Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

New literacy: how online media helps develop writing skills

Clive Thompson
Wired Magazine
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:47 UTC
As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write - and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples - everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it - and pushing our literacy in bold new directions. [..]
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Arrow Down

Facebook Exodus

Virginia Heffernan
The New York Times
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:34 UTC
farewell
© Kevin Van Aelst
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you'll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

The exodus is not evident from the site's overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing - some of them ostentatiously.

Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother's snap judgment of the site ("Facebook is the devil"), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words "Shut Your Facebook." What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life. As Facebook endeavors to be the Web's headquarters - to compete with Google, in other words, and to make money from the information it gathers - it's inevitable that some people would come to view it as Big Brother.
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Satellite

India abandons moon-orbiting satellite after losing contact

Ashok Sharma
Associated Press
Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:38 UTC
India's space agency has abandoned the country's only satellite orbiting the moon after efforts to revive communication with it failed, an official said Monday.

Communications with the Chandrayaan-1 satellite, which has been orbiting the moon for nearly a year, snapped Saturday and scientists lost control of the satellite. The space agency's efforts to restore contact since then have failed, agency spokesman S. Satish told The Associated Press.

"The mission has been terminated," Satish quoted G. Madhavan Nair, chief of the Indian Space Research Organization, as saying Sunday.
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Magnify

Microscopes zoom in on molecules at last

MacGregor Campbell
New Scientist
Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:30 UTC
Image
© IBM and SciencePentacene as you've never seen it before.
Thanks to specialised microscopes, we have long been able to see the beauty of single atoms. But strange though it might seem, imaging larger molecules at the same level of detail has not been possible - atoms are robust enough to withstand existing tools, but the structures of molecules are not. Now researchers at IBM have come up with a way to do it.

The earliest pictures of individual atoms were captured in the 1970s by blasting a target - typically a chunk of metal - with a beam of electrons, a technique known as transmission electron microscopy (TEM).
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Info

Finding the ZIP-code for gene therapy: Scientists imitate viruses to deliver therapeutic genes

Cody Mooneyhan
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:09 UTC
New research in the FASEB Journal describes the next generation of gene therapy, raising hope for successful treatment of genetic and other disorders

A research report featured on the cover of the September 2009 print issue of the FASEB Journal(http://www.fasebj.org) describes how Australian scientists developed a new gene therapy vector that uses the same machinery that viruses use to transport their cargo into our cells. As a result of this achievement, therapeutic DNA can be transferred to a cell's nucleus far more efficiently than in the past, raising hopes for more effective treatment of genetic disorders and some types of cancers.
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Telescope

Astronomers Find Coldest, Driest, Calmest Place on Earth


PhysOrg
Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:38 UTC
Antarctic Plateau
© ANIAntarctic Plateau
The search for the best observatory site in the world has lead to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth. No human is thought to have ever been there but it is expected to yield images of the heavens three times sharper than any ever taken from the ground.

The joint US-Australian research team combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect astronomy - cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence.

The researchers pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A, that is 4,053m high up on the Antarctic Plateau. It is not only particularly remote but extremely cold and dry. The study revealed that Ridge A has an average winter temperature of minus 70C and that the water content of the entire atmosphere there is sometimes less than the thickness of a human hair.
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Magnify

How the Brain Localizes Sounds

Robert Goodier
Scientific American
Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00 UTC
Specialized neurons sort out overlapping sounds

Ear
© iStockPhotoWHO SAID THAT? A simple mechanism is identified for how we sort through the cacophony of overlapping sounds.
We live in a world full of echoes. Sounds reverberate, bouncing off walls, buildings, rocks and any other nearby surface. These sound waves pile on one another and hurtle down your ear canals from different angles, the echoes from one noise jumbling together with new sounds and their echoes. In spite of that barrage, the neurons in the auditory midbrain, an area that responds before the auditory cortex does, are able to sort out which were the original sounds and where they came from. How they do so has long puzzled scientists, but new research suggests the trick is simpler than expected.

In an April study, neuroscientists led by Sasha Devore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested the widely held hypothesis that specialized cells in the brain actively suppress neuronal response to echoes. Using electrodes in a cat's midbrain, researchers measured cells' responses to a sound and its reverberations. They found that the cells that sense a sound's direction of origin responded more strongly to the first 50 milliseconds of sound waves than they did to the later waves - their activity simply tapered off after the onset of the sound.
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Magnify

World's smallest Semiconductor Laser


ScienceDaily.com
Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:06 UTC
Electron microscope image of laser
© Xiang Zhang Lab, UC BerkeleyThe schematic on the left illustrates light being compressed and sustained in the 5 nanometer gap -- smaller than a protein molecule -- between a nanowire and underlying silver surface. To the right is an electron microscope image of the hybrid design shown in the schematic.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have reached a new milestone in laser physics by creating the world's smallest semiconductor laser, capable of generating visible light in a space smaller than a single protein molecule.

This breakthrough, described in an advanced online publication of the journal Nature on Aug. 30, breaks new ground in the field of optics. The UC Berkeley team not only successfully squeezed light into such a tight space, but found a novel way to keep that light energy from dissipating as it moved along, thereby achieving laser action.
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Monkey Wrench

Brain changes may have led to Stone Age tools

David Perlman
San Francisco Chronicle
Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:58 UTC
Stone Age Tools
© Kyle Brown / South African PaleoanthropologyScientists duplicated the process used to manufacture Stone Age tools by heating a chunk of yellowish rock called silcrete
Once upon a time in the long evolution of Homo sapiens, a band of our African ancestors learned to use fire for more than cooking meat, lighting the dark or warding off attacking animals.

Those Stone Age people became the world's first engineers - they discovered that the intense heat of a fire's embers could make chunks of stone much easier to flake for making tools, and to make them much sharper too.

It was "a breakthrough adaptation in human evolution," reports an international group of archaeologists and anthropologists. And it may have come about because of changes in those early human's brains, other scientists say.

What began at least 165,000 years ago became the most common method of stone toolmaking in Africa by about 72,000 years ago.
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Cowboy Hat

Gold-plated horse head found in Germany


Associated Press
Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:02 UTC
Gold-plated horse head
© Johannes Eisele / Reuters A horse's head, part of an approximately 2,000 years old rider's statue was found in an excavation site in Waldgirmes some 20 miles north of Frankfurt
Scientists say a Roman horse head made from bronze and plated in gold has been discovered at an archaeological site in Germany.

Hesse state archaeologist Egon Schallmeyer says the head is part of a horse and rider statue and "qualitatively one of the best (pieces) created at that time."
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