A man blind since birth is taking up a surprising new hobby: photography. His newfound passion is thanks to a system that turns images into sequences of sound. The technology not only gives “sight” to the blind, but also challenges the way neurologists think the brain is organized.
Featured on Slashdot.
If music is a universal language, it doesn’t speak to everyone. Psychologists asked more than 1000 college students what they found rewarding. Of those surveyed, the team selected 10 students who ranked music significantly less pleasurable than other choices provided, such as sex, exercise, and food. The researchers discovered that the students weren’t tone deaf or incapable of grasping the emotional meaning of a song—their brains simply didn’t find listening to music rewarding.
Building from a whispering pianissimo to a thunderous fortissimo, a skilled orchestra can leave its audience with goose bumps. Because a wide selection of volumes allows for more expressive performances, a team of researchers investigated if the geometry of the performance venue plays a part in the range of volumes heard by the audience, called the perceived dynamic range.
When a male Lawes’s Parotia shakes a tail feather, the ladies and the physicists take notice. Living in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, males of the species (Parotia lawesii) wear a coat of velvety black feathers, with the exception of a colorful, shimmering spot on their breast. For their mating display, they head to a patch of sunlight and strut their stuff in a so-called ballerina dance, spreading their feathers like a tutu and shaking their body to shimmer their breast plumage.
For more than a century, invasive gray squirrels have bullied their way across Ireland, outcompeting and drastically reducing the native red squirrel population. But a new study finds that the red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris, pictured) has acquired an unlikely ally: its natural predator, the pine marten. The find comes thanks to a 2007 ecological survey, which noted an unexpected decline in the number of North American eastern gray squirrels (S. carolinensis) on the island—and a concomitant rise in the number of pine martens (Martes martes), cat-sized, squirrel-eating carnivores.
A human heart pumps enough blood in a lifetime to fill 3 supertankers #sciencewow @sciencemagazine pic.twitter.com/tdOBRyUtqS
— Thomas Sumner (@ThomasSumner) February 13, 2014
The universe is beige #scienceWow #AAASmtg @ScienceNews pic.twitter.com/EG2hw3dtxP
— Thomas Sumner (@ThomasSumner) February 15, 2014
The coldest known spot in the universe is on Earth #scienceWOW #AAASMtg @ScienceNews pic.twitter.com/iWwapj0Lsq
— Thomas Sumner (@ThomasSumner) February 15, 2014
Infographics about cool science facts. Created in Adobe Photoshop.
The mass of an electron appears prominently in many of the fundamental laws that govern the subatomic realm, yet direct measurement has been complicated by the particle’s scrawny mass. Now, a team of physicists has overcome this challenge to produce the most precise electron mass measurement ever made.
As the cost of genetic sequencing plummets, experts believe our genomes will help doctors detect diseases and save lives. But not all of us are comfortable releasing our biological blueprints into the world. Now cryptologists are perfecting a new privacy tool that turns genetic information into a secure yet functional format. Called homomorphic encryption and presented here today at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science) the method could help keep genomes private even as genetic testing shifts to cheap online cloud services.
Featured on Slashdot and in the print edition of Science.
Robots are taking over Chicago. Experts showed off three animal-inspired robots today at the annual meeting of AAAS, which publishes Science. The robots are designed to gallop, navigate, and swim like their real-world cheetah, ant, and fish counterparts. The mechanical trio’s novel movement could help future robots trek across the rocky terrain of other planets and plunge into the dark depths of the ocean.
Falls are the leading cause of injury for older adults, causing more than 20,000 deaths a year in the United States alone. Now, a team of researchers is using the same technology found in smartphone touch screens to detect these dangerous tumbles as soon as they happen.