President Obama fires a marshmallow gun and lets robots roam his White House at the White House Science Fair.
Three-year-old Danielle Fairchild probably can’t grasp the magnitude of what she’s enabled. The little girl adopted by Fred and Dale Fairchild in Duluth, Georgia was born with half a thumb and no fingers on her right hand. Half-way across the country a smart teenager and five other girl scouts were looking for a science and technology project to complete.
Danielle Fairchild Writes with Help of Prosthetic Hand
Dale Fairchild contacted Kate Murray and the troop of The Flying Monkeys and a partnership was born. 13-year old Murray was born with a thumb but no fingers on her left hand. Despite this digital abnormality she took up the violin five years ago using a device that clips to the bow and wraps around her left palm. And she thought she could help someone else learn to write.
Upon hearing about little Danielle The Flying Monkeys flew into action, learning all they could about prosthetic limbs, talking to doctors and learning how to build one from scratch.
Fast forward to February 7 as Kate Murray, Gaby Dempsey and Mackenzie Gewell present their prosthetic hand device to President Obama in the White House at the second White House Science Fair.
As the President held the BOB-1.2 plastic device in his hand, he said, “This is outstanding.”
President Obama Pumps Air Cannon at White House Science Fair
The Flying Monkeys won a $20,000 Innovation award from For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Lego League. FIRST is the non-profit organization started by inventor Dean Kamen, who famously brought us the Segway. And for Murray a trip to the White House is “super exciting.”
She says, “I want to be a mechanical engineer when I grow up. I want to design cars to be more fuel efficient and/or rely entirely on wind or solar energy.”
14-year old Joey Hudy unwittingly stole the show providing spectacular photo opportunities as President Obama listened the story about how the Phoenix teen built his marshmallow air gun from PVC pipe with the help of employees at his local Home Depot. Then he asked if the device was operational and decided on the spot that the two should fire it together.
The President asked that everyone in the line of fire move back because this was an improvised activity while strolling through the student exhibits and talking to the winners of over 40 science fairs and competitions.
Joey Hudy with President Obama Impressed by Power to Shoot a Marshmallow Missile
When the gun popped, press cameras clicked wildly and they caught the child-like wonderment in the eyes of the President, which encapsulated the entire White House science fair.
Clearly, the President was impressed by the caliber of projects presented and the students themselves. He said, “Now, as I was walking around the science fair, I was thinking back to when I was your age. And basically, you guys put me to shame.”
President Obama lauded the whip smart students and their clever projects. But he was struck by something more.
He said, “It’s the fact that you recognize that you’ve got a responsibility to use your talents in service to something bigger than yourselves.”
He said some students will develop new products that change the way we live. He pointed out Hayley Hoverter, the winner of the 2011 Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship’s National Challenge. The 16-year-old Los Angeles resident invented a flavorless, colorless sugar packet that dissolves in hot water.
About her invention the President said, “It could potentially save up to two million pounds of trash each year — and that’s just at Starbucks.” Mastercard gave the teen $10,000 to turn her concept into a working business.
Next the President said that some students will see a problem in their town or city and do something about it. After 14-year old Benjamin Hylak was worried that seniors in nursing homes would get lonely he built a robot attached to a computer monitor. His telepresence robot which moves around the center and allows seniors to connect via Skype with their family and friends qualified him as a BROADCOM Masters Competition 2011 finalist.
Angela Zhang Explains Her Nanoparticle Cancer Treatment
President Obama said, “Inventions like Benjamin’s could make life better for millions of families.”
The same holds for the three representatives from California.
Angela Zhang of Cupertino, who has proposed a potential cure for cancer. This year, she won a $100,000 grand prize in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for her nanoparticle cancer treatment. She says, “I keep saying 60 years from now I will probably be telling my grandkids everything that happened when I was 17.”
Hayley Hoverter of Los Angeles, who developed sugar packets that dissolve in hot drinks is the now the 16-year old CEO of Sweet (dis)SOLVE. She spoke at TEDx SoCal last year.
Neil de Grasse Tyson with Braeden Benedict at White House Science Fair
Braeden Benedict of Ranchos Palos Verdes designed a device to detect concussions in athletes after one of his football teammates experienced prolonged concussion symptoms and had to stop playing contact sports. The 15-year old designed a helmet-mounted sensory detector that turns red when an athlete is hit hard enough to cause a concussion.
He took the top prize in America’s 2011 Top Young Scientist competition at the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge where he won $25,000 for his efforts.
The President spoke of the adversity several groups of students overcame just to be at the science fair. A rocketry team from Presidio, Texas came from the 4th poorest school district in the nation where most students speak English as a second language. Parents raised money to help the students make the trip to Washington D.C. Mr. Obama said they even sold a goat to make the journey to the White House.
He applauded the winners of the Michigan Regional Contest of the National Engineers Week Future City Competition. Three Detroit students imagined a clean energy future for their city and while they were doing so their school burned down, forcing them to merge with another school while they completed their project. The team said, “(Future City) helps me make a better city to live in.” They designed there vision around a city following the theme of “Fuel Your Future: Imagine New Ways to Meet Our Energy Needs and Maintain a Healthy Planet.”
Samantha Garvey Tells President Obama about Mussels
The President also acknowledged 18-year old Samantha Garvey, who has spent a lot of time with the President lately. The high school senior from New York made headlines after winning a spot in the semi-finals of the Intel science talent search. But more than her ingenious project studying mussel predation on Long Island she captured the attention of America because when she found out she was a semi-finalist she was homeless.
Since then she has appeared on television and sat in the First Lady’s box at the State of the Union Address last month. At the White House science fair the President announced that the teen would like to work for NOAA or EPA some day. Pointing at them he said, “This is Dr. Lubchenco. She is the head of NOAA. Lisa Jackson, right there, head of EPA. You might, you know, just want to hook up with them before you leave.”
The President said that all the students who participated in the science fair inspired him. He said, “It’s young people like you who make me so confident that America’s best days are still to come.”
President Obama Tells Science Fair Students They Are Paving the Way to the Future
Dale Fairchild says that before The Flying Monkey’s created BOB-1 for little Danielle to use as she learns to write the toddler used her right hand like a flipper. But after the molded plastic device arrived, complete with a Vel-cro(TM) strap to attached a plastic pencil holder, the girl began using her fingerless hand to pick things up.
The teen engineers have never met Danielle Fairchild but their prosthetic hand device is going through the expensive and lengthy patent process, placing the teen inventors on track to help many more people besides the little girl in Georgia.
C-SPAN coverage of President Obama’s speech to the White House Science Fair, Feb. 7, 2012. (15:13)
Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Or an adult human for that matter. New research from England shows that not only can we learn throughout our lives but that learning can change the structure of our brains as well.
Eleanor Maguire from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London took adults training for the toughest taxi job and watched how their brains changed as they learned the ins and outs of London over four years.
For those that don’t know, The Knowledge is the test given to all taxi drivers in London who are licensed to drive the famous black cabs. But this is no ordinary test. It is perhaps the biggest spatial memory test available.
To get a taxi license to drive in all of London, drivers must know all 25,000 streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, the spot known as the center of London. They must also know the locations of 20,000 landmarks and know the shortest routes to get from point to point.
According to Dr. Maguire’s research all of this acquired knowledge increases the size of the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with memory.
Professor Maguire and her colleague Dr. Katherine Woollett followed a group of 79 trainee taxi drivers and 31 controls (non-taxi drivers). Periodically they took snapshots of their brain structure over time using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and studying their performance on certain memory tasks.
Only 39 of the group passed the tests and went on to qualify as taxi drivers, which is about the norm for given the difficulty of The Knowledge.
By looking at the structure of the brain, the neuroscientists saw remarkable changes in the brain structure of the 39 who passed the taxi driver test. They saw an increase in grey matter — the nerve cells in the brain where processing takes place — in the posterior hippocampus.
Dr. Maguire says, “The human brain remains ‘plastic’, even in adult life, allowing it to adapt when we learn new tasks.”
But The Knowledge may come at a price. Besides the 3-4-year study period where prospective drivers say they lost touch with friends, ignored holidays and had no social life, this research which appears in the journal Current Biology found that though at the end of the training, those who pass The Knowledge have an imprinted map of London in their heads, they tend to have a weaker complex visual memory.
This study supports increasing evidence that learning can help our brains grow even into adulthood. This is encouraging news for lifelong learning and the potential for rehabilitation after brain damage.
]]>It would be so much easier to replay dreams, record thoughts and communicate without speaking. But this type of futuristic technology was always thought to be a dream of a far away future or the plot of a science fiction movie.
Hollywood Movie clip (L), fMRI image of same clip (R)
Researchers at University of California Berkeley have figured out how to scan the brain and produce blurry images based on thought patterns. Just as a television image is comprised of pixels, these neuroscientists have discovered that images that begin as thoughts in the brain are composed of 3-D voxels.
The scanning equipment and the playback are definitely in their infancy with each producing crude renditions of what’s actually happening. But it is a start. Even blurry, somewhat confusing images of thoughts can be useful for interpreting dreams or filling in forgotten thoughts or memories.
But doctors have a much more practical use in mind — helping stroke patients and others who can’t communicate by speaking.
Routine use of this technology is decades away. But a brain cap captured the very first image that corresponded to a thought just a couple of years ago. And now we have full pictures of blurry images with a pretty good level of accuracy. With thoughtful focus on this area of neuroscience improving resolution and voxel quality could be just a matter of someone dreaming a little bigger.
Personally, I’d like to set my DVR to record my dreams so I could watch them back each morning. Wouldn’t you?
Here’s the experiment the Berkeley team conducted by reconstructing brain images from YouTube videos and movie trailers.
Psychologists have learned that the Internet is becoming a primary form of transactive memory, meaning the information is external or stored outside of the person.
For some it is becoming far easier to reach for a keyboard than to try to extract a piece of information from the brain. Google and Yahoo! are among the first words people in a new study thought of when asked a trivia question.
Researchers say that rather than knowing the answer to a question we are learning how to seek the answer and fast. Over the last few decades intelligent quotients have been gradually rising but many people don’t feel any smarter.
But the research from Columbia University finds that the Internet is already changing the way we remember. Betsy Sparrow asked a bunch of trivia questions (including, which Best Picture nominee lost the Academy Award to Gone with the Wind in 1939?)
She is studying memory, specifically types of external memory, ranging from other people to the Internet. In this study, Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips, which is published in the current issue of the journal Science she looked at whether people think about their computers when they don’t know the answer to something.
She says, “We found that they do. Secondly, we found that people when they don’t expect to have access to information later remember it better than if they do expect to have that access.”
Before the Internet, we still relied on outside resources to find information. We called them other people. Other research shows that after the death of a spouse or even divorce, some people experience memory loss because they have lost their partner, a memory resource.
Now we are offloading much of the information we used to hold in our working memories and shifting to create memories of how to access the information rather than the information itself.
“We also found that people tend to prioritze where to find things over the things themselves, which is adaptive in this case I think.” — Betsy Sparrow, Columbia University
Is this part of our natural evolution or is technology driving the change? Please leave your comments below.
]]>The eyes have it.
A couple of years ago former Baltimore Orioles coach Buck Showalter appeared on ESPN during a Baseball Tonight segment called Scouting the Body, all about what recruiters look for physically in an ideal baseball player. He pointed out that the best players have brown eyes. While there are great green and blue-eyed players, Showalter says, “Scouts don’t like to see hitters in a perfect world have anything other than brown eyes.”
In the last couple of weeks the very blue-eyed Texas baseballer Josh Hamilton began using special contacts to improve his daytime batting average. He blames his eye color for the disparity between his day and night time batting averages. And, now doctors are backing up that theory.
Dr. Richard L. Ison is the Hamilton’s optometrist outside of Dallas who agrees that light-eyed people have more difficulty deflecting glare. This is especially true for baseball players.
Dr. Ison says, “”Because of the lack of pigment in lighter color eyes, like blue or green eyes as opposed to brown, you get a lot more unwanted light and that can create glare problems.”
The phenomenon is called intraocular light scatter or straylight. According to several eye studies light transmittance through the iris is higher in light-blue-eyed people than in dark-brown-eyed people. Many eye doctors think that different eye colors influence straylight by reflection from the fundus oculi. A retinal pigment epithelium in the fundus oculi absorbs light and to prevent light scattering. In dark-eyed people, the color of fundus oculi is brownish-red in it is orange in light blue-eyed Caucasians.
So there is real science to back up Hamilton’s claim. While blue-eyed people may be more predisposed for sensitivity toward bright light because they scatter more light than they absorb, is this why Hamilton’s daytim batting average is one-third of his nighttime average?
Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs.com says unequivocally no. After first hearing of the Hamilton story, he asked his audience to help him crowdsource all the blue-eyed baseball hitters and run their averages to see if this was a real trend. He was quite impressed with the rapid response which allowed him to quickly conduct his experiment using a sample size of 25 players with blue eyes.
He says, “The sample of blue-eyed players we looked at follows the trend established by the rest of Major League Baseball.”
After looking at batting averages for 47,000 daytime appearances and 100,000 nighttime games, he found the blue-eyed baseballers hit just about the same during the day and during the night.
He says, “This non-difference matches up with the rest of the population, as there is no consistent historical day/night split for Major League hitters over the years.”
Among his sample of blue-eyed batters, Cameron says they split evenly, with 13 hitting better during the day and 12 hitting better at night.
One of the players Cameron singled out was Mark Grace, a blue-eyed former Chicago Cub. He says, “Grace is perhaps one of the most interesting cases, as his eyes are very blue and he spent the majority of his career with the Chicago Cubs, who play more day games than any other franchise in baseball.” Yet Grace collected the most hits (1,754) in the 1990s.
Calvin D. Esbaugh told MSNBC.com “The deal is, if someone has less pigment in their iris, they could potentially be more sensitive to sunlight.”
After wearing contacts that tint his eyes red, Hamilton reports that his daytime vision is better, making it easier to hit the ball. He says the glare from home plate and the brightness of the ball are not as bad as they were.
Cameron says, “Maybe Hamilton is the outlier here. Maybe his eyes are especially sensitive, and he’ll sustain a large day/night split going forward. It seems more likely, however, that we’re just looking at noise generated by looking at a sample of fewer than 600 career plate appearances, and Hamilton was looking for a reason to explain something that goes beyond randomness.”
More than straylight, Hamilton may be suffering from photophobia, or light sensitivity.
Dr. Esbaugh says, “Although not every blue-eyed person would be equally affected there are other factors involved in light sensitivity besides eye color, such as the density of rods and cones — the light receptors — in your retina.”
A blogger known as Baseball Guru says, “Mickey Mantle and George Brett both had blue eyes, and both performed slightly better during the day. While optomotrists have sided with Hamilton and said that it is true, I am a skeptic and not a believer, for the Mickey Mantle and George Brett reasons.”
]]>An exhibition which doubles as a huge, interactive science experiment has opened in New York. The Dublin Science Gallery’s Biorhythm: Music and the Body show immerses its visitors in a world of sonic experiences to see how they respond to different musical stimuli. Tara Cleary from Reuters reports.
But it’s not just all fun. The exhibition is also a giant science experiment, gathering physical responses to music and measuring that against how people report they feel about the music.
Ben Knapp, the research director at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, Ireland wires listeners up and then studies their reactions, their galvanic skin resistance and their heart rate as they listen to different kinds of music. The experiment called Emotion in Motion also records the listeners feelings about the music and compare that data to what their body says.
Knapp says the Internet and social media have created a social chasm where people prefer virtual relationships over real ones. This project will pinpoint empathy through music. He believes songs that make one person feel sad could be used to convey empathy to another person if they are unable to do so on their own.
He says, “If my physiology plays a particular song that’s sad for me, that may not make you sad. But if I then know what song makes you sad and I can say ‘Oh, okay, I’ll play this for you, maybe now we can identify more together.’”
The exhibition Biorhythm: Music and Body runs now through August 6 in New York City at the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center.
]]>For years scientists have argued that cell phones could be harmful to our health. But it wasn’t until last year that the first long term study suggested a relationship between prolonged cell phone use and brain cancer. And even that preliminary finding didn’t get people to turn off their cell phones.
Earlier this year, a National Institutes of Health study showed that cell phones caused an increase in brain activity and glucose metabolism.
Now, a new study from International Agency for Research on Cancer involving 31 researchers(PDF) from 14 countries assembled by the World Health Organization says that cell phones are carcinogenic(PDF). Actually it says, “radiofrequency electromagnetic fields are possibly carcinogenic to humans based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, associated with
wireless phone use.”
The organization puts them in the same category (2B) as gasoline fumes and pesticides. Serious but not that serious if you limit your exposure.
Dr. Keith Black, the head of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, who was not involved in the study says using a cellphone is about as safe as sticking your head in a microwave oven. He says that the radiation cell phones emit makes water in the brain vibrate. That vibration has the potential to heat up or cook the brain over time just like food in a microwave. And that causes cells to form improperly which leads to cancer.
Right now over 5 billion cell phones are in use around the world. But doctors believe that even if cell phones do pose the cancer risk that long term studies are now beginning to see, brain cancer is a very rare disease. And cell phone use doesn’t cause cancer it just may increase the risk.
One thing that the scientists do agree upon is that cell phone use by children should be limited to prevent radiation from seeping into their still forming brains. Since children’s skulls are thinner than adults they can allow in five times as much radiation as an adult brain.
All scientists agree that more research is needed. But since cell phones are so ubiquitous in our lives, it is unlikely that these studies will have a remarkable effect on our cell phone behavior.
For those who are concerned about radiation, limit the amount of time the phone is held to your head. Use a bluetooth or other handsfree device or use the speaker phone function.
University of Washington bioengineering professor Henry Lai told the L.A. Times “I think it’s a very fair conclusion,” Dr. Lai was the first to show cellphone radiation can damage DNA in brain cells. He and his fellow researchers also found memory loss and other learning problems in rats exposed to moderate levels of cellphone radiation.
]]>“At this point, I think the best thing for people to do is limit their exposure to this radiation.” — Henry Lai, University of Washington
Former Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy is trying to unite neuroscientists, government and advocacy groups to improve funding and research in brain science.
On the 50th Anniversary of his uncle John’s moonshot speech that launched the space age, leading scientists, philanthropists and government agencies will call for a new initiative tackling the last frontier of medicine — the brain and neurological disorders.
But instead of going to outer space he wants us all to go to inner space.
The eight-term Congressman has had very public battles with addiction and depression. Now, the son of Edward Kennedy is putting that attention to good use, trying to shine a light in the dark corners of mental health, traumatic brain injuries and brain diseases.
The One Mind for Research campaign kicks off with the invitation-only Next Frontier conference later this month. The conference ends on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s famous speech, which will be celebrated at the JFK Library at Harvard University by Vice President Joe Biden, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and mental health celebrity advocates Glenn Close and Martin Sheetn.
and culminates with the launch of a ten-year, $6 billion program to focus research on the physical causes of mental health and to help cure some of the biggest brain diseases, ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to depression and post traumatic stress disorder.
]]>“I hear people say that the brain represents the last medical frontier for discovery.” — Patrick Kennedy, founder of One Mind for Research.
Emotional pain, like that associated with a heartbreak hurts with the same intensity as physical pain and it lights up the same part of the brain. Now researchers have discovered that the pain is just as real and can be reduced with a common painkiller.
It’s been said that love hurts, especially a breakup. New research reported in the journal Psychological Science now proves that it does.
By looking at brain scans of people who were enduring the emotional loss of a bad breakup, scientists noticed that the people showed reduced emotional pain and physical pain — like headaches — after being given acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.
]]>The key to successful stem cell research and treatment is being able to create stable, self-renewing stem cells. For years, scientists have been able to make massive quantities of stem cells to enhance brain activity. The problem was that when they tested their treatments in mice, the stem cells often caused tumors to grow, creating a new disease that is much worse than the original.
Now, a team of 30 researchers at University of California San Diego have made groundbreaking advancements in neural stem cell research which may change the future for patients with vision problems and eventually help those with Parkinson’s disease.
Dr. Kang Zhang has been focused on studying eye problems. The ophthalmologist studies ocular genetics and has a particular interest in stopping macular degeneration, glaucoma and other diseases of the eye.
Now his team has found a way to slow the progression of macular degeneration using the novel stem cell treatment.
The self-renewing stem cell approach that Dr. Zhang’s team created can grow a very large quantity of neural stem cells without the dire consequences of developing tumors.
While Dr. Zhang is busy creating eye-specific neurons to repair the ones lost in diseases like macular degeneration he believes his treatment can be used to fight other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s or Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Not everyone is as enthusiastic about this breakthrough. The North County Times talked to two researchers who recognized this advance as an important step but reiterated the incremental nature over the breakthrough.
UC Davis cell biologist Paul Knoepfler says, “The fact that [the] group made the neural progenitors from human embryonic stem cells using only a fairly straightforward chemical cocktail should make this approach one that other researchers in the field can readily replicate.”
Sanford-Burnham Research Institute cell researcher Evan Snyder was less enthusiastic about Dr. Zhang’s development.
He called the research an incremental advance not the big leap forward. He told the newspaper, “The neural stem cell derivatives are still limited in the range of cell types they can yield; the authors are still not seeing the full spectrum of neurectoderm derivatives that they should be seeing — including neural crest and glial cells (that determine neuron function). He adds, “True neural stem cells should be able to give rise to the range of neurectodermal progeny, including glia and neural crest in addition to neurons.
]]>The consumer watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest wants to ban all artificial color from foods. At the very least the organization wants the Food and Drug Administration to put warning labels on foods containing some dyes, like Yellow 5 and Red 40, which have been linked to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in children already prone to it.
CSPI executive director Michael Jacobsen says, “Getting rid of food dyes is not going to solve the hyperactivity or attention deficit disorder problem. But it would reduce the problem.”
Advisors to the FDA met this week in a meeting to discuss the science behind artificial colors in food and whether they lead to hyperactivity in children. At the end of the two-day meeting, the FDA decided not to require labels on foods containing artificial colors.
FDA advisers examined how the problem was reduced when Great Britain banned several artificial colors. Most companies did. Strawberry bars purchased in the U.K. are made with paprika extract for color. In the U.S. the same product is made with Red 40.
The Grocery Manufacturers of America issued a statement saying there’s no clear link between artificial food colors and hyperactivity among children, and that “we are always producing the safest possible product for our consumers.”
Experts say the use of artificial colors in the U.S. has increased by half in the past 20 years, and a fresh look at their effect is overdue. Georgetown University’s Dr. Laura Anderko says, “The regulation hasn’t kept up with our consuming habits.”
Frito-Lay recently announced it will switch to using natural colors like beets and carrots in half of its snacks by the end of the year. The FDA advisers recommended further study of the link between artificial food coloring and ADHD but voted 8 to 6 against putting warning labels on food products.
The FDA is not required to follow the recommendations of this panel of advisers but it often does.
]]>Scientists studying the brains of dyslexic children say they can now accurately predict which child will overcome their disability and which will continue to struggle to read throughout later life.
A Stanford University research team has been using brain scans on children with dyslexia and they can tell with 90 percent accuracy which kids will overcome the learning disability and which kids will struggle their whole lives.
It’s not a matter of mind reading but rather of better understanding which areas of the brain are associated with reading. While this personalized treatment isn’t ready for every child now, perhaps a brain scan of a dyslexic child in the future will help parents decide which course of action to take in helping their child overcome or reduce dyslexia.
Brain areas showing greater activation among good readers vs. poor readers
Scientists are now convinced there is a marker in the brain that points to an outcome of dyslexia but they aren’t sure which parts of the brain govern the individual behaviors associated with reading or other cognitive processes like attention or working memory.
In the Stanford study, Fumiko Hoeft found that children who had greater activation in one part of the brain had a better chance to compensate for dyslexia. She also discovered that children with more connectivity between brain regions on the right side of the brain are better able to overcome their deficit.
]]>Just because Texas oil tycoon Tom Slick died in a plane crash in 1962 doesn’t mean his vision died with him. In fact, his legacy has grown a few lone-star state institutions that bring in over $1 billion a year to the San Antonio area. The Southwest Research Institute and the Texas Biomedical Research Institute are much more well known than one of his other visionary organizations–the Mind Science Foundation.
Originally started as a search for paranormal activity–from the hunt for Bigfoot to telekinesis–the foundation changed focus about ten years ago. It now funds researchers all over the world who are conducting neuroscience studies that will help scientists understand how the human brain creates the experience of consciousness.
The Mind Science Foundation has moved from the realm of spoon bending to studying the generosity hormone, oxytocin. But in keeping with Tom Slick’s vision, the foundation also likes to explore the edge of neuroscience, wherever that may lead.
]]>Radio frequency exposure to cell phones may increase brain activity and glucose metabolism.
Scientists don’t know what it means for our health but a new National Institutes of Health study has found that hand held cell phone use stimulates brain activity.
Dr. Nora Volkow says the study shows that the human brain is sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation that is emitted from cell phones.
But the piece scientists don’t yet understand is whether this rise in brain metabolism is harmful in the long run. More research is needed to answer that question.
]]>Find out just how incredible the human body is.
How fast do you sneeze?
How much heat does your body produce?
How much blood do you pump?
How many miles of nerves do you have in your body?
How many scents can your nose detect?
How much saliva will you produce over your lifetime?
10 scientific facts you thought you knew…that most people don’t.
Is there gravity in space?
How long can a goldfish hold a memory?
How much of our brains do we really use?
Does lightning ever strike twice?
How long does it take to digest chewing gum?
Does a microwave cook food from the inside out or outside in?
Did humans and dinosaurs ever coexist?
David Nichols studies the way psychedelic drugs act in the brains of rats. But he’s haunted by how humans hijack his work to make street drugs, sometimes causing overdose deaths. He was hoping that his work would lead to new ways of treating psychiatric disorders not become club drugs.
Today the journal Nature published an essay by Dr. Nichols where he describes the ethical dilemma he and and other neuroscientists face.
]]>“I had never considered the possibility that something I’ve done might lead directly or even indirectly to somebody dying.” — David Nichols, Purdue University
Is there a gene that determines how generous you are? That’s one of the questions that a new research initiative at the University of Notre Dame hopes to answer. The new Science of Generosity Initiative has just finished funding 13 projects that will help science (mostly social science) better understand the effects of generosity on the giver and the receiver.
Over the course of the next two years this group of researchers from across the country will study various elements of generosity, from socio-economic conditions that allow people to give to what neural circuitry is involved in doing generous behavior like donating blood or helping the less fortunate.
Based on the premise that underpinned Notre Dame professor Christian Smith’s book Passing the Plate, which examined why Christians in the U.S. don’t give more, the generosity research is aimed at helping non-profit organizations — from the Salvation Army to the Peace Corps — figure out why donors give.
]]>A man is cured, doctors are stunned and patients have new hope. It could be the cure for HIV. It worked on one man in Germany and now a San Francisco company is trying to do replicate the results in the United States.
“We have this patient in Berlin who develops leukemia, gets a bone marrow transplant from donor who has a genetic anomaly, he lacks CCR5 genes. It turns out CCR5 is the key doorway for HIV to get into the cell,” explains Quest Research’s Dr. Jacob Lalezari.
Now, four years later with no other treatment that patient is HIV free. The goal now is to replicate what happened in Berlin.
Doctors in Germany gave a patient a bone marrow transplant in 2007 to treat leukemia. The patient also was HIV-positive so doctors selected a donor known to have a specific gene mutation, known for blocking HIV from entering cells.
The risky transplant involves killing off a patient’s unhealthy bone marrow and all the white blood cells, leaving the patient without an immune system until doctors infuse donated stem cells to rebuild the bone marrow which can then produce healthy cells.
Because the stem cells that were introduced in an HIV-postive U.S. man in his 40s contained the HIV-blocking mutation, the healthy cells became resistant to HIV and wiped out the virus in the process.
Scientists have discovered it’s relatively easy to remove HIV from the bloodstream but it tends to lurk in the brain, gut and lymphatic tissue.
This breakthrough has eradicated the virus from the patient’s entire body.
Experts at Quest Research are removing CCR5 from patients genes, replicating them and then putting them back. Dr. Lalezari says without CCR5 the virus can’t infect new cells and it eventually goes away.
Only time will tell if the new treatment can actually cure patients. So far Quest Research is treating ten patients with the gene therapy and experts call their results encouraging.
Professor Basil Donovan from the University of New South Wales in Australia says, “There is no guarantee that it would work in everyone you did it in, but the fact that it worked at all is encouraging.”
Dr. Jonathan Ball from the University of Nottingham in England says, “This is the first time the mutated gene has been harnessed to cure HIV infection.”
Doctors warn that this one case is an outlier and should by no means be viewed as a panacea to cure everyone living with HIV. The procedure itself kills about 30 percent of patients and is very expensive.
But experts are nevertheless blown away by this case, which you can read more about in the December issue of the journal, Blood.
]]>The medical community is questioning a San Diego doctor’s ‘”miracle’” treatment for multiple sclerosis.
Dr. David Hubbard prescribed a revolutionary treatment–venoplasty–to help alleviate the symptoms of MS that his 27-year-old son Devon was experiencing.
If an MRI scan of the patient’s brain reveals that a patient has decreased blood flow to the brain, Dr. Hubbard performs a surgical procedure to open up veins that carry blood out of the brain. He has now treated 60 patients using this technique and he claims 58 of them have seen symptoms decrease or disappear.
Although the work Dr. Hubbard is performing is part of a scientific study of the MS, the neuro-degenerative disease that attacks the central nervous system, he is collecting data not running a clinical trial.
Still patients are coming from all over the nation and Canada to pay $15,000 for this surgical treatment. Other doctors believe Dr. Hubbard is pedaling false hope not a cure.
Dr. Hubbard is not alone in thinking that MS is related to narrow brain veins.
Dr. Paulo Zamboni thinks the vein-narrowing allows blood to drain more slowly. He believes this causes iron to build up in the brain and cause MS.
Like Dr. Hubbard, for Dr. Zamboni, MS is a family affair. The BBC reports that he treated his wife using a vein widening procedure.
Unlike Dr. Hubbard, Dr. Zamboni ran MRIs on 500 MS patients in different postures to study blood flow. And he used 161 healthy patients as controls.
]]>President Obama bestowed medals on researchers and scientists in a ceremony in the East Room on Wednesday. The President presented the National Medal of Science to ten eminent researchers and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to three individuals and a three-person team for a wide range of groundbreaking achievements. The medals are the highest honors bestowed by the United States government on scientists, engineers, and inventors.
And the National Medal of Science winners are…
Yakir Aharonov, Chapman University, CA
“For his contributions to the foundations of quantum physics and for drawing out unexpected implications of that field ranging from the Aharonov-Bohm effect to the theory of weak measurement.”
Stephen J. Benkovic, Pennsylvania State University, PA
“For his research contributions in the field of bioorganic chemistry, which have changed our understanding of how enzymes function and advanced the identification of targets and strategies for drug design.”
Esther M. Conwell, University of Rochester, NY
“For her broad contributions to understanding electron and hole transport in semiconducting materials, which helped to enable commercial applications of semiconductor and organic electronic devices, and for extending her analysis to studying the electronic properties of DNA.”
Marye Anne Fox, University of California San Diego, CA
“For her research contributions in the areas of organic photochemistry and electrochemistry and for enhancing our understanding of excited-state and charge-transfer processes with interdisciplinary applications in material science, solar energy conversion, and environmental chemistry.”
Susan L. Lindquist, Whitehead Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA
“For her studies of protein folding, demonstrating that alternative protein conformations and aggregations can have profound and unexpected biological influences, facilitating insights in fields as wide-ranging as human disease, evolution, and biomaterials.”
Mortimer Mishkin, National Institutes of Health, MD
“For his contributions to understanding the neural basis of perception and memory in primates, notably the delineation of sensory neocortical processing systems especially for vision, audition, and somatic sensation, and the organization of memory systems in the brain.”
David B. Mumford, Brown University, RI
“For his contributions to the field of mathematics, which fundamentally changed algebraic geometry, and for connecting mathematics to other disciplines such as computer vision and neurobiology.”
Stanley B. Prusiner, University of California San Francisco, CA
“For his discovery of prions, the causative agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and other related neurodegenerative diseases, and his continuing efforts to develop effective methods for detecting and treating prion diseases.”
Warren M. Washington, National Center for Atmospheric Research, CO
“For his development and use of global climate models to understand climate and explain the role of human activities and natural processes in the Earth’s climate system, and for his work to support a diverse science and engineering workforce.”
Amnon Yariv, California Institute of Technology, CA
“For foundational contributions to photonics and quantum electronics, including his demonstration of the semiconductor distributed feedback laser that underpins today’s high-speed optical fiber communications.”
National Medal of Technology and Innovation
Individuals
Harry W. Coover, Eastman Chemical Company, TN
“For his invention of cyanoacrylates—novel adhesives known widely to consumers as ‘super glues’—which today play significant roles in medicine and industry.”
Helen M. Free, Miles Laboratories, IN
“For her seminal contributions to diagnostic chemistry through development of dip-and-read urinalysis, which gave rise to a technological revolution in convenient, reliable, point-of-care tests and patient self-monitoring.”
Steven J. Sasson, Eastman Kodak Company, NY
“For the invention of the digital camera, which has revolutionized the way images are captured, stored, and shared, creating new opportunities in commerce, education, and global communication.”
Team
Federico Faggin,
Marcian E. Hoff Jr., Stanley Mazor; Intel Corporation, CA
“For the conception, design and application of the first microprocessor, which was commercially adopted and became the universal building block of digital electronic systems, significantly impacting the global economy and people’s day-to-day lives.”
The science fiction world of bionic hybrid people is one step closer to reality now that a University of Calgary team has discovered how to get brain cells to “talk” to a silicon microchip.
The applications range from an implantable chip eventually being able to help people control chronic neurological disorders like epilepsy or Parkinson’s Disease.
But right now, just being able to study the chemical and electrical responses between brain cell and chip will help scientists better test drugs by knowing how the cell responds to each treatment.
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It’s a rare occasion when a scientist can test a theory outside the confines of a laboratory. So when Paul Zak got a call from New Scientist reporter Linda Geddes to take her blood at her wedding, he just couldn’t say no.
Dr. Zak is an ocytoxin researcher who studies social indicators of the love hormone.
Geddes and her groom-to-be offered their wedding (and a few guests) as guinea pigs in this science experiment. The goal? See if oxytocin is released by friends and family witnessing this momentous event or if the hormone release is limited to bride and groom being bonded.
Geddes writes about the experiment in a New Scientist editorial.
Photo by John Hurst, courtesy of New Scientist.
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Did you fall into a turkey coma? Well, if you did don’t blame it on the much-maligned tryptophan. It was more likely something else, like all the starch in stuffing or sugars in candied yams that made you need a nap.
New research is finding that carbohydrate-rich meals help tryptophan cross the blood-brain barrier more easily but turkey isn’t the only food containing that amino acid.
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Entangled Photons and The Lost Symbol
Avid fiction aficionados have anxiously awaited author Dan Brown’s latest rip-snorting adventure through the mysterious. The Lost Symbol is Brown’s new book, which features the largely unknown field of noetic sciences as a means to move his plot along.
Loosely based on the quantum mechanical principle of entanglement, noetics aims to scientifically understand the mind-connection as a way to discover the unconscious.
The Institute of Noetics has been using physics to drive research that has appeared in bona fide peer-reviewed journals. And, now it’s front-and-center position in Brown’s book will surely push it into public consciousness.
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In a move to take science from the lab and place it in the public square, the World Science Festival is about to start its second year of inciting curiosity.
REALscience talked with organizer and physicist Brian Greene to hear what we can expect at this year’s festival.
Photo: Physicist and Co-Founder Brian Greene
Credit: Suzie Horgan for World Science Festival
Listen here.
Buy Tickets (if you are in the New York City area.)
REALscience correspondent Richard Romano will have a full report from the festival next week.
Festival highlights:
Opening Gala to celebrate E.O. Wilson’s 80th Birthday.
Pioneers in Science, a discussion with Harold Varmus and Sylvia Earle led by New York City high school students.
Transparent Brain, a neurological exploration of how close we are to reading the mind of others.
Watching Wilson and Watson, actress Anna Deavere Smith’s trip down the rabbit hole and into the minds of these two mega scientists.
Notes & Neurons, a musical adventure with Bobby McFerrin (of Don’t Worry, Be Happy fame.)
World Science Festival Street Fair, an all-day outdoor science fair with the Math Midway, Discovery Labs, CSI, and much, much more.
]]>After poring over about 1,000 YouTube videos researchers have discovered that some animals can bebop to the beat. The movie shows three excerpts of videos analyzed in this experiment. Each excerpt is at a tempo different from the original song (Everybody, by the Backstreet Boys; 108.7 beats per minute [bpm]).
The excerpts include synchronized bouts, periods during which Snowball, the cockatoo bobs his head in synchrony with the musical beat for at least 12 consecutive bobs, demonstrating rhythmic animal entrainment.
Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego first proposed the music connection in 2006. His research can be found in Current Biology.
]]>Using brain waves to communicate sounds a lot like science fiction but it might be the answer for people with communication disorders.
In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on his Twitter feed using only his mind.
]]>A Japanese science lab is developing technologies to visualise images and dreams – and eventually read people’s minds.
The resolution is very low and images are still blurry but this is the first step toward making your dreams come true – or at least being able to show them to friends and family.
Eventually this technology could render keyboards, telephones and other computing devices unecessary. But making that science fiction fact is still a ways off.
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Chemicals pervade consumer products and most of them are unregulated. Many of them are harmful in large doses. But all pose potential hazards to children, especially babies.
A new report by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has found two cancer-causing chemicals in baby shampoos and foaming soaps.
To see if your brands are on the list of products with formaldehyde or 1,4 dioxane, check out the Skin Deep Web site.
]]>Looking for a way to make extra money and help further medical research?
Try becoming a medical test subject and give yourself over to the warm embrace of science where you can make up to $50,000 a year.
Before starting, go here:
BioTrax.com
and here…
to see if you qualify.
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Scientists who do research on animals are being harassed, having their test subjects stolen, their families threatened, homes flooded and cars bombed. Even administrators who aren’t doing direct animal research are being targeted by extreme animal activists.
The first arrests under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act were made in February. And, universities that have long been silent on the issue, are taking steps to better protect scientists and their research.
Dr. P. Michael Conn sat down with REALscience this week to talk about the increase in extremist attacks in recent years. Listen Here.
]]>It’s a difficult question, …I encourage the minimum use of experiments on animals, the absolute minimum amount of pain. Only perform highly necessary experiments, and as little pain as possible. If it must be done, [if that is your path, it is compassionate] to kill out of necessity, but only with empathy. Hold in you the sense of the compassionate: ‘I acknowledge that I exploit this animal to bring greater benefit to a great number of sentient beings.’ You must feel the sacrifice, in your heart. It is never made lightly. —His holiness the Dalai Lama
Dr. Helen Fisher, the author of Why Him, Why Her talks about the power of love–from a chemical point of view. The chemicals dopamine, serotonin, estrogen, and testosterone and are powerful forces in attracting a mate.
Does the opposites-attract idea hold up under scientific scrutiny? Or is like drawn to like? The answer? It depends who you are. Find out your chemical profile, based on the research of this anthropologist and scientific advisor for dating site Chemistry.com.
Flickr photo courtesy of squidminion
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Concern over the link of vaccines and diseases like autism and even multiple sclerosis have created a confusing medical climate. Some parents are torn between vaccinating their children against things like measles, mumps and rubella or risking exposure to those diseases that are trying to make a comeback.
The science and medical communities have no definitive proof of a link between vaccines and autism. But there is no way to disqualify those claims, either.
The research supporting one of the pillars of that argument has now crumbled entirely after The Times of London investigation showed Dr. Andrew Wakefield manipulated his data on a small group of children, on which his landmark paper showing a cause and effect link between kids immunized with the MMR vaccine and regressive autism, was based.
The study was largely dismissed in 2004, when other researchers disassociated themselves from Dr. Wakefield but this new investigation shows that bad science was rampant in this important study.
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Environmental toxins are all around. And, many consumer products contain these man made compounds that damage organs, mutate cells or disrupt one biological system or another. From bath toys to shower curtains, these chemicals are seeping into our lives.
Two Reports:
Body Burden: Pollution in Newborns
Volatile Vinyl: The New Shower Curtain’s Chemical Smell
Pesticides, fire retardants and phthalates are showing up in newborn babies and seem to be building up in the foods we eat and even in the ocean.
Here’s a list of resources to find out more about consumer risk for some products:
Scientists are worried that the Internet is becoming a clogged superhighway, complete with bottlenecks where information seems to disappear.
These electronic misfires are called Internet black holes. And, they seem to be a result of limited routing architecture.
But a team at University of California, San Diego is trying to uncover the hidden shape of the overall network to help open up the information arteries that get information across the globe in just a few seconds.
A new math model is based on the 1990s party game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which uses a sociology theory called the “small-world” paradigm.
While that team tries to understand the structure of the Internet, a team at University of Washington is mapping the black holes as they appear.
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Reading has often been seen as the best medicine for keeping a mind alert. Now the digital age is giving the Internet a shot at becoming a way to prevent or slow down the effects of aging on the brain.
New research from UCLA has found that performing a simple Internet search is wildly more beneficial for middle-aged and older adults than simply reading a book.
Surfing online requires complex reasoning and decision-making skills that give the brain a good workout.
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2009 has been declared the Year of Science. A group of scientific organizations has formed a network to promote science to the public. With many milestones being celebrated next year, Year of Science 2009 will celebrate the people, the process and procedures of science.
To find out more visit:
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Thousands of spinal cord injuries and disease could disappear overnight if doctors and scientists could figure out how to turn some genes off and others on.
This medical mystery is getting a boost from the institute funded by billionaire Paul Allen. Today, the mouse spinal cord atlas was unveiled in Washington D.C. and it will provide a road map for neuroscientists asking specific questions related to the brain.
]]>Scientists in Japan have created a genetically modified mouse that is unafraid of cats. It’s like the old Tom & Jerry cartoons…but real.
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There’s a perfectly good explanation why we can’t remember everything. …Uh, what was it again?
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