the generalyst

The Pre-Teen Brain

2010-03-24T04:49:00.000-07:00

"Any parent or middle-school teacher could tell you that adolescents often have, shall we say, a resistance to learning. In fact, behavioral scientists have shown that certain cognitive processes slow down through puberty. In video game tests of spatial learning, for example, middle-schoolers did not perform nearly as well as fifth-graders.

But now scientists say they have pinpointed the neurological mechanism that most likely clouds the adolescent brain, along with a possible trick for spurring those 'tween and teen neurons to start firing again."

Read the full story.

how daylight saving wears us out

2010-03-16T10:34:00.001-07:00

Rolling the clocks forward an hour isn't just annoying...it's unhealthy.

A story I wrote Friday, after talking to some experts about the effects.

reading minds

2010-03-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

A story for AOL NEWS:

Mind-reading devices are still a thing of science fiction, but scientists can now peer into the brain and pinpoint complex memories.

In the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, researchers at University College London report using a brain scanner to effectively figure out what different people were thinking. "Given a set of memories, we could tell just from the patterns of activity in the hippocampus which memory a person was recalling," says study co-author Eleanor Maguire.

Read the rest here.

read me the rhythm

2010-03-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

A translator talking about meeting with the author whose book he's working on:

VK: Well, we’d go to a café and he’d say, “Just read me what you’ve got. I don’t know English, but read it to me.” And I would and he would listen for the rhythm. And if he thought the rhythm approximated that, he would be happy with that. So that’s what he would listen to, the rhythm of it, if what I was translating rhythmically matched the original.

Read it all on/in/at Quarterly Conversation.

Quake Detectives

2010-03-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

Just wrote a story for AOL News on the seismologists and engineers who are rushing down to Chile to study the effects of the massive quake, including the ongoing after-slip. Here's a quote from the piece:

"The first priority is human relief. People need doctors, medicine, water, food, shelter, before seismologists," seismologist Christophe Vigny of the École Normale Supérieure, an expert on the area, wrote in an e-mail. "But hopefully, we will all be there by the end of the week."

And the rest.

Why We Can't Resist Big Action Movies

2010-02-24T07:18:00.000-08:00

I wrote this for AOL News. Really wild research. No mention of Matthew McConaughey, though, which is disappointing. Anyway:

Any moviegoer could attest to the fact that today's big hits, such as "Avatar" or "Sherlock Holmes," are faster-paced than the films of 50 years ago. But Cornell University psychologist James Cutting and his group have quantified just how much faster and found something even more revealing. It's not just that individual camera shots are shorter. In a new paper in Psychological Science, Cutting and his team uncover an underlying pattern -- a sort of secret sauce -- to modern blockbusters.

What it shows is that even the snobbiest cineast shouldn't feel bad for getting wrapped up in a schlocky popcorn flick. The way those films are made practically guarantees we can't turn away.

And the rest of the article....

The Physics of Shaun White

2010-02-24T07:16:00.000-08:00

After taking his second consecutive gold in the men's halfpipe event at the Winter Olympics, U.S. snowboarder Shaun White is clearly the dominant athlete in his sport, and arguably in all of the Winter Games. So what makes him so great? What underlying abilities allow him to pull off those Double McTwist 1260s?

According to University of Virginia physicist Louis Bloomfield, author of the book "How Everything Works," it's a mix of factors. Ultimately, though, White's soaring performances all come down to raw energy.

Check it out here.

We Are All Predictable

2010-02-24T07:01:00.000-08:00

Physicist Albert-László Barabási can guess where you will be tomorrow at 3 p.m. And where you'll be Saturday night at 8. In fact, given enough data, he can predict your location at any time, with an average 93 percent accuracy. But don't worry. He's not watching you. In fact, his work shouldn't be cause for alarm so much as existential distress.

In a new paper published in the Feb. 19 issue of Science, the Northeastern University physicist and his colleagues describe how they used data from 50,000 anonymous cell phone users to study human mobility, or where we are and when. Their work reveals that our movements follow a pattern, whether we are homebodies or frequent fliers.

"The surprise was that we couldn't find unpredictable people," Barabási says. "We are all boring."

Read more here.