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Wonderful story! I still remember that chilly December day, sitting in science class. I’d finished a worksheet early and decided to get a TIME for Kids magazine off of Mrs. Estevez’s bookshelf. It was the 2008 Invention Issue, but that wasn’t the only thing that caught my eye. In the magazine, there was an article…
Study used D & D characters to test how subjects responded to eyegaze in human, humanoid, and monster characters. Observers were presented with images selected from the popular fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D; figure 1a). The images could be of humans, creatures with eyes in the centre of the face (humanoids), and creatures with…
A humanities faculty member and a math faculty member collaborate on a course about the meaning of math. “Don’t worry;” I told them. “You can’t find this more frightening than I do.” And it was true. Ever since the word problems my father forced on us at dinner, I’ve always been terrified of math. I…
Somehow I don’t expect to find this story hyped up on TV news shows… but if a similar study proposed any sort of connection that made video games look bad, that would be another story. Using complex actuarial tables and adjusting for smoking, waist circumference, dietary quality, exercise habits and other variables, the scientists were…
A spokesperson for the Sunday Times told the BBC: “The headline and the first sentence of the article over-simplified a complicated issue, which we regret. However, the rest of the story made clear that we were referring to cod over the age of 13 and the figures cited were accurate.” And what of that other…
By comparing the specimens’ ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and…
Toddlers, multiple experiments have shown, can test hypotheses about how machines work—for example, they can figure out which blocks made a machine play when some but not all blocks trigger the toy. We have to be careful, though. This exploratory, quasi-scientific approach to the world doesn’t last if adults teach kids to do something else: Kids will let adult…
Thanks for the link, Karissa. The article begins, “It used to be we thought that people who went around correcting other people’s grammar were just plain annoying. Now there’s evidence they are actually ill, suffering from a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder/oppositional defiant disorder (OCD/ODD). Researchers are calling it Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome, or GPS.” The Hallmarks…
A few days ago, I blogged about visiting SportsWorks at the Carnegie Science Center. A couple weeks ago, I brought my son and his friend to see an extended tour of the submarine USS Requin. This post is mostly about visiting the Exploration Station, part of the fourth floor installation that features more of the hands-on,…
I confess that I have never been all that physical. I do try to take the stairs instead of the elevator at work. I let my daughter talk me into auditioning for a community theater musical (and while my dancing was definitely in the bottom third, or maybe the bottom tenth, I didn’t humiliate myself).…
The first issue of the Seton Hill student newspaper comes out tomorrow, but the articles are already online. I’m the faculty adviser, so naturally I’m proud. Way to go, new media journos! “The human brain multitasks just fine. If you’re paying attention to me at the same time you are also regulating your heart beat…
Mars Panorama — My 10yo Pretends Her Bed Is NASAs Curiosi – YouTube.
Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. At first that might sound confusing; at one level the brain does multitask. You can walk and talk at the same time. Your brain controls your heartbeat while you read a book. Pianists can…
Soon after WWII began, the USS Requin began serving as a training target for sonar crews. After several refits during the Cold War, she eventually came to rest in Pittsburgh as a museum exhibit in 1990.
That awesome image showing Earth, Venus and Jupiter from Mars? It’s cool, but according to Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait, it’s from planetarium software. I was about to reblog it myself, but did a quick check first. An unreal Mars skyline | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.
More great satire from The Onion. PASADENA, CA—Barely 72 hours after the landing of its Mars rover, NASA officials announced Thursday that their mission had ended, as Curiosity’s two-gigabyte memory card was now filled to capacity. “Well, that’s that, folks,” said chief scientist John Grotzinger, explaining that after Curiosity’s Mars Descent Imager took an especially…
NASA’s rover Curiosity touched down deep in a Martian crater early Monday after a picture-perfect descent and landing, beginning what promises to be the most ambitious planetary mission in history. via NASA mission to Mars: Rover Curiosity touches down – The Washington Post.
Fascinating… asking test subjects to think more globally (in terms of the relationships between the parts that make the whole) reduced the bias that makes people think of women as body parts. People were also better at discerning women’s individual body parts than they were at men’s individual body parts, further confirming the local processing,…