Urban Sketchers Portugal Panamath Watercolor Painting Free lessons and tutorials, Step-by-step paintings, techniques, hints and tips Press releases - Turing's Sunflowers Thursday 22 March 2012 Thousands of sunflowers will be planted in honour of the mathematician Alan Turing as part of a new research project led by MOSI (Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester) and Manchester Science Festival, in association with The University of Manchester. A hundred years after Turing was born families, schools, community groups and businesses will be encouraged to plant over 3000 sunflowers to celebrate his work and help solve a mathematical riddle that he worked on before his death in 1954. Alan Turing is famous for his code-breaking skills which helped to crack the Enigma Code during the Second World War, and as a founder of computer science and artificial intelligence, but later he became fascinated with the mathematical patterns found in stems, leaves and seeds - a study known as phyllotaxis. Erinma Ochu, Project Manager of Turing’s Sunflowers said: “This is a fantastic opportunity to learn about the wonder of maths in nature. Notes to editors
Baby Laughter Survey | The Baby Laughter project The laughter of tiny babies is not just a phenomenally popular theme for YouTube videos, it is also a fantastic window into the workings of the human brain. You can’t laugh unless you get the joke and neither can your baby. At Birkbeck Babylab we study how babies learn about the world. We believe that studying early laughter in detail will throw new light on the workings of babies’ brains, as well as offering new insights into the uniquely human characteristic that is humour. There are LOTS of ways you and your baby can help us: 1. 2. 3. Thank you, Dr. (Visited 230 time, 8 visit today) Like this: Like Loading...
MyHeartMap Challenge The Device That Saves Lives, But Can Be Hard to Find November 12, 2012 | By Ron Winslow If you needed an automated external defibrillator to help a victim of sudden cardiac arrest, chances are you would have trouble finding one, even if a device were located nearby. That's despite the fact that about one million AEDs—portable devices that can jump-start the heart and save lives when sudden cardiac arrest strikes—are installed in office buildings, malls, schools and sports stadiums around the U.S. <read more> Contest aims to map Philadelphia's AEDS January 31, 2012 | Action News AEDs - or automated external defibrillators can save lives. Health: MyHeartMap Challenge Saves Lives With Cell Phones January 31, 2012 5:15 PM | By Stephanie Stahl There's a new challenge for people in Philadelphia. Global contest will lead to help during heart attacks January 31, 2012 3:01 AM | By Marie McCullough | Inquirer Staff Writer Man Who Suffered Near Fatal Heart Attack Reunited With His 'Angels'
World Water Monitoring Challenge : Test. Share. Protect. Citizen Sort American Gut In the summer of 2008, a 26-year-old man from Shanxi Province walked into a lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and 23 weeks later walked out 113 pounds lighter. He had not participated in a clinical trial of some new secret weight loss pill, or signed up for a punishing Biggest Loser-style exercise program, nor had he been fussed over by behavioral scientists who made his plates and drinking cups smaller with each passing week. The researchers, who were microbiologists, had simply put the man’s gut microbes on a diet. One of the huge mysteries in studies of diet and exercise is the difference between people who get the same treatment but have remarkably different outcomes. But why are there such extreme differences between people? Is our DNA to blame? In addition to the familiar human genome that we inherit from our moms and dads, each of us also has hundreds of trillions of microbial symbionts, each with their own genomes. No. 5. No. 4. No. 3. No. 2. No. 1.
Citizen Science Alliance Citizen Science Bioblitzes are gatherings of citizen scientists—and great introductions to citizen science itself! Just bring your smartphone and powers of observation to help catalog the natural wonders of urban parks and open space. Spearheaded by our friends at Nerds for Nature, bioblitzes are gatherings of scientists, citizen scientists, land managers, and more, all working together to find and identify as many different species as possible—everything from an ant to a redwood tree! Bioblitzes not only help land managers build a species list and atlas for their park, they also highlight the incredible biodiversity in these urban oases. Participants use the iNaturalist app to document their plant and animal observations, and we end each bioblitz with a “wrap session” that allows the group to see what everyone found and help each other with identifications. Learn more about and register for upcoming bioblitzes by visiting www.nerdsfornature.org/bioblitz. See what was found at past bioblitzes:
Foldit Gamers Solve Riddle of HIV Enzyme within 3 Weeks When video gamers armed with the world's most powerful supercomputers take on science and its most vexing riddles, who wins? Sometimes, it's the gamers. Humans retain an edge over computers when complex problems require intuition and leaps of insight rather than brute calculation. Savvy programmers and researchers at the University of Washington have tapped into this human "supercomputer" with Foldit, an online game that poses complex puzzles about how proteins fold, one of the hardest and most expensive problems in biology today. "Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins," the company explains on its website. "Since proteins are part of so many diseases, they can also be part of the cure. They've been on a tear ever since. Their latest solution has resolved a problem stumping scientists for a decade. Want to discover the next cure? Game on.