A Penn State physicist is looking at how songbirds transmit impulses through nerve cells in the brain to produce a complex behavior, such as singing.
The research will help scientists gain insight into how the human brain functions, which may lead to a better understanding of complex vocal behavior, human speech production and ultimately, speech disorders and related diseases.
The findings were presented this week at the American Physical Society's March meeting in Portland.
Songbirds are particularly well suited for studying speech production and syntax -- the rules of syllable or word sequence -- because there are more similarities between birdsong and human speech than one may initially think.
NASA IceBridge Mission Prepares for Study of Arctic Glaciers
In a world where the blogosphere is filled with politically motivated versions of what is 'really' happening to the cryosphere it is good to know that real scientists are taking real risks to get real data. I take my hat off to them.
NASA IceBridge Mission Prepares for Study of Arctic Glaciers
Press release March 18, 2010
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Operation IceBridge mission, the largest airborne survey ever flown of Earth's polar ice, kicks off its second year of study when NASA aircraft arrive in Greenland March 22.
Baird : The Wonder Of Television
The following article was scanned by me from
"The Wonder Encyclopedia For Children"
Odhams, 1933.
Apart from minor adjustments to layout and removal of page references it is verbatim.
I present it here as a view from the past, when television was a brand new scientific achievement being presented as a new wonder to children and using the latest photographic illustration techniques.
John Logie Baird describes broadcast television in his own words.
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THE WONDER OF TELEVISION
Electric Eyes that Scan the World
By J. L. BAIRD
Textbooks are not mere non-fiction books. Whereas you can feel free to doubt what ispresented in a typical non-fiction book (mine excluded), textbooks are a record of the true facts and principles in a field. Textbooks, you see, should not be questioned.
Now here’s an interesting chap.
The Göttingen Academy of Sciences [1] was founded in 1751 with Albrecht von Haller (1708 – 1777) [2] as the main driving force in the setting it up. He had very definite views on what an academy should be. The historian Morris Kline writes:–
A Critique Of A Multiply-Published Article On Ice Sheet Collapse
An article in AIG News, the Australian Institute of Geoscientists Quarterly Newsletter No. 97 August 2009, purports to state that collapse of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is impossible.
In this critique I demonstrate the writers' use of straw man arguments and other unscientific methods to support their arguments.
I commence with the authors' abstract and conclusions. The body of the text will be dealt with in due course.
Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing.
Cliff Ollier and Colin Pain
Abstract:
“The Role of Abathur (the Third Life) in the Mandaean Story of Creation.”
Genetic engineering may one day turn the Anopheles mosquito, the transmitter of malaria, into a natural 'flying vaccinator' for the disease, a new study in Insect Molecular Biology suggests.
Scientists have successfully generated a transgenic mosquito expressing the Leishmania vaccine within its saliva. Bites from the insect succeeded in raising antibodies, indicating successful immunization with the vaccine through blood feeding.
The research, led by Associate Professor Shigeto Yoshida from the Jichi Medical University in Japan, targets the saliva gland of the mosquitoes, the main vectors of human malaria.
Early last month, the now-famous paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield that supposedly linked vaccines to the onset of Autism, was formally
retracted by the Lancet, the journal that published it back in 1998. This was a monumental decision, considering it was the conclusions drawn from this paper that launched the firestorm of debate around the safety of vaccines, and likely the cause of the current vaccine crisis.
The newly discovered gas giant Corot-9b may have an interior that closely resembles those of Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System, according to a new paper published today in Nature.
Some evidence also suggest that the exoplanet, discovered last Spring, may also be temperate enough to allow the presence of liquid water.
Corot-9b orbits its star every 95.274 days, a little longer than Mercury takes to go round the Sun. It is the first transiting planet to have both a longer period and a near-circular orbit. Its orbit is slightly elliptical but at closest approach to its parent star it reaches a distance of 54 million kilometers.
