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.

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.