Bionics - Prodigies - Voting Genes? - Washoe's Lessons

[Marc Breedlove]

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/346135/description/Beginnings_of_Bionic

Beginnings of Bionic

By Meghan Rosen

Michael McAlpine’s shiny circuit doesn’t look
like something you would stick in your mouth.
It’s dashed with gold, has a coiled antenna and
is glued to a stiff rectangle. But the antenna
flexes, and the rectangle is actually silk, its
stiffness melting away under water. And if you
paste the device on your tooth, it could keep you healthy.

The electronic gizmo is designed to detect
dangerous bacteria and send out warning signals,
alerting its bearer to microbes slipping past the
lips. Recently, McAlpine, of Princeton
University, and his colleagues spotted a single
E. coli bacterium skittering across the surface
of the gadget’s sensor. The sensor also picked
out ulcer-causing H. pylori amid the molecular
medley of human saliva, the team reported earlier
this year in Nature Communications.

At about the size of a standard postage stamp,
the dental device is still too big to fit
comfortably in a human mouth. “We had to use a
cow tooth,” McAlpine says, describing test
experiments. But his team plans to shrink the
gadget so it can nestle against human enamel.
McAlpine is convinced that one day, perhaps five
to 10 years from now, everyone will wear some
sort of electronic device. “It’s not just teeth,”
he says. “People are going to be bionic.”

McAlpine belongs to a growing pack of tech-savvy
scientists figuring out how to merge the rigid,
brittle materials of conventional electronics
with the soft, curving surfaces of human tissues.
Their goal: To create products that have the high
performance of silicon wafers ­ the crystalline
material used in computer chips ­ while still moving with the body.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012
--------------------


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/magazine/how-do-you-raise-a-prodigy.html?pagewanted=all

How Do You Raise a Prodigy?

By ANDREW SOLOMON

Drew Petersen didn’t speak until he was 3½, but
his mother, Sue, never believed he was slow. When
he was 18 months old, in 1994, she was reading to
him and skipped a word, whereupon Drew reached
over and pointed to the missing word on the page.
Drew didn’t produce much sound at that stage, but
he already cared about it deeply. “Church bells
would elicit a big response,” Sue told me.
“Birdsong would stop him in his tracks.”

Sue, who learned piano as a child, taught Drew
the basics on an old upright, and he became
fascinated by sheet music. “He needed to decode
it,” Sue said. “So I had to recall what little I
remembered, which was the treble clef.” As Drew
told me, “It was like learning 13 letters of the
alphabet and then trying to read books.” He
figured out the bass clef on his own, and when he
began formal lessons at 5, his teacher said he
could skip the first six months’ worth of
material. Within the year, Drew was performing
Beethoven sonatas at the recital hall at Carnegie
Hall. “I thought it was delightful,” Sue said,
“but I also thought we shouldn’t take it too
seriously. He was just a little boy.”

On his way to kindergarten one day, Drew asked
his mother, “Can I just stay home so I can learn
something?” Sue was at a loss. “He was reading
textbooks this big, and they’re in class holding
up a blowup M,” she said. Drew, who is now 18,
said: “At first, it felt lonely. Then you accept
that, yes, you’re different from everyone else,
but people will be your friends anyway.” Drew’s
parents moved him to a private school. They
bought him a new piano, because he announced at 7
that their upright lacked dynamic contrast. “It
cost more money than we’d ever paid for anything
except a down payment on a house,” Sue said. When
Drew was 14, he discovered a home-school program
created by Harvard; when I met him two years ago,
he was 16, studying at the Manhattan School of
Music and halfway to a Harvard bachelor’s degree.

© 2012 The New York Times Company
--------------------


http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-genes-dont-predict-voting-behavior

Why Genes Don’t Predict Voting Behavior

By Evan Charney and William English

Dozens of studies in the past few years have
linked single genes to whether a person is
liberal or conservative, has a strong party
affiliation or is likely to vote reguarly. The
discipline of “genopolitics” has grabbed
headlines as a result, but is the claim that a
few genes influence political views and actions legitimate?

We don't think so. The kinds of studies that have
produced many of the findings we question involve
searching for connections between behavior and
gene variants that occur frequently in the
population. Most of the 20,000 to 25,000 human
genes come in hundreds or thousands of common
variations, which often consist of slight
differences in a gene's sequence of DNA code
letters or in repeats of a particular segment.
For the most part, scientists do not know what
effect, if any, these common variants, known as
polymorphisms, have on the functioning of the
proteins they encode. Genes predict certain
well-defined physiological diseases­such as
hereditary breast cancer and the risk of
developing Alzheimer's disease­but when it comes
to complex human behaviors such as voting, the link is tenuous at best.

One of the most prominent papers showing a link
between a few polymorphisms and political
behavior was published by James Fowler and
Christopher Dawes in 2008 in the Journal of
Politics. They concluded that people who possess
certain variants of a gene called MAOA are more
likely to vote than those who do not and that
people with a particular variant of a gene known
as 5-HTT who regularly attend religious services
are also more likely to vote. We do not believe
that these conclusions are right.

© 2012 Scientific American
--------------------


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/opinion/sunday/seeing-things-hearing-things-many-of-us-do.html?ref=health&_r=0

Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do

By OLIVER SACKS

HALLUCINATIONS are very startling and
frightening: you suddenly see, or hear or smell
something ­ something that is not there. Your
immediate, bewildered feeling is, what is going
on? Where is this coming from? The hallucination
is convincingly real, produced by the same neural
pathways as actual perception, and yet no one
else seems to see it. And then you are forced to
the conclusion that something ­ something
unprecedented ­ is happening in your own brain or
mind. Are you going insane, getting dementia, having a stroke?

In other cultures, hallucinations have been
regarded as gifts from the gods or the Muses, but
in modern times they seem to carry an ominous
significance in the public (and also the medical)
mind, as portents of severe mental or
neurological disorders. Having hallucinations is
a fearful secret for many people ­ millions of
people ­ never to be mentioned, hardly to be
acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from
uncommon. The vast majority are benign ­ and,
indeed, in many circumstances, perfectly normal.
Most of us have experienced them from time to
time, during a fever or with the sensory monotony
of a desert or empty road, or sometimes, seemingly, out of the blue.

Many of us, as we lie in bed with closed eyes,
awaiting sleep, have so-called hypnagogic
hallucinations ­ geometric patterns, or faces,
sometimes landscapes. Such patterns or scenes may
be almost too faint to notice, or they may be
very elaborate, brilliantly colored and rapidly
changing ­ people used to compare them to slide shows.

At the other end of sleep are hypnopompic
hallucinations, seen with open eyes, upon first
waking. These may be ordinary (an intensification
of color perhaps, or someone calling your name)
or terrifying (especially if combined with sleep
paralysis) ­ a vast spider, a pterodactyl above the bed, poised to strike.

© 2012 The New York Times Company
--------------------


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/2012/11/04/chimps-in-uganda-lessons-from-washoe/

Chimps in Uganda: Lessons from Washoe

By Maureen McCarthy

October 30th marked the five-year anniversary of
the death of my friend Washoe. Washoe was a
wonderful friend. She was confident and
self-assured. She was a matriarch, a mother
figure not only to her adopted son but to others
as well. She was kind and caring, but she didn’t
suffer fools. Washoe also happened to be known
around the world as the first nonhuman to acquire
aspects of a human language, American Sign
Language. You see, my friend Washoe was a chimpanzee.

Washoe was born somewhere in West Africa around
September 1965. Much like the chimpanzees I study
here in Uganda, Washoe’s mother cared for her
during infancy, nursing her, carrying her, and
sharing her sleeping nests with her. That changed
when her mother was killed so baby Washoe could
be taken from her forest home, then bought by the
US Air Force for use in biomedical testing.

Washoe was not used in this sort of testing,
however. Instead, Drs. Allen and Beatrix Gardner
of the University of Nevada chose her among the
young chimpanzees at Holloman Aeromedical
Laboratory to be cross-fostered. Cross-fostering
occurs when a youngster of one species is reared
by adults of a different species.

In this case, humans raised Washoe exactly as if
she were a deaf human child. She learned to brush
her teeth, drink from cups, and dress herself, in
the same way a human child learns these
behaviors. She was also exposed to humans using
sign language around her. In fact, humans used
only American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate
in Washoe’s presence, avoiding spoken English so
as to replicate as accurately as possible the
learning environment of a young human exposed to sign language.

© 2012 Scientific American
--------------------