What Shapes My Brain? -Science Blog Post

Nina Kraus of Northwest University performed experiments to measure how the brain processes sound and how it affects us in our daily lives.  The results are fairly surprising.

The researchers played music or speeches into volunteer's ears.  While the sound was playing, they monitored the electricity the brain created. The volunteers ranged from ages birth to 90 years.

It was concluded that several factors impact the brain.  The music we listen to, the languages we speak (especially if you are multilingual), aging, language disorders, and hearing loss. Also, people who actively listen to music were found to hear better than those who don’t.  

Outside of the lab, studies have also been conducted in schools, community centers, and clinics.  

Other findings include:

• Kraus lab discovers biological approach to measure an individual's sound processing with unprecedented precision.

• The way a pre-literate child processes the ingredients of sound -- pitch, timing and timbre -- can predict future reading ability.

• Sound processing disadvantages can be partially offset by making music as well as speaking another language.

• Engagement matters. The brains of children who were more actively involved in Kraus lab studies saw more robust changes.

• Sound processing in the brain can be a neurological marker for issues such as autism, dyslexia and learning delays.

All in all, many fascinating conclusions have been reached by Kraus and her colleagues.  My favorite one is: How the brain processes the sounds it hears is a great measure of how healthy your brain really is.   

For more information, go to http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151214185800.htm

 

I Stand For What I Stand On: Join The Fight To Save Planet Earth

Explain To

Explain to future generations

That it was once good for the economy

When they cannot farm the land

There is no clean air to breathe

And there is no clean water to drink.

Explain to them

You knew one day Earth would be beyond fixable

Yet you never even bothered to lend a helping hand

What monsters will they make of us?

Knowing so much, but caring so little.

Explain to the suffering, the dying, the ill

The cure that once existed

That could cure them once and for all

Was eliminated by deforestation

And would never have a chance to help a single soul.

Explain to the animals

Why you kill for their homes

And what they did to deserve to be so hated

Why they die for fashion, or to become a decoration.

Explain to the world

When nothing is left

Corpses in the ground and smog up above

You knew this would happen

Yet you never even bothered to lend a helping hand.

Since humans started walking the Earth, we have been polluting.  Killing animals for decorations and fashion and using up resources faster than they can be produced.  We say technology is advancing, but as long as the air, food, and water is dirty, the Ozone Hole expands, and living beings die at the mercy of others, technology isn't advancing for the better.  Greed controls us.  We are brainwashed into believing the world is a safe, healthy place.  War breaks out.  Entire species of plants and animals are wiped out.  The rain forest is in danger.  I wrote this poem to explain how we destroy our environment. Consequences can be prevented, though.  Solar electricity can become the new gasoline.  Recycling can occur more.  We, as the human race, can open our eyes and together make a change.  Turning off lights is small.  Recycling is small.  Not taking the car to every place you go is small.  Sometimes small is what makes the biggest impact. Please join the fight to save our planet Earth.

   

27 Random Trivia You Never Thought You'd Know!

Hello! I have always loved trivia.  Jeopardy, Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, etc. have always been some of my favorite shows.  Taking a break from science, here are some fun things I bet you never thought you'd know! Feel free to comment more trivia!   

1. The line between the two numbers of a fraction has a name--- the vinculum.

2. To get a rough estimate of the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, count the number of cricket chirps you hear for 15 seconds, then add 37 to that number.

3. 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 configurations can be made out of a 3x3 Rubik’s Cube.

4. The longest word typed using only the left hand is ‘stewardesses’.

5. If you throw an object, it will travel further if you throw it to the west than if you throw it to the east.  This is because of Earth’s rotation.

6. Mosquitoes are attracted to blue twice as much as they are attracted to any other color.

7. Wrigley’s Gum was the first item to have a bar code.

8. To eat a piece of celery, it takes more calories to eat it than are actually in the celery itself.

9. Humans only used about 10% of their brain.

10. 7 times is the average number of times the average major league baseball is pitched.

11. The first novel written on a typewriter was Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

12. The GNP of Texas - if it were a country - would be the fifth largest GNP of any country in the world.

13. The average American eats 18 acres of pizza per day.

14. In the English language, the shortest complex sentence is ‘I am’.

15. Almonds are a member of the peach family.

16. To produce enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee, you would have to yell for about 8 years, 7 months, and 6 days.

17. The lifespan of a dragonfly is 24 hours.

18. The only state that can be typed on one row of a keyboard is Alaska.

19. Dr. Seuss was challenged by editor Bennett Cerf to write a book with no more than 50 words in it, resulting in Green Eggs And Ham.

20. The only bank in the world that allows ATM users to perform transactions in Latin is in Vatican City.

21. Approximately one out of every 4 lobsters are born with a genetic disorder that will eventually turn the lobster a blue color.

22. The Baby Ruth candy bar was named after the daughter of President Grover Cleveland. Her name was Ruth Cleveland, and she was the first baby girl born in the White House.

23. The most widely spoken native language in the world is Mandarin Chinese.

24. Starbucks was named after the first mate in Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

25. M&M stands for the lasts names of Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie, the inventors of M&M.

26. One-Fifth of the world’s oxygen comes from the Amazon Rainforest.

27. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter of the English alphabet in it.

Zipf's Law

Zipf’s Law, proposed by an American Linguist named George Kingsley Zipf, deals with probability.  It states the the frequency of an event (f) is inversely proportional to its rank (r).

Originally, it was proposed for the frequency of words used in the English language.  A word’s approximate usage is determined by the formula: f(r)≅0.1/r

The most common word (Rank 1) in the English language is “the”, which, in a typical text, occurs about one-tenth of the time.  The second most common English word (Rank 2) is “of”, which occurs approximately one-twentieth of the time, and so on and so forth.

To look at it another way, focus only on the rank: 1/rank means that world occurs 1/rank of the time.  The word “the” occurs 1/r times, the word “of” occurs half that amount (Because 1/rank for the second word is equivalent to ½).  The third word occurs one -third as often as the second word (1/rank equals ⅓).  And the forth word occurs ¼  as often.  Unfortunately, beyond the ranking of 1,000 the law becomes untrue.  

This same principle can be applied to other things.  Though the results are not exactly correct, it comes up with a decent estimate.  For example, the largest city in a country is about twice the size of the second largest.  The second largest city is about three times the size of the third largest, and so on.  The basic principle can be useful in schemes like urban planning.

For more information, visit: http://www.britannica.com/topic/Zipfs-law

                                         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

Fracking And Why It Needs To Stop NOW!!!! -Science Blog Post

What Is It:

Hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, is a process used to recover natural gas and oil from shale rock.  

To do this, a hole is drilled into the Earth.  Then, a high-pressure water mixture is put into the rock, releasing the gas inside it.  To get the gas to go flow into the well, the rock is then injected with chemicals, water, and sand.  

The well is drilled into the ground horizontally so the gas will float upwards.  This process was named “fracking” because the name refers to how rocks are fractured apart by high pressure.

Why Is It Controversial:

With fracking comes great environmental concerns.  Immense amounts of water have been transported to fracking sites, damaging the environment. Also, many fear that chemicals used in this process will eventually contaminate groundwater near the sites. “The industry suggests pollution incidents are the results of bad practices, rather than the inherent risky technique.”  But there is always room for error.  If the risks of fracking could potentially contaminate acres and acres of land from one “bad practice”, why do it?  

In addition to these, an increased amount of earthquakes in areas with fracking is linked to fracking in those areas.  The graph below shows the how many earthquakes, how strong they were, and when they hit in Barnett Shale.  Under that is a mini interview telling the normal amount of earthquakes in Oklahoma that are at or above 3 magnitude before fracking and how many are at or above 3 magnitude now.

Many other worries include that fracking wastes energy and eliminates renewable resources.  

Conclusion:

Fracking destabilizes the earth, causing increases in earthquakes everywhere it happens.  So why do we continue to do it?

For more information, visit: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-14432401

KIC 8462852: An Anomaly In The Cygnus Constellation? -Science Blog Post

KIC 8462864 is a sun 1,500 light years from Earth.  The irregular light blockage (up to 20%) due to objects orbiting it, has led scientist on a search for an extraterrestrial civilization. These objects appear as masses of tightly packed objects. They’ve been deemed too big to be planets.

If KIC 8362852 were a young star, we’d conclude that the star was surrounded by dust.  But KIC 8462852 isn’t young, and no excess of infrared light has been found near it. Jason Wright published a statement claiming that these objects are a swarm of megastructures. Wright hypothesized that these objects are Dyson Sphere’s built by this civilization to harness all of the sun’s energy.  Some think the human civilization is only a few hundred years from doing this as well.

To succeed at building this, the civilization would have to be a Type III civilization on the Kardashev Scale. In comparison, humans are a Type I civilization.

Besides aliens, other hypotheses include:

• KIC 8462852 is a young star with protoplanetary disks orbiting it
• The objects are massive planets with rings, irregularly obstructing our view of the sun
• Dense gasses occasionally pass between KIC 8462852 and Earth, because of a mass ejection event
• This galaxy’s old and violent resulting in debris orbiting the sun
• Large masses of comet-like objects block the light in irregular patterns
• A swarm of comets orbits KIC 8462852

These explanations sound reasonable, yet every one of them proves itself false or highly unlikely.

KIC 8462852 was discovered by the Kepler Telescope, and a scientist named Tabetha Boyajian.

But for now, scientist can only hypothesize.  The Allen Telescope Array has its focus KIC 8462852. The Very Large Array (VLA) may eventually get involved in this search.

For more information, go to:

http://earthsky.org/space/possible-alien-megastructure-kic-8462852

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/curious-case-of-kic-8462852-102020155/

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/15/world/extraterrestrial-intelligence-anomaly/

Also, for vocabulary important to this post, I have linked a Wikipedia page. Click the words to learn more!

Color Perception: Effected By Sadness? -Science Blog Post

We know emotions affect how we see the world around us.  But does it also affect color perception? Christopher Thorstenson, Adam Pazda, and Andrew Elliot conduct experiments to test this.

In one study, 127 undergraduates were randomly assigned to watch a film to generate sadness, or a stand up comedy to generate amusement.  After watching their assigned clip, the participants were shown 48 consecutive color patches and asked to determine whether each patch was yellow, green, blue, or red.  The participants who watched the sad movie were less accurate at identifying colors than the participants who watched the stand up comedy, but only in identifying colors along the blue-yellow axis.  There was no difference in identifying colors along the red-green axis.

Another study with 130 undergraduates had the same results.  Participants that watched the sad film were less accurate at decoding colors along the blue-yellow axis that participants shown the neutral film.  And like before, only the blue-yellow axis was impaired. There was no difference in the red-green axis.

The scientists were surprised by these results, as they were nowhere near what they predicted. But they think this study might give clues for the reason for the effect in neurotransmitter function.

They need to do more research before they provide a final conclusion to this study. We know color perception along the blue-yellow axis is linked to the neurotransmitter dopamine.  

For more information, go to http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150902112006.htm