to number sense
  • calls this 'numerosity coding': the understanding that things have a precise quantity associated with them, and that adding or taking things away alters that quantity.
  • Approximation and a sense of small numbers, while critical, are not enough for humans to precisely grasp large numbers,
  • Language, he argues, empowers humans to integrate the two number systems — giving them the ability to intuitively distinguish, say, 11,437 from 11,436.
  • young children who could not yet count past two nonetheless understood that adding pennies to a bowl containing six somehow altered its number, even if the children couldn't say exactly how.
  • If numerosity coding is fundamental, it predicts that dyscalculics
  • struggle to enumerate and manipulate all numbers, large and small.
  • hopes that, by honing this ability, the Number Sense games will help support his research ideas
Mars Base

Numbers Games Devised to Aid People with "Dyscalculia": Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

scibyte78 Dyscalculia

shared by Mars Base on 15 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • A cognitive scientist who studies numerical cognition and a learning disability likened to dyslexia for mathematics works on identifying its cause as well as ways to help those who suffer from it
  • After conducting some tests,
  • concluded that
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “a disaster at arithmetic” and diagnosed him with dyscalculia, a little-known learning disability sometimes called number blindness and likened to dyslexia for maths
  • Researchers estimate that as much as 7% of the population has dyscalculia, which is marked by severe difficulties in dealing with numbers despite otherwise normal
  • well above normal) intelligence
  • he has crusaded to get dyscalculia recognized — by parents, teachers, politicians and anyone who will listen.
  • Number Sense, a suite of educational computer games
Mars Base

Tiny Sun Activity Changes Affect Earth's Climate | Solar Sunspot Cycle | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ar-activity-earth-climate.html

scibyte78 sun

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Even small changes in solar activity can impact Earth's climate in significant and surprisingly complex ways, researchers say.
  • The sun is a constant star when compared with many others in the galaxy
  • ome stars pulsate dramatically, varying wildly in size and brightness and even exploding
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • In comparison, the sun varies in the amount of light it emits by only 0.1 percent over the course of a relatively stable 11-year-long pattern known as the solar cycle.
  • "the light reaching the top of the Earth's atmosphere provides about 2,500 times as much energy as the total of all other sources combined,"
  • even 0.1 percent of the amount of light the sun emits exceeds all other energy sources the Earth's atmosphere sees combined, such as the radioactivity naturally emitted from Earth's core,
  • Many of the ways the scientists proposed these fluctuations in solar activity could influence Earth were complicated in nature.
  • , solar energetic particles and cosmic rays could reduce ozone levels in the stratosphere
  • in turn alters the behavior of the atmosphere below it, perhaps even pushing storms on the surface off cours
  • "In the lower stratosphere, the presence of ozone causes a local warming because of the breakup of ozone molecules by ultraviolet light,
  • When the ozone is removed, "the stratosphere there becomes cooler, increasing the temperature contrast between the tropics and the polar region
  • contrast in temperatures in the stratosphere and the upper troposphere leads to instabilities in the atmospheric flow west to east.
  • feed the strength of jet streams, ultimately altering flows in the upper troposphere, the layer of atmosphere closest to Earth's surface.
  • alter the distribution of storms over the middle latitudes
  • the sun might have a role to play in this kind of process. I would have to say this would be a very difficult mechanism to prove in climate models
  • climate scientist Gerald Meehl at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and his colleagues suggest that solar variability is leaving a definite imprint on climate, especially in the Pacific Ocean.
  • When researchers look at sea surface temperature data during sunspot peak years, the tropical Pacific showed a pattern very much like that expected with La Niña,
  • cyclical cooling of the Pacific Ocean that regularly affects climate worldwide, with sunspot peak years leading to a cooling of almost 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the equatorial eastern Pacific
  • peaks in the sunspot cycle were linked with increased precipitation in a number of areas across the globe, as well as above-normal sea-level pressure in the mid-latitude North and South Pacific.
  • Scientists have also often speculated whether the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year dearth of sunspots in the late 17th to early 18th century, was linked with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America experienced bitterly cold winter
  • This regional cooling might be linked with a drop in the sun's extreme ultraviolet radiation.
  • t, the sun could currently be on the cusp of a miniature version of the Maunder Minimum, since the current solar cycle is the weakest in more than 50 years.
  • Although the sun is the main source of heat for Earth, the researchers note that solar variability may have more of a regional effect than a global one
  • While the sun is by far the dominant energy source powering our climate system, do not assume that it is causing much of recent climate changes. It's pretty stabl
  • Ancient signals of climate such as tree rings and ice cores might also help shed light on the link between the sun and climate
  • Since variations in Earth's magnetic field and atmospheric circulation might disrupt this evidence on Earth,
  • a better long-term record of solar radiation might lie in the rocks and sediments of the moon or Mar
Mars Base

NASA - Curiosity Finds Calcium-Rich Deposits - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...curiosity20130118.html

scibyte78 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • images being returned by Curiosity show a diverse collection of interesting features, including sedimentary rocks, pebbles, cracks, nodules, and veins
  • vein features are seen as a bright white material
  • contain elevated levels of calcium sulfate, likely in the form of bassanite or gypsum
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Gypsum veins are also seen here on Earth and associated with water percolating through cracks and fractured rocks.
  • The team hopes to drill directly into one of the veins and place the powder into the SAM and ChemMin analytical instruments
  • give us detailed information about the composition of the material
  • On our way over to the drill site, we’re planning on using the rover’s wheels to crush some of these nearby veins and examine the freshly broken material
Mars Base

NASA beams Mona Lisa to Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at the moon (w/ video) - 0 views

phys.org/...lisa-lunar-reconnaissance.html

scibyte78

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • To clean up transmission errors introduced by Earth's atmosphere (left), Goddard scientists applied Reed-Solomon error correction (right), which is commonly used in CDs and DVDs.
  • Typical errors include missing pixels (white) and false signals (black). The white stripe indicates a brief period when transmission was paused
  • As part of the first demonstration of laser communication with a satellite at the moon, scientists with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) beamed an image of the Mona Lisa to the spacecraft from Earth.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • he iconic image traveled nearly 240,000 miles in digital form from the Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging (NGSLR) station at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument on the spacecraft.
  • By transmitting the image piggyback on laser pulses that are routinely sent to track LOLA's position, the team achieved simultaneous laser communication and tracking.
  • This is the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances
  • "In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use
  • In the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide
  • Typically, satellites that go beyond Earth orbit use radio waves for tracking and communication
  • LRO is the only satellite in orbit around a body other than Earth to be tracked by laser as well.
  • Precise timing was the key to transmitting the image
  • divided the Mona Lisa image into an array of 152 pixels by 200 pixels
  • Every pixel was converted into a shade of gray, represented by a number between zero and 4,095.
  • Each pixel was transmitted by a laser pulse, with the pulse being fired in one of 4,096 possible time slots during a brief time window allotted for laser tracking
  • he complete image was transmitted at a data rate of about 300 bits per second.
  • The laser pulses were received by LRO's LOLA instrument, which reconstructed the image based on the arrival times of the laser pulses from Earth
  • This was accomplished without interfering with LOLA's primary task of mapping the moon's elevation and terrain and NGSLR's primary task of tracking LRO.
  • The success of the laser transmission was verified by returning the image to Earth using the spacecraft's radio telemetry system.
  • Turbulence in Earth's atmosphere introduced transmission errors even when the sky was clear.
  • To overcome these effects,
  • employed Reed-Solomon coding, which is the same type of error-correction code commonly used in CDs and DVDs.
  • The next step after LLCD is the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), NASA's first long-duration optical communications mission.
Mars Base

The Flu Virus Can Tell Time. Here's Why You Should Care | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...time-heres-why-you-should-care

scibyte78 Flu

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The flu knows how long it has to invade our cells and spread to other humans. So new treatments could fight the virus by resetting its clock.
  • Influenza can tell time, and it choreographs its actions according to a strict schedule. If new vaccines can reset flu’s clock, the human immune system might be able to fight it more effectively
  • Viruses multiply by invading a host cell, hijacking its machinery and using it to make new copies of itself. Cells have warning systems that can detect this invasion and call in reinforcements, but that can take a while.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The virus has to orchestrate its actions carefully--if it moves too fast, it won’t have time to make new copies of itself, and if it moves too slowly, it might be stopped by immune defenses.
  • Researchers knew the virus has about eight hours to make copies of itself before a cell will notice
  • To produce sufficient copies to infect another human, it needs about two days of continuous activity inside our cells
  • The team figured out that the virus slowly gathers a protein it needs to make its exit, and leaves the cell in the nick of time.
  • To fight it, they tricked the virus into changing the amount of time it took to gather the protein.
  • First, they made it acquire the protein too quickly, which caused the flu to leave the cell before it had made enough copies of itself.
  • In this case, the cells were lung epithelial cells. Then they altered it to leave too late, giving immune cells enough time to respond and kill the virus before it escaped.
  • This is promising for new flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, which could target this internal protein clock
  • a flu vaccine is still the best way to protect yourself against the flu, not everyone is eligible to get one--especially the nasal spray, which is not recommended for the very young and the very old.
  • also rely on an educated guess about which flu will spread throughout the population in a season, and there are only so many vaccines.
  • a treatment that targets the virus’ clock wouldn’t need a dead or weakened version of the flu--it would just need to fool the virus into losing track of time
Mars Base

Alien Planet Archive Now Open to World | NASA Kepler Spacecraft | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/lanet-nasa-kepler-website.html

scibyte78 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Researchers are now posting all exoplanet sightings by the Kepler observatory into a single, comprehensive website called the "NASA Exoplanet Archive."
  • Instead of going through the long planet confirmation process before making data publicly available
  • So the day we know about the list, the archive knows about the list. And then everybody, including us, can work on that list. But that list is dynamic so if we, or a community person, makes an observation and says, 'Hey, I looked at this planet candidate but it's really an eclipsing binary,' then that entry in the archive will be changed."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The archive has information about the size, orbital period and other metrics of any possible planet discovered and investigated by Kepler
  • Planet Hunters, a collective of amateur astronomers, recently found 42 new alien planets using Kepler data that was publicly available prior to the launch of the new archive system.
Mars Base

Planet-Hunting Kepler Spacecraft Shut Down Temporarily After Glitch | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/cope-alien-planets-glitch.html

scibyte78 Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The Kepler telescope went into safe mode on Jan. 17 for a planned 10 days, during which time the telescope's reaction wheels — spinning devices used by the observatory to maintain its position in space —will be rested
  • after researchers detected an unexpected increase in the amount of torque needed to rotate
  • "Resting the wheels provides an opportunity to redistribute internal lubricant, potentially returning the friction to normal levels," Kepler officials
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Once the 10-day rest period ends, the team will recover the spacecraft from this resting safe mode and return to science operations
  • When the Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009, it had four functional reaction wheels — three for immediate use, plus one spare
  • One of the wheels failed last
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