News Revisited

Psychologists at the University of Chicago have been studying how gesturing affects a child’s ability to learn.  What they have found is that children who are told to use their hands during instruction are more likely to find the correct answer to future problems.  For example, children who filled in the following blank incorrectly 6 + 3 + 7 = ___ + 7, but used gestures when explaining their thought process were more likely to learn from instruction about this type of problem.  The gestures appear to be a way to externalize concepts that have not been fully integrated yet.

This comet was predicted to be magnitude 17 but is now clearly visible with the naked eye at about magnitude 3 from the Northern Hemisphere, reports A Quantum Diaries Survivor and a thread at www.irishastronomy.org.  It’s the extra star between Mirphak and Capella and looks similar to a globular cluster in a large telescope.

As you can see my posting rate has dramatically slowed lately.  Currently reading the news isn’t as high a priority for me given the various other things that are going on in my life.  I will still post an occasional story here when I see something of note but for now I’m not expecting to post much.  I do expect that at some point things will settle down again and I’ll start reading the news on a more frequent basis.  Thank you for reading.

The GalaxyZoo project has announced its first preliminary results.  As I mentioned before the GalaxyZoo project asks the general public to classify images of galaxies.  The results they are announcing now is that galaxies tend to rotate counter-clockwise from our point of view.  If that were to hold true there would need to be a unknown force acting upon them or the universe would need to be lopsided in some way.  Naturally I have to wonder if there is a natural bias in the human eye/brain system that explains away this anomaly.  Of course, they have already considered this and are investigating it by adding a bunch of mirror images into the database to see how they are categorized.  This is quite an interesting project.

Another thing I find interesting is that when they compared their data to that of earlier work done professional astronomers they found that the self-selected general public is about as good at classifying galaxies.

Cytograft Tissue Engineering of Novato, CA has successfully grown blood vessels from human skin without using any synthetic materials or scaffolding.  That means they could grow new blood vessels for a patient using a piece of the patient’s own skin without requiring any antirejection medicine and without the complications of inflammatory reaction.  This is also important for children with congenital heart defects since unlike grafts from cadavers these should grow as the child grows.

I’m a little behind the times on this one, but I just happened to stumble across it on the LiveScience website.  Michael Goldfarb, of the Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and colleagues are designing rocket powered bionic arms and legs.  They have a four pound prototype arm capable of lifting 20 - 25 pounds and operating for 18 hours of normal use on a single fill-up.  They say it is so quiet you wouldn’t hear it in a room with people talking at very low levels.

Richard Garriott of Ultima fame will be the next space tourist if all goes well.  He’s currently slated for a visit to the International Space Station in October 2008. 

This one hits a little close to home for me.  Not long after the release of Ultima III Richard’s brother Robert invited me to tour their company, Origin Systems.  Most people were working in one big room with computers jammed side by side on long tables.  The walls of that room were covered with the map they were developing for Ultima IV.  They had people folding, filling, and sealing boxes of Ultima III for shipment.  It really hit home that here were a couple of guys who had a vision and managed to get it going with very little.  To see Richard now so successful that he’s headed off to space as a tourist is an amazing thing.  Good for you Richard!