Spiders' Silk Slippers Help Them Stick. Unleashing the Power of Networked Learning - Martha Stone Wiske - Innovations in Education. By Martha Stone Wiske | 9:57 AM March 21, 2011 Editor’s note: This post is part of a three-week series examining educational innovation and technology, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. How do we unleash the power of networked learning? What is the nature of that power and what levers must we wiggle to generate effective learning through online technologies?
I’ve taught a course about these questions for many years at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and this year I notice a shift in the answers my students are developing. As in prior years, we read and think about how to build online learning communities: The educational design of the course is the same as it has been for years. So what’s different now? Networked learning continues to fuel uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East. What’s different is that the top-down, center-out approach to traditional education is dramatically diminished. Dr. Why People Respond to Fitness, Fashion Magazines. By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on March 15, 2011 People read fitness and fashion magazines featuring photos of impossibly thin or muscular models when the photos are surrounded by articles suggesting that they, too, can look like those models.
Many previous studies have found that people who are unhappy with their physical appearance feel even more dissatisfied when they are shown photos of models who have “ideal” bodies. Dr. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, an associate professor of communication at Ohio State University, wondered why individuals “buy those magazines and watch those television programs, when they should just make us more dissatisfied?” In the new study, Knobloch-Westerwick found the answer through an experiment that measured how long people looked at pictures of models in an online magazine. “That’s the key. Knobloch-Westerwick conducted the research with Joshua Paul Romero, a former graduate student at Ohio State. The Neuroscience Of Creativity And Insight—The Good, The Bad, & The Absolutely Ridiculous. —A Critical Look at Recent Studies of Creativity and Insight— "All this fires in my soul, and—provided I am not disturbed—my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and in the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance...
" —Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart This is how Mozart described his subjective cognitive experience at his time of greatest productivity. We may recognize it as the "Ah ha! " moment—the point at which everything rapidly, and often suddenly, comes together to form a whole, complete idea, sometimes out of nowhere. This is also known as the moment of insight—the pinnacle of the creative process. Anyone who's experienced this moment knows how addictive that feeling can be. And so, like most wonderful things, science wants to replicate it artificially. They state: So—plausible? Creativity isn't magic, people. Experiment: Results: Eh... And then I saw the reason.
U.S. regulators clear stem cell growth material for wider use - SignOnSanDiego.com. Federal regulators have approved the general sale of a medium made by Life Technologies for culturing a certain type of stem cell in laboratories, opening the door for wider cell production outside of research projects, the Carlsbad life sciences company said Monday. The liquid product, known by the brand name StemPro MSC SFM, received what is known as 510(k) clearance from the Food and Drug Administration, a designation given new products that are as safe and effective as a similar product already on the market. The StemPro MSC SFM medium made by Life Technologies is used to grow stem cells.
The medium is used to grow mesenchymal stem cells, which are typically harvested from bone marrow and can develop into bone, cartilage, tendon and muscle cells. The medium serves as food for the stem cells as they make duplicates of themselves. Scientists are trying to find ways to use the stem cells to repair injured tissue, such as cardiovascular muscle after a heart attack. Nasa scientist finds 'evidence of life' in meteorites. Genetic Testing and Youth Sports, March 9, 2011, Brooks and Tarini 305 (10): 1033. Do we want to ‘feminise’ science teaching? This week two rather different (scholarly) articles about women/girls and science were brought to my notice.
One, a study of 14 year old schoolchildren began ‘Girls are more interested in studying science if topics are presented in a female friendly way.’ Or, as the draft press release I saw and which I was being asked to comment on screamed in a slightly more newsworthy way ‘Feminine’ Science Catches Girls’ Interest…..When scientific concepts in physics, information technology, and statistics were presented in a female friendly way – as for example relating to online shopping or cosmetic surgery – the mean level of girls’ interest rose.
(Summary of the article here; the full article requires a subscription). The second article dealt with an older age group, those already at university (in the States), and considered the response of students to the gender of their instructors, and suggested (A summary of this article can be found here; again the full article requires a subscription.) Going Viral: Exploring the Role Of Viruses in Our Bodies. Context-Dependent Encoding of Fear and Extinction Memories in a Large-Scale Network Model of the Basal Amygdala. Abstract The basal nucleus of the amygdala (BA) is involved in the formation of context-dependent conditioned fear and extinction memories. To understand the underlying neural mechanisms we developed a large-scale neuron network model of the BA, composed of excitatory and inhibitory leaky-integrate-and-fire neurons.
Excitatory BA neurons received conditioned stimulus (CS)-related input from the adjacent lateral nucleus (LA) and contextual input from the hippocampus or medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). We implemented a plasticity mechanism according to which CS and contextual synapses were potentiated if CS and contextual inputs temporally coincided on the afferents of the excitatory neurons. Author Summary The amygdaloid complex is one of the key brain structures involved in fear-related processes.
Figures Citation: Vlachos I, Herry C, Lüthi A, Aertsen A, Kumar A (2011) Context-Dependent Encoding of Fear and Extinction Memories in a Large-Scale Network Model of the Basal Amygdala. Models . Japanese scientists use alcoholic drinks to induce superconductivity. Japanese researchers have been immersing iron-based compounds in hot alcoholic beverages such as red wine, sake and shochu to induce superconductivity. Scientists from the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, found that immersing pellets of an iron-based compound in heated alcoholic beverages for 24 hours greatly increase their superconducting ability.
Iron-based compounds usually become superconductive after being exposed to air. This process however can take up to several months. This study demonstrated that superconductivity can be induced in just one day. Due to the variety of technological applications of superconducting materials, there has been a scramble for substances that may induce and enhance superconductivity in iron-based compounds. The alcoholic beverages used were red and white wine, beer, Japanese sake, shochu, and whisky. Iron-based compounds undergo a process called magnetic order whereby the molecules align in a regular pattern. Source: Institute of Physics. How Much Would It Cost to Identify Every Animal on Earth? Researchers have identified 1.4 million animal species so far—and millions remain to be discovered, named, and scientifically described.
So how much would it actually cost to identify every animal on Earth? A pair of Brazilian scientists has crunched the numbers and come up with an answer: $263 billion. That's way more than the $5 billion that famed Harvard University ant biologist Edward O. Wilson estimated back in 2000—and that was for every species on Earth, not just animals.
But even $263 billion would be a small price to pay to understand the creatures that enable such essentials as agriculture, fisheries, new drugs, and energy sources, says ornithologist Joel Cracraft of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "Literally, the world economy runs on biodiversity," he says. Besides the money, another huge obstacle to a complete understanding of the animal kingdom is a global shortage of taxonomists, experts say. Amoebas: Sexier Than Anyone Knew | Sex, Reproduction & Microbes. After taking a second look at the tree of life, researchers are rethinking the asexuality of amoebas, considered the epitome of chastity. They now have evidence of amoeboid sex lives, suggesting the act didn't evolve, it has always been there.
Amoebas are blob-like creatures about a billion years old — the oldest members of the domain of life called the eukaryotes. This group is fundamentally different in appearance and various other features from the two other domains of life. Amoeba species are spread throughout this tree on every branch, interspersed with familiar lineages like animals and plants. They are known for how they move, slowly extending foot-like portions of their cell membranes. "It changes how we interpret the evolution of organisms," study researcher Daniel Lahr, of the University of Massachusetts, told LiveScience. "If the last common ancestor of eukaryotes was sexual, then there is in practice no evolution of sex. " Asexual amoeba Muller's ratchet.