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ScienceDaily (May 13, 2011) - Parents know the unparalleled joy and wonder of hearing a beloved child's first words turn quickly into whole sentences and then babbling paragraphs. But how human children acquire language-which is so complex and has so many variations-remains largely a mystery. Fifty years ago, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky proposed an answer: Humans are able to learn language so quickly because some knowledge of grammar is hardwired into our brains. In other words, we know some of the most fundamental things about human language unconsciously at birth, without ever being taught.

Apply the electrodes... Externally modulating the brain's activity can boost its performance. The easiest way to manipulate the brain is through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which involves applying electrodes directly to the head to influence neuron activity with an electric current. Roi Cohen Kadosh's team at the University of Oxford showed last year that targeting tDCS at the brain's right parietal lobe can boost a person's arithmetic ability - the effects were still apparent six months after the tDCS session (newscientist.com/article/dn19679). More recently, Richard Chi and Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney, Australia, demonstrated that tDCS can improve a person's insight. The pair applied tDCS to volunteers' anterior frontal lobes - regions known to play a role in how we perceive the world - and found the participants were three times as likely as normal to complete a problem-solving task (newscientist.com/article/dn20080). Brain stimulation can also boost a person's learning abilities, according to Agnes Flöel's team at the University of Münster in Germany. Twenty minutes of tDCS to a part of the brain called the left perisylvian area was enough to speed up and improve language learning in a group of 19 volunteers (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20098). Using the same technique to stimulate the brain's motor cortex, meanwhile, can enhance a person's ability to learn a movement-based skill (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805413106).

Last year 10 children died in California in the worst whooping cough outbreak to sweep the state since 1947. In the first six months of 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 10 measles outbreaks-the largest of which (21 cases) occurred in a Minnesota county, where many children were unvaccinated because of parental concerns about the safety of the standard MMR vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella. At least seven infants in the county who were too young to receive the MMR vaccine were infected.

'It is now virtually certain a child born in 1979 will not reach 50 years of age before the Arctic is ice-free in the summer. That is a rapid change on a planetary scale, with far-reaching consequences that scientists are just beginning to understand.' Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service

A new project to create a 3D map of space so large that scientists can find a 500 million-light-year-size remnant from the early universe inside it began operation last month. The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey opened its eyes to the universe, taking in data from hundreds of galaxies and quasars in the constellation Aquarius, from its perch on the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Eventually, it will image two million galaxies and quasars.

A protein that normally helps defend cells from infection can play a critical role in the development of lung cancer, according to MIT cancer biologists. Their findings suggest that the protein, NF-κB, could be a promising target for new drugs against lung cancer, which kills more than one million people each year.

"The creation of E-ZPass lanes over the past 15 years has significantly improved the health of newborn babies living near highways in the Northeast, according to a Columbia study. The researchers found that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-ZPass lanes reduced premature birthrates by 10.8 percent and low birth weight by 11.8 percent among infants born within 2 kilometers of toll plazas. The net effect has led to hundreds of millions of dollars in saved medical costs."

Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves. But if the self is not "real," he asks, why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct the self? In a series of fascinating virtual reality experiments, Metzinger and his colleagues have attempted to create so-called "out-of-body experiences" in the lab, in order to explore these questions. As a philosopher, he offers a discussion of many of the latest results in robotics, neuroscience, dream and meditation research, and argues that the brain is much more powerful than we have ever imagined. He shows us, for example, that we now have the first machines that have developed an inner image of their own body -- and actually use this model to create intelligent behavior. In addition, studies exploring the connections between phantom limbs and the brain have shown us that even people born without arms or legs sometimes experience a sensation that they do in fact have limbs that are not there. Experiments like the "rubber-hand illusion" demonstrate how we can experience a fake hand as part of our self and even feel a sensation of touch on the phantom hand form the basis and testing ground for the idea that what we have called the "self" in the past is just the content of a transparent self-model in our brains. Now, as new ways of manipulating the conscious mind-brain appear on the scene, it will soon become possible to alter our subjective reality in an unprecedented manner. The cultural consequences of this, Metzinger claims, may be immense: we will need a new approach to ethics, and we will be forced to think about ourselves in a fundamentally new way. At

ScienceDaily (Oct. 17, 2011) - Rising sea levels in the coming centuries is perhaps one of the most catastrophic consequences of rising temperatures. Massive economic costs, social consequences and forced migrations could result from global warming. But how frightening of times are we facing? Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute are part of a team that has calculated the long-term outlook for rising sea levels in relation to the emission of greenhouse gases and pollution of the atmosphere using climate models.

"We measured the direction of the body axis in 70 dogs of 37 breeds during defecation (1,893 observations) and urination (5,582 observations) over a two-year period. After complete sampling, we sorted the data according to the geomagnetic conditions prevailing during the respective sampling periods. Relative declination and intensity changes of the MF during the respective dog walks were calculated from daily magnetograms. Directional preferences of dogs under different MF conditions were analyzed and tested by means of circular statistics. Results Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm MF conditions. This directional behavior was abolished under Unstable MF. The best predictor of the behavioral switch was the rate of change in declination, i.e., polar orientation of the MF. "

AS A SMALL CHILD living in poverty in rural India, Gopal B. Nayak had wide visions. When he was just nine years of age, he saw a man in his vision and that man was Mr. Mahendra Trivedi Guruji.

It is a known fact, that cancer in any form is dreaded and when its brain cancer, the worry just doubles. However, the good news among this fear is that over the years a lot of brain cancer studies have been conducted across the globe that has led to various ways and means of not only detecting brain cancer, but also resolving it if identified in early stage.

Brain tumor and brain cancer are synonymous terms. Due to the formation of abnormal cells in the human brain this disease occurs. Human beings below the age of 40 years, especially the kids are the most affected ones by this particular sort of cancer.

The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department is the largest department at MIT, preparing over 300 graduate and undergraduate students each year to become leaders in diverse career fields such as academia, biomedical technology, finance, consulting, law, nanotechnology and more.  MIT EECS consistently ranks top by the the U.S. News and World Reports and is known globally for its world class faculty creating the best possible education, which is based on their innovative and award winning research.

He turned to Wikipedia and together with SGI has created the first-ever historical mapping and exploration of the full text contents of the English-language edition of Wikipedia, in time and space, with visualizations of modern history captured in under a day. Loading the entire English language edition of Wikipedia into SGI UV 2000, Mr. Leetaru was able to show how Wikipedia's view of the world unfolded over the past two centuries. Location, year and the positive or negative sentiment have been tied to those references.

This video is a pretty impressive showcase of graphics technology that is possible with the Unreal 4 engine TODAY. I seriously had to do a double take as well on a few of these! My brain was fooled a few times, for sure. It's a showcase of various technical demos and a tribute if you will to the sheer power of the Unreal 4 engine. Some of these were from 2015 or earlier! So imagine, what's going to be possible in 2016 and beyond! And with the advent of VR upon us, this only makes the future of gaming that much more exciting! What's everyone think of these? Is the photorealism of gaming graphics shown here going to be possible in every game over the next few years or is this just going to be for the top tier developers?

As a high-tech incubator, Xiongjin Biotechnology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. has an independent enzyme preparation research and development team. It tracks the textile industry all the year round and specializes in the application of enzyme technology in the textile industry.

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being ...