I am forever amazed that everything that we think, feel, do, or seem is nothing more than sodium and potassium moving in and out of ion gated channels as a result of an action potential. Where are memories stored? Images? Thoughts? It all comes down to these tiny chemical elements and I don’t understand why. The brain is such a complex and fascinating thing.
Tasha Sturm, a microbiologist and teacher at Cabrillo College, recently took a handprint of her 8-year-old son after he had been playing outside.
She then incubated the handprint for 48 hours and let it sit for another few days, photographing the final result. Bacteria, yeast, fungi, it’s remarkable to see what grew from a simple handprint.
Normally cats have five toes on their front feet and four on the back feet, yet some are known to have extra toes, a condition known as polydactyly. The author Ernest Hemingway received a six-toed cat, called Snow White, from a Ship’s Captain, and descendants of this feline are still resident at the Hemingway Museum today. These cats have become known as ‘Hemingway’s Cats’ or ‘Polydactyls’.
Normally the correct number of fingers/toes is regulated by a gene called Sonic Hedgehog (Shh), which is active in a specific region near the future little finger/toe. However, these cats have a genetic variation in which Shh also becomes active in the region near what should be the future thumb, leading to growth of one or more additional toes.
How media savvy are you? Keeping special interest groups from manipulating media with regard to science begins with awareness.
Astroturf and manipulation of media messages | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDxUniversityofNevada
In
this eye-opening talk, veteran investigative journalist Sharyl
Attkisson shows how astroturf, or fake grassroots movements funded by
political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively
manipulate and distort media messages.
The human brain was initially used for basic
survival tasks, such as staying safe and hunting and gathering. Yet,
200,000 years later, the same human brain is able to learn abstract
concepts, like momentum, energy and gravity, which have only been
formally defined in the last few centuries.
New research from Carnegie Mellon University has now uncovered how
the brain is able to acquire brand new types of ideas. Published in Psychological Science,
scientists Robert Mason and Marcel Just used neural-decoding techniques
developed at CMU to identify specific physics concepts that advanced
students recalled when prompted. The brain activation patterns while
thinking about the physics concepts indicated that all of the students’
brains used the ancient brain systems the same way, and the patterns
revealed how the new knowledge was formed – by re-purposing existing
neural systems.
The findings could be used to improve science instruction.
“If science teachers know how the brain is going to encode a new
science concept, then they can define and elaborate that concept in ways
that match the encoding. They can teach to the brain by using the
brain’s language,” said Mason, a senior research associate in the
Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of
Psychology.
New research from Carnegie Mellon University
shows for the first time how learning physics concepts is accomplished
by repurposing neural structures that were originally used for general
everyday purposes. More specifically, the brain is able to learn physics
concepts because of its ability to understand the four fundamental
concepts of causal motion, periodicity, energy flow and algebraic
(sentence-like) representations. Credit: Carnegie Mellon University
when i’m sad i think of the time two-face kidnapped robin and he takes him to the getaway car which he has been so meticulous about defacing only half of it and jason who has been so chill the entire time is just like omfg you’re tacky and i hate you
EY FATTY BOOM BOOM 