The apocryphal tale that you can’t grow new brain cells just isn’t true. Neurons continue to grow and change beyond the first years of development and well into adulthood, according to a new study.
The finding challenges the traditional belief that adult brain cells, or neurons, are largely static and unable to change their structures in response to new experiences.
Games and Simulations at the Noble Prize website.See the right sidebar for a complete list of what’s available.
Sam Dinkin has won the contest held by “The Space Show” for the first message to space. The message could have a maximum length of one page, taking no more than 5 minute to read. His winning entry:
“We taste terrible.”
Study: Cows Excel At Selecting Leaders
Recent studies on leadership in cows and other grazing herbivores suggest that intelligence, inquisitiveness, confidence, experience and good social skills help to determine which animals will become leaders within herds.
The findings suggest that, at least among these animals, individuals are not necessarily “born leaders,” and that bullying, selfishness, size and strength are not recognized as suitable leadership qualities.
“The fact that in groups of animals of different age, leaders are amongst the oldest animals suggests that it’s not innate, but the result of previous experience,” said Bertrand Dumont, lead author of a recent Applied Animal Behavior Science paper on leadership in a group of grazing heifers.
Dumont is a researcher at INRA, the national institute of agricultural research in Saint-Genès-Champanelle, France.
The brightest star in our sky has a companion that’s smaller than Earth yet 98 percent as massive as the Sun, a new study reveals.
Astronomers already knew the brilliant blue-white Sirius had a stellar companion. But they didn’t know the object’s mass. The new measurement, announced today, was done by an international team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Sirius is one of the closest known stars at 8.6 light-years away. It is twice as massive as the Sun and has a surface temperature of 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (10,000 degrees C).
The narwhal, often termed “The Unicorn of the Sea,” has a really odd tusk. It’s long, spiraled, and there’s only one of ‘em per animal. Its purpose has been disputed for ages, but at long last, it seems that the answer has been found. And it’s pretty damn cool.
Don’t be too proud of never forgetting a face: It turns out even a humble bumblebee can distinguish and recall different human faces, say researchers who have conducted experiments on the surprisingly canny insects.
Researchers in the UK have found that bumblebees show a remarkable ability to spot the same human face even days after training.
“The more we study these creatures, the more we find they have abilities like ours,” observed insect vision researcher Mandyam Srinivasan of Australian National University in Canberra.
From bees to wasps, spiders and even sheep, other animals have proven they can not only recognize our faces, but they navigate mazes, match objects and shapes and even associate smells with previous experiences.
“Sometimes I wonder what we are doing with two-kilogram brains,” mused Srinivasan.
Bumblebees, for their part, have brains weighing less than a tenth of a gram — that’s about 20,000 times less massive than the human brain.
The larger implications of such a small number of neurons doing such complex tasks are intriguing, but not obvious, says Dyer. There is the possibility, for instance, that someday humans who have experienced brain damage could borrow the bumblebee trick — whatever the trick is — to relearn facial recognition and other lost abilities, he says.
Will the 3-hour special-effects-loaded remake of King Kong be a box office smash or a complete turkey? For movie producers, getting such questions right can be worth millions, and now they have a computer system to help them work it out before a film is even made.
The idea comes from Ramesh Sharda, an information scientist at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who has trained an artificial neural network to recognise what makes a successful movie (Expert Systems with Applications, vol 30, p 243).
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May be someday Neural network can sort – relationships….
This year, as every year, the struggle against disease was a grab bag of good and bad–vision and shortsightedness, courage and obtuseness, scientific masterstrokes and experiments that came to naught. It’s medicine’s historical dance, with every two steps forward matched by at least one step back. In a very good year, you might push that ratio to 3 to 1. TIME’s 2005 A-to-Z guide to the year in medicine tracks the highlights of the 12 months soon ending–and suggests that this year may have been one of the good ones.
By any measure, 2005’s biggest medical news came out of Hwang’s lab–despite the subsequent scandal. The earliest bulletin was the announcement that Hwang and his 45-person team had become the first to using cloning techniques to create stem cells from human patients suffering from diseases such as diabetes and spinal-cord injury. Tissue derived from those cells could, in theory, be implanted in the pancreas or spine with little chance that the body would rejected it. If such experiments work, the same approach could be applied to other parts of the body, such as the brain or heart.
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LAUGHTER Remember the last time you laughed so hard you couldn’t stop? Good. Do it again. Laughter increases blood flow by causing the inner lining of blood vessels (the endothelium) to expand, according to a small study of healthy moviegoers who were shown both funny and distressing clips from films and then tested for the physical effects of each. With laughter, blood flow increased 22%; under stress, it decreased 35%.
People lacking any sense of fashion no longer need worry about their scarf clashing with their clothes this winter – researchers have created one that automatically changes colour to suit an outfit.
The colour-shifting garment, dubbed a chameleon shawl, was developed by Akira Wakita and colleagues at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.
Interwoven into the scarf material are pixels containing red, blue and green light-emitting diodes (LEDs), so adjusting the brightness of each type of diode turns the scarf a different overall shade.
A small sensor embedded in the garment also enables it to identify the colour of the nearest item of clothing. A microcomputer then selects a suitable colour for the scarf itself to adopt.
Tasteful shade
“In the default setting, the microcomputer in the shawl is programmed to change to the coordinative colour of the input data,” Wakita told New Scientist.
This means that if its owner is wearing dark blue, for example, the scarf will instinctively turn a tasteful shade of light blue to match. “A kind of colour coordination will be established automatically,” Wakita says.
If, however, the wearer fancies making a more daring fashion statement, the scarf’s computer can be configured to match more unusual colours together. “Theoretically, about 4000 colours can be generated,” Wakita says. “However, the difference may not be perceivable for human eyes.”
The scarf was demonstrated at the International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC2005) in Osaka, Japan, in October 2005.
It’s official, humans are dumber than chimps. These guys show (at the NY Times level) that human kids will over-imitate every ritualized nuance modeled for them, whereas chimp kids just wanna get the damn cookie out of the box. Their website also describes more of their studies.
Einstein was one of the founders of quantum mechanics, yet he disliked the randomness that lies at the heart of the theory. God does not, he famously said, play dice. However, quantum theory has survived a century of experimental tests, although it has yet to be reconciled with another of Einstein’s great discoveries – the general theory of relativity. Four theorists – Gerard ‘t Hooft, Edward Witten, Fay Dowker and Paul Davies- outline their views on the current status of quantum theory and the way forward
When you’re buying hardware, software, and services, you want the top combination of power, features, reliability, and value. That’s what you’ll find in these World Class Award winners–starting with the Product of the Year.
They say everything looks better from a distance, but here’s proof that it’s not always true. While no one’s itching to get close to the mosquito, when it’s magnified a couple of thousand times, the notorious pest begins to look almost…beautiful. With this site, you can zoom in on the detailed anatomy of a black ant or fruit fly, simulate the use of a scanning electron microscope to magnify a bee’s eye or a carpet beetle (up to 4000x), discover the 12 Most Wanted bugs (like our old pals the cockroach or the cat flea), and browse “over 1500 micrographs of scientific, biological, and medical subjects photographed with light and electron microscopes.” So if you don’t know an ant’s, er, rear end from its abdomen…don’t worry, you will.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the most famous idea that nobody understands, is now completely explained in five one-minute films. Well, not really. The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia advises that it’ll take some more effort on your part to grasp the whole thing, but they certainly help get the ball rolling (or the watch ticking). Get this — the speed of light from a uniformly moving source is always the same, regardless of how fast it’s moving. We’re still dealing with that one, but we had a eureka moment on the concept of time dilation, as demonstrated by Zoe driving her car while Jasper watches from his veranda. Thanks, Professor Wolfe!
This seems like a direct threat from the big brother:
Disappointed with your cellphone’s lack of enthusiasm? Then you’ll be relieved to hear that Motorola has devised a handset that dances for joy when it receives a call.
The “ambulatory” device, as it is described, sits on four vibrating feet that shake with different strength and in slightly different directions to make the whole handset wriggle around.
The device could, for example, shimmy in a clockwise direction to signal an incoming call from the office, or wobble counter-clockwise to alert the user to a new message.
Motorola even proposes using accelerometers to let the owner teach the phone how to dance when a certain person calls. A further party trick would see the device detect the beat of a music track and dance along in time.
Read the dancing cellphone patent here.
Exactly 100 years ago, Albert Einstein grappled with the implications of his revolutionary special theory of relativity and came to a startling conclusion: mass and energy are one, related by the formula E = mc2. In “Einstein’s Big Idea,” NOVA dramatizes the remarkable story behind this equation.
PBS Broadcast Date: October 11, 2005 from 8 to 10 pm
Nissan has developed an egg-shaped car for drivers who find backing out of tight parking spots a hassle.
The car’s body pivots 360 degrees so that its rear end becomes the front.
The Pivo, shown on Friday at a Tokyo Nissan showroom, is still an experimental model and probably will not go on sale publicly for several years. It is a three-seater electric car that looks like a big egg on wheels. Its body revolves in a complete circle while its wheels stay put.
Such moves are possible because Pivo’s steering, wheels and other parts are controlled electronically by wireless, or electronic signals, not mechanical links between the cabin and the vehicle’s chassis.
“This is a cute car for people who have problems parking,” said Nissan Motor Co. chief designer Masato Inoue.
Pivo, also planned for display at the Tokyo auto show opening next month, highlights other technologies, including a system that allows the driver to control devices inside the car simply by raising his or her fingers off the steering wheel.
Finger pointing
That is done through a camera embedded in the steering wheel that senses heat. Lifting one finger might turn on the radio. Two fingers might set car navigation equipment.
The technology works much like voice-recognition capabilities already available in some advanced cars, but Tokyo-based Nissan says some people prefer finger-pointing than talking.
Pivo also allows the driver to see blind spots via cameras attached to the outside of the car.
Inoue says it is possible to design a gasoline-engine vehicles that spins in the same way if electronic controls are approved for traffic safety. But they are unlikely to have the round look of Pivo because a conventional engine requires more room than an electric motor.
Stars race around a black hole at the center of the Andromeda galaxy so fast that they could go the distance from Earth to the Moon in six minutes.
The finding, announced today, solves a mystery over the source of strange blue light coming from Andromeda’s center. But it generates a new puzzle: The stars’ phenomenal orbital velocity suggests they should never have formed in the first place.
Astronomers first spotted the blue light near Andromeda’s core in 1995. Three years later, another group determined that the light emanated from a cluster of hot, young stars. Nobody knew how many were involved.
Inspired by NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, the gardeners and plant enthusiasts at the University of British Columbia’s Botanical Centre have grown their very own photo blog. The first entry, on April 5, 2005, of a Chinese parasol storax, let it be known that these pictures would be painterly and lush. From a close-up of ferns, a Himalayan blue poppy, or this delicate fragrant granadilla, the diverse plants of Canada and the plentiful holdings of the UBC garden bloom forth. Categories include mosses, conifers, and the always-popular flowering plants. If you’re the type who thinks fungus is don’t-touch-that gross, dare to view these beauties. The garden syndicates its content through RSS, so plant a feed and see a new picture blossom each day.
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