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Emily Horwitz

Paralyzed Mom Controls Robotic Arm Using Her Thoughts - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/91656354--abc-news-health.html

neuroscience robotics biology abc heath brain science technology thoughts

shared by Emily Horwitz on 18 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • After years of paralysis, the one thing Jan Scheuermann wanted was to feed herself. Now, thanks to a mind-controlled robotic arm, Scheuermann has done just that.
  • By implanting two quarter-inch-by-quarter-inch electrodes in her brain and connecting them to a sophisticated robotic arm, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have allowed the mother of two to manipulate objects by using only her thoughts through a brain-computer interface, or BCI.
  • "They asked me if there was something special I wanted to do," Sheuermann said. "And I said my goal is to feed myself a bar of chocolate. And I did that today."
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Quadriplegics like Scheuermann have manipulated robotic arms using BCI before.
  • "With three degrees of control, you can do things like manipulate a computer screen and that gentleman was able to reach out and touch his daughter
  • But to actually manipulate objects, to feed yourself for example, you need more than those three dimensions of control. That's what makes Jan so remarkable
  • "The biggest change," Boninger said, "is the sophistication with which we've learned to interpret electrical activity in the brain."
  • "I wouldn't say we have decoded the brain," Boninger said. "But we are getting closer. We can't read emotions but we can interpret motions the brain wants the body to make."
  • "For me, it's been one of the most exciting endeavors I have ever undertaken," Sheuermann wrote on the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center blog. "Being with a team of scientists and using cutting-edge technology that makes me the only person in the world who can scratch her nose with a robotic arm, well, that's thrilling."
Emily Horwitz

Ah, Wilderness! Nature Hike Could Unlock Your Imagination : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-could-unlock-your-imagination

npr neuroscience nature study wilderness health science technology

shared by Emily Horwitz on 13 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Want to be more creative? Drop that iPad and head to the great outdoors.
  • David Strayer, a cognitive neuroscientist in Uta
  • t sent students out into nature with computers, to test their attention spans. "It was an abysmal failure,
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • students didn't want to be anywhere near the computers
  • pencil-and-paper creativity quiz, the so-called Remote Associates Test, which asks people to identify word associations that aren't immediately obvious. Four days into the trip, they took the test again
  • 45 percent improvement.
  • hardly scientific.
  • researchers had already taken the test once.
  • Outward Bound is notoriously strict about bringing artifacts of modern life into the wilderness.
  • Half of the 56 hikers took the test before going backpacking in the wilderness, and the other half took the RAT test on the fourth day of their trip. The groups went into the wild in Alaska, Colorado, Maine and Washington.
  • took the test four days into the wilderness did 50 percent better than those who were still immersed in modern lif
  • exposure to nature over a number of days, which has been shown in other studies to improve thinking
  • exercise
  • abandoning electronic devices
  • constant texting and checking in on Facebook are not making us think more clearly.
  • Emily Horwitz on 13 Dec 12
     
    An interesting connection between being in nature and being creative and mentally present.
Emily Horwitz

Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Language | LiveScience - 1 views

www.livescience.com/-killed-sumerian-language.html

language mesopotamia livescience drought science geology

shared by Emily Horwitz on 05 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.
  • no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues.
  • his was not a single summer or winter, this was 200 to 300 years of drought," said Matt Konfirst, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Sumerian culture disappeared around 4,000 years ago, and the Sumerian language went extinct soon after that.
  • geological records point to a long period of drier weather in the Middle East around 4,200 years ago, Konfirst said. The Red Sea and the Dead Sea had increased evaporation; water levels dropped at Lake Van in Turkey, and cores from marine sediments around that period indicate increased dust in the environment.
  • Around the same time, 74 percent of the ancient Mesopotamian settlements were abandoned, according to a 2006 study of an archaeological site called Tell Leilan in Syria. The populated area also shrank by 93 percent, he said.
  • great drought, two waves of marauding nomads descended upon the region, sacking the capital city of Ur. After around 2000 B.C., ancient Sumerian gradually died off as a spoken language in the region. For the next 2,000 years, the tongue lingered on as a dead written language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, but has been completely extinct since then, Konfirst said.
Emily Horwitz

Supreme Court Takes Up Question of Gene Research - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-patents-in-gene-research.html

genetics patents DNA ethics nytimes science supreme court

shared by Emily Horwitz on 01 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would decide whether human genes may be patented.
  • The patents were challenged by scientists and doctors who said that their research and ability to help patients had been frustrated.
  • ained the right to exclude the rest of the scientific community from examining the naturally occurring genes of every person in the United States,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • prevent patients from examining their own genetic information” and “made it impossible to obtain second opinions.”
  • he legal question for the justices is whether isolated genes are “products of nature” that may not be patented or “human-made inventions” eligible for patent protection.
  • “The isolated DNA molecules before us are not found in nature,” wrote Judge Alan D. Lourie, who was in the majority. “They are obtained in the laboratory and are man-made, the product of human ingenuity.”
Emily Horwitz

Can you spot the fake objects among the real ones? | Unplugged - Yahoo! Games - 0 views

games.yahoo.com/...among-real-ones-195357959.html

sense perception knowledge optical illusions

shared by Emily Horwitz on 29 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 29 Nov 12
     
    A cool video of an optical illusion that shows that our sense perception is not always correct; using the technique of anamorphosis, images are distorted so that they only appear correct from a certain angle.
  • Emily Horwitz on 29 Nov 12
Emily Horwitz

Pigeon Code Baffles British Cryptographers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...es-british-cryptographers.html

knowledge WWII carrier pigeons cryptography british nytimes

shared by Emily Horwitz on 25 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • They have eavesdropped on the enemy for decades, tracking messages from Hitler’s high command and the Soviet K.G.B. and on to the murky, modern world of satellites and cyberspace. But a lowly and yet mysterious carrier pigeon may have them baffled.
  • igeon specialists said they believed it may have been flying home from British units in France around the time of the D-Day landing in 1944 when it somehow expired in the chimney at the 17th-century home where it was found in the village of Bletchingley, south of London.
  • “Unless we get rather more idea than we have about who sent this message and who it was sent to, we are not going to be able to find out what the underlying code was,” said the historian, who was identified only as Tony under the organization’s secrecy protocols.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • s code-breaking and communications interception unit in Gloucestershire, agreed to try to crack the code. But on Friday the secretive organization acknowledged that it had been unable to do so.
  • “Without access to the relevant code books and details of any additional encryption used, it will remain impossible to decrypt,” the Government Communications Headquarters said in a news release.
  • Mr. Martin said he was skeptical of the idea that the agency had been unable to crack the code. “I think there’s something about that message that is either sensitive or does not reflect well” on British special forces operating behind enemy lines in wartime France, he said in a telephone interview. “I’m convinced that it’s an important message and a secret message.”
Emily Horwitz

Scientists Make Progress in Tailor-Made Organs - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ess-in-tailor-made-organs.html

science biomedical engineering nytimes bioethics stem cells

shared by Emily Horwitz on 14 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 14 Nov 12
     
    An intriguing article about a more bioethically non-controversial way of reconstructing damaged organs in the body.
Emily Horwitz

Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning : Shots - Health ... - 1 views

www.npr.org/...stern-cultures-tackle-learning

knowledge learning asia america struggle intelligence

shared by Emily Horwitz on 12 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth grade math class.
  • and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, 'Why don't you go put yours on the board?' So right there I thought, 'That's interesting! He took the one who can't do it and told him to go and put it on the board.'"
  • the kid didn't break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. "And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, 'How does that look, class?' And they all looked up and said, 'He did it!' And they broke into applause." The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you're just not very smart," Stigler says. "It's a sign of low ability — people who are smart don't struggle, they just naturally get it, that's our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity."
  • For the most part in American culture, intellectual struggle in schoolchildren is seen as an indicator of weakness, while in Eastern cultures it is not only tolerated, it is often used to measure emotional strength.
  • to understand why these two cultures view struggle so differently, it's good to step back and examine how they think about where academic excellence comes from.
  • American mother is communicating to her son that the cause of his success in school is his intelligence. He's smart — which, Li says, is a common American view.
  • "The idea of intelligence in believed in the West as a cause," Li explains. "She is telling him that there is something in him, in his mind, that enables him to do what he does."
  • "So the focus is on the process of persisting through it despite the challenges, not giving up, and that's what leads to success," Li says.
  • Obviously if struggle indicates weakness — a lack of intelligence — it makes you feel bad, and so you're less likely to put up with it. But if struggle indicates strength — an ability to face down the challenges that inevitably occur when you are trying to learn something — you're more willing to accept it.
  • American students "worked on it less than 30 seconds on average and then they basically looked at us and said, 'We haven't had this,'" he says.
  • Japanese students worked for the entire hour on the impossible problem.
  • Westerns tend to worry that their kids won't be able to compete against Asian kids who excel in many areas but especially in math and science. Jin Li says that educators from Asian countries have their own set of worries.
  • children are not creative. Our children do not have individuality. They're just robots. You hear the educators from Asian countries express that concern, a
  • in the Japanese classrooms that he's studied, teachers consciously design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach, so the students can actually experience struggling with something just outside their reach. Then, once the task is mastered, the teachers actively point out that the student was able to accomplish it through the students hard work and struggle.
  • Emily Horwitz on 12 Nov 12
     
    An interesting look into the differences between how Eastern and Western cultures see academic struggle
Emily Horwitz

Charles Darwin gets 4,000 write-in votes in Georgia | Reuters - 1 views

www.reuters.com/...-georgia-idUSBRE8A813W20121109

darwin election evolution georgia reuters paul broun science

shared by Emily Horwitz on 10 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • called evolution and the Big Bang Theory, "lies straight from the pit of hell."
  • Emily Horwitz on 10 Nov 12
     
    An amusing article about evolution and the election!
Emily Horwitz

Surrounded by Humans, Elephant in South Korea Learns to 'Speak' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-elephant-learns-to-speak.html

science elephants nytimes language

shared by Emily Horwitz on 03 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • At the Everland Zoo in South Korea, there is a young male elephant that can speak Korean.
  • In fact, Koshik seems to imitate the pitch and timbre of human speech, and of his trainers in particular.
  • started imitating human speech out of a need to socialize
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “He’s basically using this as a social function, but not really to communicate with the keepers,” Dr. Stoeger said.
Emily Horwitz

True Blue Stands Out in an Earthy Crowd - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tivated-by-the-color-blue.html

blue science perception nytimes culture psychology nature

shared by Emily Horwitz on 25 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue “in all its tones.”
  • Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency.
  • Still other researchers are tracing the history of blue pigments in human culture, and the role those pigments have played in shaping our notions of virtue, authority, divinity and social class. “Blue pigments played an outstanding role in human development,” said Heinz Berke, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Zurich. For some cultures, he said, they were as valuable as gold.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • people their favorite color, and in most parts of the world roughly half will say blue, a figure three to four times the support accorded common second-place finishers like purple or green
  • t young patients preferred nurses wearing blue uniforms to those in white or yellow.
  • blue’s basic emotional valence is calmness and open-endedness, in contrast to the aggressive specificity associated with red. Blue is sea and sky, a pocket-size vacation.
  • computer screen color affected participants’ ability to solve either creative problems —
  • blue can also imply coldness, sorrow and death. On learning of a good friend’s suicide in 1901, Pablo Picasso fell into a severe depression, and he began painting images of beggars, drunks, the poor and the halt, all famously rendered in a palette of blue.
  • association arose from the look of the body when it’s in a low energy, low oxygen state. “The lips turn blue, there’s a blue pallor to the complexion,” she said. “It’s the opposite of the warm flushing of the skin that we associate with love, kindness and affection.”
  • A blue glow makes food look very unappetizing.”
  • That blue can connote coolness and tranquillity is one of nature’s little inside jokes. Blue light is on the high-energy end of the visible spectrum, and the comparative shortness of its wavelengths explains why the blue portion of the white light from the sun is easily scattered by the nitrogen and oxygen molecules in our atmosphere, and thus why the sky looks blue.
Emily Horwitz

UK, Japan scientists win Nobel for stem cell breakthroughs | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...medicine-idUSBRE8970AB20121008

science reuters ethics stem cells research nobel

shared by Emily Horwitz on 08 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Scientists from Britain and Japan shared a Nobel Prize on Monday for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.
  • discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells, without the need to harvest embryos.
  • "These groundbreaking discoveries have completely changed our view of the development and specialization of cells," the Nobel Assembly at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • big hope for stem cells is that they can be used to replace damaged tissue in everything from spinal cord injuries to Parkinson's disease.
  • Scientists once thought it was impossible to turn adult tissue back into stem cells, which meant that new stem cells could only be created by harvesting embryos - a practice that raised ethical qualms in some countries and also means that implanted cells might be rejected by the body.
  • The new stem cells are known as "induced pluripotency stem cells", or iPS cells.
  • "We would like to be able to find a way of obtaining spare heart or brain cells from skin or blood cells. The important point is that the replacement cells need to be from the same individual, to avoid problems of rejection and hence of the need for immunosuppression."
  • Thomas Perlmann, Nobel Committee member and professor of Molecular Development Biology at the Karolinska Institute said: "Thanks to these two scientists, we know now that development is not strictly a one-way street."
  • "You can't take out a large part of the heart or the brain or so to study this, but now you can take a cell from for example the skin of the patient, reprogram it, return it to a pluripotent state, and then grow it in a laboratory," he said.
Emily Horwitz

With Limited Budgets, Pursuing Science Smartly - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-pursuing-science-smartly.html

science politics space exploration mars rover nytimes

shared by Emily Horwitz on 02 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • With the first presidential debate coming up on Wednesday, it is striking — if not surprising — how bland and predictable the candidates have been in discussing America’s role in space.
  • neither candidate, and neither party, has addressed the scientific question of why we want to bother with exploring space.
  • Maybe scientists should simply face reality and accept that science doesn’t play a central role in the government’s equation.
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  • unmanned space exploration seems to me much more exciting and scientifically worthwhile than human spaceflight, especially at a time of restricted budgets and nascent technology.
  • human geologist could do in a few days what Curiosity may do in a year or two. But we aren’t likely to send geologists there anytime soon — and if we did, they wouldn’t be able to stay much longer than a few days, while Curiosity can silently and gently move about the planet for a decade or more, powered by its plutonium generator. Moreover, by the time we might get around to sending humans, in two to three decades at best, robots will have advanced to the point where they might easily compete in real time.
  • Over the coming decades we may send more robotic explorers to even harsher climes, maybe to explore deep oceans on Jupiter’s moon Europa, or to search on comets for telltale signs of life’s origins.
Emily Horwitz

Bias Persists Against Women of Science, a Study Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-of-science-a-study-says.html

bias perception science nytimes sexism

shared by Emily Horwitz on 27 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills, a new study by researchers at Yale concluded.
  • The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination.
  • I think we were all just a little bit surprised at how powerful the results were
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • People tend to think that the problem has gone away, but alas, it hasn’t.”
Emily Horwitz

Religion, Science And Magic Fairy Cellphones : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 2 views

www.npr.org/...on-science-and-no-easy-answers

religion science npr belief

shared by Emily Horwitz on 25 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Heaven and Hell. God and the Devil. For many folks these polar opposites are what religion is all about. And for many folks in science who consider themselves atheists, this is what makes religion so impossible to bear. How can the nature of the world be seen in such simplistic terms? How can such beliefs co-exist with the technologies on which we've built our everyday lives?
  • What is remarkable about the fundamentalist perspective, however, is an unwillingness to see spiritual life in the same light. Instead of seeing subtlety and complication that require a lifetime of intense dedicated effort — a genuine personal investigation of the world — to understand, everything is reduced to magic-marker outlines with unwavering, absolute answers.
  • Acknowledging that truth, in both science and religion, could be one way to raise the discussion to a plane where we might all learn something.
Emily Horwitz

Will Science Someday Rule Out the Possibility of God? | Physics vs. God | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/ence-religion-god-physics.html

science belief religion physics

shared by Emily Horwitz on 19 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious — the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe — can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science. 
  • good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever.
  • Psychology research suggests that belief in the supernatural acts as societal glue and motivates people to follow the rules; further, belief in the afterlife helps people grieve and staves off fears of death.
Emily Horwitz

New Demotic Dictionary Translates Lives of Ancient Egyptians - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ives-of-ancient-egyptians.html

science knowledge language egypt nytimes

shared by Emily Horwitz on 18 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. Those elaborate pictographs were the elite script for recording the lives and triumphs of pharaohs in their tombs and on the monumental stones along the Nile. But almost from the beginning, people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs.
  • Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words.
  • Janet H. Johnson, an Egyptologist at the university’s Oriental Institute who has devoted much of her career to editing the Chicago Demotic Dictionary, called it “an indispensable tool for reconstructing the social, political and cultural life of ancient Egypt during a fascinating period,” when the land was usually dominated by foreigners — first Persians, then Greeks and finally Romans.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “It’s really huge what a dictionary does for understanding an ancient society,”
Emily Horwitz

News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...US_SCI_STEM_CELLS_DEAFNESS

science ethics AP knowledge research stem cells

shared by Emily Horwitz on 13 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • For the first time, scientists have improved hearing in deaf animals by using human embryonic stem cells, an encouraging step for someday treating people with certain hearing disorders.
  • it will be years before human patients might benefit.
  • Human embryonic stem cells can be manipulated to produce any type of cell. Using them is controversial because they are initially obtained by destroying embryos.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Yehoash Raphael of the University of Michigan, who didn't participate in the work, said it's possible the stem cell transplants worked by stimulating the gerbils' own few remaining nerve cells, rather than creating new ones. But either way, "this is a big step forward in use of stem cells for treating deafness," he said.
Emily Horwitz

Mammoth fragments from Siberia raise cloning hopes - Yahoo! News - 1 views

news.yahoo.com/e-cloning-hopes-165221958.html

mammoth cloning DNA science

shared by Emily Horwitz on 12 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Scientists have discovered well-preserved frozen woolly mammoth fragments deep in Siberia that may contain living cells, edging a tad closer to the "Jurassic Park" possibility of cloning a prehistoric animal, the mission's organizer said Tuesday.
  • Expedition chief Semyon Grigoryev said Korean scientists with the team had set a goal of finding living cells in the hope of cloning a mammoth. Scientists have previously found bones and fragments but not living cells.
  • Some believe it's possible to recreate the prehistoric animal if they find living cells in the permafrost.
Emily Horwitz

A Redoubt of Learning Holds Firm - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cal-challenges-to-science.html

royal society science knowledge newton nytimes

shared by Emily Horwitz on 09 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 09 Sep 12
     
    An article about the Royal Society and their struggle to continue preserving and collecting scientific knowledge, while promoting the teaching/learning of true science (i.e. not creationism)
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