That’s right! These four Eagles cheerleaders are big fans of science (one’s even a math geek). This past week, I interviewed these brainy cheerleaders and we talked about what sparked their love of science…and much more. Stay tuned for that video! (Thanks to the Eagles for making this possible.)
Now we know why our own Dr. John seems obsessed with Super Mario Kart. (Check out his world records.)
Found this (2008) first-of-its-kind study where researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine demonstrate how the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play.
After analyzing the imaging data for the entire group, the researchers found that the participants showed activation in the brain’s mesocorticolimbic center, the region typically associated with reward and addiction. Male brains, however, showed much greater activation, and the amount of activation was correlated with how much territory they gained. (This wasn’t the case with women.) Three structures within the reward circuit—the nucleus accumbens, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex—were also shown to influence each other much more in men than in women. And the better connected this circuit was, the better males performed in the game.
Boys will be boys
(I should admit I was the QUEEN of Ms. PacMan and just felt myself getting sucked back into the underground world while playing Ms Pacman online, for free.)
From Dr. John: To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internets, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role of social networking in communication, team building, and group mobilization. The challenge is to be the first person to submit the locations of 10 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States.
Here’s how it works: The red balloons will be deployed on Saturday, December 5, in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads. Teams and collaborators will have approximately 9 days, until 12:00 PM (ET) on December 14, to collect the locations of the balloons and submit their entries. All locations must be submitted in latitude and longitude coordinates. The event is open to individuals of all ages irrespective of nationality or residency (except Federal employees and their spouses and dependents), but first you must register your team on the DARPA Network Challenge website.
Find the red balloons. Win $40,000. Do you have what it takes to be the next Balloon Boy/Girl?
I’ve hinted at a special announcement the White House was expected to make today and here it is:
You can read the “official” White House press release on this but it’s only fair to tell you, it’s nothing but good-old safe facts. I, on the other hand, am about to fill you in on who’s REALLY behind this huge effort to improve science education. Ready? OK!
Kudos to President Obama and:
-his Office of Science and Technology Policy staff (my guess is, based on some conversations I’ve had with her, the unbelievably effective Beth Noveck had a big role in this)
-the MacArthur Foundation, (here’s hoping they support little people with big ideas, too, not just Obama-sized proposals)
-Dean Kamen (the real hero here even though he spilled red wine on my borrowed shoes)
-Jack Hidary (kindly took a break from his squash game a few weeks ago to talk me through these plans)
-The Discovery Channel (an independent production company of theirs called me Friday to talk about my family starring in a Science Family reality TVshow–not sure it’s going to fly since I don’t have one scientist in my family)
-and others I’m sure I’ve come in contact with along the way….OH! and Tim O’Reilly who seems to be taking over the world through his Gov 2.0 and Web 2.0 conferences and now it looks like his giant Maker Faire will take over the White House in May (as part of National Lab Day). THAT’s going to be cool.
Exciting week! Score ONE for our ongoing efforts to help Congress get the information it needs to form sound science policy!
The American Association for the Advancement of Science announced a venture, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, called Expert Labs. This new, non-profit independent lab, will “help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government tap into the expertise of their fellow citizens.” Fellow EXPERT citizens, that is. You, me, folks like us…well, we’re still left out of the discussion, for now. But I’m here to tell you, things are a-changing! Stay tuned.
In the interim, I ask of the AAAS, MacArthur Foundation and the very talented director of Expert Labs (Anil Dash): Why didn’t you just include a way for non-expert citizens to weigh in on the societal implications of these policies? That’s the real point of “opening government to the people” isn’t it? Peer-to-Policy so to speak.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled at this latest development and all 661 of you who signed this petition should be, too. But, clearly, our work isn’t finished. Not until our “non expert” opinions are taken into consideration….
Cheers!
Darlene
Meet former 76ers Cheerleader Sharon Steidler (the dancer on the right). Hands down, Sharon’s the most talented dancer I’ve ever met. (We were on the 76ers dance team together.) A picture of health, too. Sharon’s story is timely as it relates to this week’s headlines about the Mammogram Storm. In short, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force reversed previous advice and recommended that women in their 40s not at high risk for breast cancer forgo mammograms. Basically, the thinking is that the slight benefits of early detection in women in their 40s (risk of dying of cancer drops from 3% to 2.7%) does not outweigh the “costs” defined partly as stress and unnecessary X rays and biopsies. More than half of women ages 40-49 will have a false-positive mammogram during a decade of annual screening leading to additional X-Rays and biopsies.
This debate about whether women should be screened before the age of 50 has been going on since mammograms became all the rage. The Philadelphia Inquirer calls the debate “scientifically unresolvable.” And frankly most doctors interviewed recently say they’ll continue to give referrals for women who want a mammogram. So it’s unclear whether this week’s recommendations will have any long term impact at all.
One thing is clear, however. Some women are outraged, particularly those with a personal story about the benefits of early detection in a young woman. This brings us back to Sharon. Sharon was diagnosed with Stage III Invasive Ductal Carcinoma. Thankfully, she’s doing well today. I asked her to share her story with us well before the recent recommendations were released. I was more interested in helping Sharon find some purpose in her experience while exploring how someone like Sharon (a self-described “non science” person) became well informed and quite articulate about all things “breast cancer”. Here’s her story.
I met Darlene when we were both members of the Philadelphia 76′ers dance team. Dream Team, if you will. This was way back in 1991!!! Ahh…So much has changed since then! The plot thickens! (more…)
(Thanks, Jessie, for alerting us to this sweet vid!)
A crack team of PhD-trained golden retrievers illustrate the structure of atoms – the particles that make up everything around you. From the creative folks at PetsTeachScience.
By Occam’s Razor: The list of people who have made significant contributions to geriatric access and communication is distinguished: Dean Kamen, who invented, among other things, the iBOT, a wheelchair that can navigate stairs (and who once spilled a bit of red wine on Darlene’s BORROWED Chanel pumps…she’s still sorry about that, Amanda); Robert Jarvik, inventor of the artificial heart; and Isaac Shepher, founder of the company that sells Life Alert (of, “I’ve fallen…and I can’t get up!” fame). Add to this list of luminaries Florence Henderson. That’s right, Carol Brady of The Brady Bunch herself.
What has this citizen scientist done to be included in this list? She has started the FloH Club, which she calls, “roadside assistance for your computer.”
It’s essentially a service that provides seniors with phone assistance to handle technological challenges they encounter as they use a computer, particularly in accessing Facebook, email, and other communication tools. While there are free resources available to seniors, providing them help in accessing the internet and other secrets of the mysterious IBM box that sits in their den, the FloH Club is doing laudable work, even if it is a fee-based product. (If Occam was more cynical, he’d compare this to Old Glory, sellers of robot insurance, as a way to scare old people out of their money.) But regardless of whether Henderson makes a buck or not, we at the Science Cheerleader applaud her at bringing technology – and the world – a bit closer to those otherwise sealed off from it. Nigerian princes everywhere have already found this new audience quite obliging.
Of course, Henderson is best known as mom Carol Brady from The Brady Bunch, a show which we’ve come to learn with each subsequent castmember book was a bacchanalia of hedonistic Hollywood excess. Henderson was said to have gone on a date once with TV son Greg Brady, played by Barry Williams. That would explain one of the premium services of the FloH Club, May-December, an online dating service for those of incongruous ages. FloH Club describes it as “a social meeting place with no judgments…and no boundaries.” The “aged love” advocacy group Geri-Action has given two wrinkly and Viagra-stained thumbs up to the site. Celebrity endorser Woody Allen has said: “Oy vey…this would have made things so much easier for me!” and Roman Polanski adds, “I’m sorry, this is my only phone call this week…can we talk about this later?”
You go, FloHo! (Warning, this links to graphic images and sounds that may be disturbing to many viewers.)
From the NASA press release:
Now anyone with a Web browser can become a Martian explorer. That’s because NASA is launching a new citizen-science Web site, called “Be a Martian,” that gives people a chance to view hundreds of thousands of images gathered over decades of exploration on the Red Planet.
The site is also designed as a game with a twofold purpose: NASA and Microsoft hope it will spur interest in science and technology among students in the U.S. and around the world. It also is a “crowdsourcing” tool designed to tap visitors’ brains and help the space agency process volumes of Mars images.
“We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, director of Mars Public Outreach at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for NASA. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important.”
“So NASA and Microsoft are combining crowd-sourcing, cloud-computing, and citizen-science, all toward aligning with a web philosophy that Tim O’Reilly calls ’small pieces loosely joined,’ ” says Microsoft’s CTO of Advanced Government Technologies, Lewis Shepherd. (more…)
Humans evolved. Shouldn’t our websites? That’s the idea behind NOVA’s new Beta Evolution website, an experimental effort to transform the way NOVA delivers its award-winning science and technology programming.
Since 1996, NOVA has pioneered new forms of web-original content with more than 30,000 pages covering anything from string theory to aviation to how the Pyrimids were built. The Beta Evolution website serves as one-stop shop for all matters evolution, including the recent three-part NOVA series, Becoming Human, which explores the latest scientific research on human origins. Over time, NOVA will rely on user feedback to help inspire new ways of designing, organizing, and presenting this content to make it more useful for viewers.
Last week, I had the opportunity to chat with Lauren Aguirre, executive director of NOVA’s Web team, about goals of the new project, the challenges of organizing 13 years of content, and her experiences at the forefront of science communications. You can listen to each individual question and answer by clicking on the audio player below. Enjoy!
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