Chickens Agree: Counting From Left Works Best

This is the way I view numbers, along a spatial sequence. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chicken, anyone?
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By ERICA GOODE


Asked to picture the numbers from one to 10, most people will imagine a straight line with one at the left end and 10 at the right.

This “mental number line,” as researchers have termed it, is so pervasive that some scientists have argued that the spatial representation of numbers is hard-wired into the brain, part of a primitive number system that underlies humans’ capacity for higher mathematics.

Now Italian researchers have found that newborn chicks, like humans, appear to map numbers spatially, in the same way.

The chicks, trained to seek out mealworms behind white plastic panels printed with varying numbers of identical red squares, repeatedly demonstrated a preference for the left when the number of squares was small and for the right when the number was larger. The research, led by Rosa Rugani, a psychologist who at the time was at the University of Padova, appeared in the journal Science.

The researchers said the findings supported the idea that the left-right orientation for numbers is innate rather than determined by culture or education – a possibility that was raised by some studies that found that in Arabic-speaking countries where letters and numbers are read right to left, the mental number scale was reversed. But the new research, Dr. Rugani and her colleagues wrote, indicates that orienting numbers in space may represent “a universal cognitive strategy available soon after birth.”

Tyler Marghetis, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of California, San Diego, said: “We have brains that evolved for fighting and finding food, not for doing calculus. So one of the hopes of this kind of research is that it will tell us something about the basic building blocks we have access to in building up these more human concepts.”

But Mr. Marghetis said that the studies demonstrated only that the chicks associated rough quantities that were smaller or larger with left or right, not that they represented precise numbers in a mental line. And he cautioned against leaping to the idea that chicks are capable of the same complex abilities as humans.

Judging amounts, either of how much food is available or how many predators are nearby, is an important tool for survival. And many nonhuman species – including chickens, monkeys and even some fish – have some ability to count, though these may be a capacity to distinguish rough numerical magnitude rather than precise numbers.

Human studies indicate that when presented with a task involving numbers people automatically create a mental scale, using one number as an anchor and locating smaller numbers to the left and larger ones to the right. The new research suggests that some version of this may be true for chickens. “We cannot think of any other, and simpler, explanation for the behavior of the chicks than assuming the training number is 1) remembered and 2) compared with the number seen at test,” Dr. Rugani said in an email.


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, March 14, 2015

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For Healthier Rice, Bacteria Deployed to Fight a Poison

Mature rice panicle against blue sky. Part of the image collection of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By CARINA STORR


When Harsh Bais grows rice plants in trays of water in his greenhouse at the University of Delaware, he can easily spot the ones that have been exposed to arsenic: They are stunted, with shorter stems and shrunken leaves.

Dr. Bais is working to develop rice plants that take up less arsenic, a common contaminant in the fields of his native India and other Asian countries. Chronic exposure to arsenic has been linked to heart disease, diabetes and genetic damage associated with elevated risks for cancer.

But instead of trying to breed new strains of rice or alter its DNA, he and other scientists are looking at the vast microbial community that lives near the rice’s roots.

These bacteria are the botanic equivalent of the human microbiome – the trillions of organisms that live in our guts, many performing beneficial tasks like digesting food and fighting off infection.

The hope is to find bacteria that will somehow block arsenic. In the past three years, Dr. Bais has isolated about a dozen bacterial species, added them to plants and looked for signs of arsenic poisoning.

Now, he says, he has zeroed in on one species, Pantoea agglomerans, that seems to reduce arsenic in the stem to one-eighth its former levels.

“Research on the plant microbiome is very hot because everyone is trying to find things that can increase growth and yield,” said Dr. Bais, an associate professor at Delaware.

For scientists interested in tweaking plant traits, there is a list longer than ever of bacteria to investigate. Advances in DNA sequencing have made it possible to identify large groups of related bacteria from different plant types and soil conditions.

Agricultural companies are already using bacteria on seeds of major crops such as corn and soybeans to help them bear more fruit or require less fertilizer. This year, Monsanto entered a partnership with Novozymes, a Danish company that sells more than 200 biologic products, to test organisms from the corn and soybean microbiomes at thousands of field sites.

A study of the rice microbiome is underway in the lab of Venkatesan Sundaresan, at the University of California, Davis. Using DNA sequencing, he has found at least a quarter-million bacterial species in the rice microbiome.

Dr. Sundaresan is also interested in the functions of individual microbes. So he is collaborating with Dr. Bais, shipping him soil from rice roots in his test field in Davis.

P. agglomerans is the first microbe that has been shown to reduce arsenic in rice. While the microbe appears to keep most arsenic out of the rice’s stem and leaves, the crucial question is how it affects the grain.

“Microbes for crops have the reputation of being finicky.” said Tom Adams, vice president for chemistry technology at Monsanto. But he added that new technology could help predict which microbes would work best in different soil and environmental conditions.


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, September 27, 2014

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Success Is Not Just About Smarts

English: Logo of One Laptop per Child (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like this article. Not that it disregards technology, but it enforces the truth, that with or without technology, our basis for success is not only intelligence. I mean, being smart gives you a headstart, but grit - fortitude and determination, coupled with persistence, and all of the other good values - these what makes the basis for making it good in life. But then again, it is not a guarantee...
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TOM BRADY


Technology has been promoted as the great equalizer in education. Initiatives like One Laptop Per Child and Massive Online Open Courses were supposed to democratize learning, but when the $400 laptops given to poor children around the world broke, and failure rates of some MOOCs were as high as 75 percent, reality set in.

Though many believe that computers can shrink the education gap, research shows that giving students from poor families online access is more likely to widen the divide, Susan Pinker reported in The Times. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd, economists at Duke University in North Carolina, tracked a million disadvantaged middle-school students for five years after they were given networked computers and found “a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” they wrote. The scores of boys and African-Americans dropped drastically because many used their machines to play games, surf social media and download entertainment.

The same thing happened in the One Laptop project, with children spending less time on their homework than before, researchers found.

New findings suggest that educators should focus more on low teacher-student ratios, early intervention and character traits.

Chicago has introduced an intensive program where black and Latino boys work two on one with a tutor, and participants have ended up as much as two years ahead of students who haven’t gotten help, David Kirp wrote in The Times. This math success also has put them on track to graduate, helped them engage in school and made them less likely to be arrested for a violent crime.

Many programs address the time between birth and age 3, but the teen years may be just as important. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, points out in his new book that neuroscientists have realized that adolescence, like early childhood, Is a “period of tremendous ‘neuroplasticity,’ ” during which the brain changes through experience.

The Time’s Nicholas Kristof wrote that early help for disadvantaged children not only reduces inequality but also can save public money. He quoted James Heckman, a University of Chicago professor and Nobel Prize-winning economists, who says the cheapest way to reduce crime is to invest in early childhood programs. Mr. Heckman has calculated that to get the same reduction in crime by adding police officers would cost five times as much.

“Early education” includes counseling at-risk pregnant women not to drink, smoke or take drugs, and then after birth, helping them breast-feed and read to the child. These help, Mr.Kristof wrote, “apparently because the first few years are the window when the brain is forming and when basic skills like self-control and grit are developed.”

At some schools, grit, self- control and curiosity are now part of the curriculum. Scientists say personality could be more important than intelligence when it comes to success in school.

Arthur E. Poropat, an Australian psychology professor, cites data showing that a tendency to be “diligent, dutiful and hardworking,” and qualities like creativity and curiosity, are more predictive of student performance than intelligence. This is good news, Dr. Poropat wrote in a paper last year, because “personality has been demonstrated to change over time to a far greater extent than intelligence.”

“We probably need to start rethinking our emphasis on intelligence,” he told The Times.

Mandy Benedix, who teaches a class on grit at Rogers Middle School in Pearland, Texas, told The Times: “We know that these non-cognitive traits can be taught. We also know that it is necessary for success. You look at anybody who has had long-term sustainable success, and every one of them exhibited at some point this grit, this tenacity to keep going.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, February 28, 2015

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Making the Cells and Tissue Bigger, to Get a Better Look

Microscopic view of a histologic specimen of human lung tissue stained with hematoxylin and eosin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY JOHN MARKOFF 


A new laboratory technique enables researchers to see minuscule biological features, such as individual neurons and synapses, at a nearly molecular scale through conventional optical microscopes.

In a paper published recently in the journal Science, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they were able to increase the physical size of cells and tissue by as much as five times while still preserving their structure. They call the new technique expansion microscopy.

By extending the resolving power of conventional microscopes, Scientists can glimpse the protein structures that form ion channels and the outline of the membrane that holds the genome within a cell. The researchers have examined minute neutral circuits, gaining new insights into local connections in the brain and a better understanding of larger networks.

The maximum resolving power of conventional microscopes is about 200 nanometers. (A human hair is about 500 times wider.) In recent decades, scientist have struggled to push past these limits.

Last year, three scientists received a Nobel Prize for a technique in which fluorescent molecules are used to extend the resolving power of optical microscopes. But the technique requires specialized equipment and is costly.

With expansion microscopy, Edward S. Boyden of the M.I.T. Center for Neurobiological Engineering and his colleagues were able to observe objects originally measuring just 70 nanometers in cultured cells and brain tissue through an optical microscope. They were also able to produce super-resolution animations in which the viewer “flies” through a detailed three-dimensional image of a mouse hippocampus.

“We hope we have a technology that will allow you to scan the nervous system of entire animals,” Dr.Boyden said.

The idea began as a joke, according to Dr. Boyden. But he and two graduate students realized it might be feasible after exploring the work of Toyoichi Tanaka, who discovered a class of “intelligent” gels that respond to stimuli such as water.

One of those materials is a polymer used in diapers, which absorbs 200 times to 300 times its mass in water. The researchers realized it was perfect for forcing biological tissue to swell.

The researchers apply fluorescent dye to the sample. Then they infuse the tissue with the chemical building blocks of the polymer. The blocks form the polymer inside the tissue, which is then chemically “chopped up” so it can be enlarged. Then, just add water. The tissue expands, and the tiny structures traced in fluorescence burst into view.

Expansion microscopy may permit scientists to create three-dimensional models of large areas in the brain of animals, making it possible to map biological processes from one region to the next. And the technique may reveal the structures of individual proteins, structural detail inside cells and other biological features in near-molecular detail.

Dr. Boyden said the imaging technique will not directly capture dynamic processes in the brain, but it may make it possible to gain insight into brain function by taking samples before and after events.


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, January 31, 2015

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Giving Up Science For a Life of Writing

University of Iowa logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kids, this is an example of how you can be someone other than what you studied in school. You do what you like, and where your passion is, put all your heart into it. Be the best that you can be!
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BY LARRY ROHTER


OAKLAND, California – Growing up in Beijing as the daughter of a physicist, Yiyun Li seemed destined for science. But she would surreptitiously read from Tang dynasty poetry while “pretending to do math.” Years later, studying for a Ph.D. in immunology at the University of Iowa, she read short stories clipped from The New Yorker as she did lab work.

“My parents were very much against writing and even very much against me reading literature, which they thought put wrong thoughts in your head,” she recalled. “I don’t think they liked me reading anything but science.”

About a dozen years ago, Ms. Li abandoned medicine and enrolled in the renowned writing program at Iowa. Since then, she has published two highly praised short-story collections, written a pair of novels, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” (a no-strings attached stipend of $625,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years) and been named to lists of “ best young American writers.”

Yet, when she arrived in the United State in 1996, she had written nothing in either Chinese or English, a language she could speak, if not yet colloquially.

“She’s an interesting case for a writer writing in a second language,” said John Freeman, a former editor of Granta, the British literary magazine that named Ms. Li, now 41, to its best young novelist list.

“There’s an elegance and smoothness to her writing that is actually disguising the quite passionate and intense feelings of equivocation and loss that her characters feel.”

Ms. Li’s latest novel, “Kinder than Solitude,” from Random House, shifts between China and the United States. Its four main characters start out as adolescent friends growing up around a Beijing courtyard in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. After the oldest is poisoned, perhaps by one of the others, the survivors drift apart: One becomes a prosperous but soulless businessman riding China’s economic boom, while the other two flee to America, settling in college towns like Berkeley, Madison and Cambridge but never quite learning how to fit in.

Because of these immigrant touches, Ms. Li is often grouped with novelist like Jhumpa Lahiri, Gary Shteyngart and Daniel Alarcon as a first-generation “new American” writer. But she points out that she came to the United State as an adult, and did not grow up bilingual.

“I actually don’t know what an immigrant writer should be written about,” she said, “and if you look at my characters, they don’t struggle as immigrants. They actually do fairly well. If they want, they can have a good life. It’s more that they have to deal with their internal struggles” and the problems they bring from China.

Ms. Li seems to have adapted smoothly to America. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and described ferrying her sons, Vincent and James, to music lessons and sports; her husband, Dapeng Li, who was her college sweetheart in China, is a software engineer at the Pandora music service.

Ms. Li said that in China she did not write anything in Chinese, except a journal she kept as a teenager. Though most of her characters are Chinese, when she hears them talking in her head, they are speaking English. English “felt very natural to me very fast,” she said. “I think in English, I dream in English. I came to English as a grown-up, which is probably to my advantage. The disadvantage is that you don’t have that intimacy with the language.”

The writer Amy Leach, a classmate at Iowa and still a close friend, said, “We’ve talked about how it can be an advantage not to have all those ready-made clichés springing to your mind and precluding more original thinking and wording.”

Ms. Li said, “You miss a lot of idioms, cultural things,” if you don’t go to middle school or high school in the language. “On the other hand, I think if you do approach a language as a grown-up and then use it to write, you also bypass a lot of silliness.”


Taken from The New York Times International Weekly, TODAY Saturday Edition, March 8, 2014

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