Action Video Games Change Brains

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2012/04/27/action_videogames_change_brains.html

     In this article we learn how playing an action video game, even for a relatively short time causes differences in the brain. From this article we learn that there are many differences between people who play video games and people who avoid them. They showed significant changes in the brainwaves. Many tests have shows that the action in video games can improve selective visual attention and the ability to quickly detect and identify targets in cluttered backgrounds. 

      I found this article interesting even though I don't play video games because it shows how the games can improve some of your relfexes and can make some of your skills sharper.

posted for R. Dubinski

Coffee gives Jolt to Life Span

            The article “Coffee gives Jolt to Life Span” was fabulously written by Nathan Seppa. The article on ScienceNews.com discusses a study performed involving the health benefits of drinking coffee regularly. This study was performed on a group of over 400,000 men and women all of whom lack any prior medical issues. The experiment lasted 27 years and at 13.5 years it was found that those who drank who or more cups of coffee per day were 10-16% less likely to have died than non-drinkers. However, one cup per day proved to be less beneficial. The study also found that women who drank coffee reeked more benefits than men who drank the same amount of coffee everyday. The daily coffee intake reduces one’s chance of death due to heart disease, respiratory ailments, and diabetes. Differences such as body weight, height, smoking status, consumption of alcohol, red/white meat, vitamins, etc were all accounted for. It was also proven that caffeine was not the factor in why coffee was so beneficial.

            After being told so many times that coffee is irreversibly bad for your health, it was surprising to find out otherwise. Coffee has become a major part of everyday life for the majority of Americans. It’s practically impossible to go more than a block in New York City without seeing a Starbucks open for business. This article will definitely make me rethink not having coffee in the morning.

           This article was very well written. Nathan Seppa did a great job using simple, yet elegant language to describe this experiment. There were very few scientific words used, but when there were he made sure to define them for the reader. I also enjoyed the way he split up the paragraphs to make it easier to focus on what was going on.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340733/title/Coffee_gives_jolt_to_life_span

posted for M. Donovan 

Bugs Help Measure Impact of New Transoceanic Highway on Amazon

“Bugs Help Measure Impact of New Transoceanic Highway on Amazon” from National Geographic is a very relevant and important article to the environmental issues we are facing today. This article is explaining the citizen led studies of the Transoceanic Highway which is a major road that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil to the Pacific Ocean in Peru, opened to the public for the first time earlier this year. Although this highway brings high economic benefits, many environmental concerns about the impact it will have on the Amazon’s plants and animals is unavoidably evident. The leaf pack is an experiment designed by the Stroud Water Research Center in Pennsylvania that is meant to study the water quality of the Amazon near the highway. The leaf pack consists of a mesh net stuffed with local tree leaves and secured to the bed of a stream. Despite such a simple design and idea, “the leaf packs can reveal a surprising amount of information about not only the health of a stream, but also the land surround it” Mustalish once said. An example of the information gathered from the leaf pack is if a stream contains a high population of flies known as midges, it is a sure sign that the ecosystem is polluted due to the fact that midges can tolerate low oxygen levels and high levels of silt in the water. Overall, the leaf pack project will focus on three key groups.  These groups of insects are mayflies, stoneflies and caddis flies.  These insects are specifically known from other studies to be excellent gauges of watershed health. By the presence and disappearance of those few groups of insects, these scientists will be able to determine the quality of the water and the overall effect that the highway had the richness of the ecosystem. The monitoring of these leaf packs has just begun and will continue until November but already significant data has been recorded that supports the idea that the highway dramatically hurts and affects the surrounding ecosystems in the Amazon. It will be very interesting what information these scientists gather in the coming months.

            I feel this article is really important nowadays due to the over construction and development of land all throughout the world. We are overworking the earth and causing too many problems that we will not be able to fix in order to sustain or planet. I choose this article because it is very relevant to me and my AP Environmental Science course I took this year, as this exactly was a very important topic and I learned a lot about the construction of roads and the serious effects it has on an ecosystem. 

            Overall, I was very interested by this article and I had a great time reading it. The only thing I think maybe could be improved upon is the condensing of the information projected in the article. While a great article with lots of information, I sometimes felt that stuff was being repeated and maybe could have been cut out in order to simplify and organize the article for easier reading. Despite this, it was still a great article with very relevant and strong message to us as a whole, today.

Than, Ker. "Bugs Help Measure Impact of New Transoceanic Highway on Amazon."National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 18 May 2012. Web. 23 May 2012. <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/05/120518-leaf-packs-transoceanic-highway-amazon-water-quality/>. 

New Report Shows 15 Million Babies Born Too Soon Every Year

The article "New Report Shows 15 Million Babies Born Too Soon Every Year", provides fascinating insight into the world of premature birth. In the article, researchers have conducted a Global Action Report, and found that 15 million, more than 10% of all babies born, have premature births. Here a premature, or preterm birth, is defined as a baby being born before 37 weeks in the womb. 9 of the 11 countries with premature birth rates of over 15 percent can be found in Africa. Packed in among what many would label third-world and developing countries, comes the United States with 12 preterm births for every 100. Just ahead, sit Pakistan, Indonesia, and Zimbabwe. Topping the list of countries with the most preterm births were India, China, and Nigeria, with the United States coming in 6th place. 

This is a very important article for society, and clearly illustrates that preterm pregnancy doesn’t just apply to third world and developing countries. It was absolutely astonishing to see the United States nestled in with the likes of Pakistan, Nigeria, and Congo in terms of most preterm births, though this can be attributed, in part, to our population of 300 million. Another figure that caught me off guard was that of a 12 percent preterm birth rate in the United States. 

I found this article to be very interesting, and found the statistics in it unbelievable. In a class of around 25, like ours, at least 3 of us could be expected to have been prematurely born. This astonishes me, as the United States is the world leader in things such as health care and technology, and one would expect such a medically and technologically inclined society to have fewer preterm births. I enjoyed reviewing this article, and found it ver interesting and insightful.

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2012/05/03/new_report_shows_15_million_babies_born_too_soon_every_year.html

Imagining the Future Invokes Your Memory

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=memories-of-tomorrow

            This article delved into the findings of a recent study from the January issue of Psychological Science that may explain why we are all so optimistic about the future. The authors of the study reported that people tend to remember imagined future scenarios that are happy better than they recall the unhappy ones. First of all, this idea of “remembered futures” is a topic of great interest in the cognitive science world as of late. This seemingly contradictory phrase is basically referring to how we all imagine the future and then later recall those imagined scenarios—in a sense, remembering. Recent research has shown that the same brain areas are active when we remember past events and when we think about the future. This leads scientists to find that we use these memories all the time to prepare for what’s next: if we can remember the actions and reactions we thought about in the past, our future behavior will be more efficient. So, the team of scientists from Harvard came up with a way of generating authentic future simulations, of which the characteristics and staying power were then examined. They began by collecting a lot of biographical detail from volunteers’ actual memories. This information included people they had known, places they had been and the ordinary things surrounding them. A week later the researchers took each person’s “raw material” and mixed it all together. They presented the students with random combinations and instructed them to generate imaginary future scenarios for each one. Sometimes the volunteers were told to imagine a positive future, sometimes a negative one and others times neutral. Finally, afterwards, the researchers tested the volunteers’ memories of these future scenarios by giving them two of the three details and asking them to fill in the missing detail. The researchers found that after only a 10-minute delay, the volunteers could remember all types of scenarios equally well. One day later, however, the details of negative simulations were much more difficult to recall than the details of positive or neutral simulations. These findings support what is known about negative memories for actual past events, which also tend to fade more rapidly than positive ones. Szpu­nar and his colleagues hypothesize that the emotion associated with a future simulation is “the glue that binds together the details of the scenario in memory.”
            This article is of importance because the study is one that is quite relevant to an everyday cognitive function of a neurotypical person. We all come up with scenarios of the future and recall these scenarios time and again. The fact that we all tend to remember positive scenarios more readily than negative ones is definitely a hopeful thing for humanity. This is relatable to the converse, how people suffering from depression often dwell on the negative parts of the past and also create negative futures. I find that this is one of those studies that you can’t help but be intrigued by because it digs into some utterly human behavior that we can all connect with and then tells us something more about why we are the way we are.
            Nonetheless, if I were to offer one point of criticism for this article I would have to say that I would have liked for the author to describe more of the limitations of the study and the experiments performed by this team because, ironically, the set-up of this study had a rosy tint to it itself. The author does note that not much was known about this theory until recently, though he doesn’t go into what we don’t know or what we have to build on besides just this study.

Herbert, Wray. "Imagining the Future Invokes Your Memory." Scientific American Magazine. Scientific American Magazine, 12 May 2012. Web. 15 May 2012.

Herd’s Fate Lies in Preservation Clash

The article, “Herd’s Fate Lies in Preservation Clash” by Laura Beil was extremely informative and interesting. This article outlines the problems that the wild horses which live on a beach in Corolla, North Carolina are facing. These majestic horses which roam the beaches of North Carolina are said to be the descendants of the horses which the Spanish explorers rode five hundred years ago. The herd has dwindled from thousands of horses to just a couple hundred. The biggest herd has approximately 140 horses which inhabit only 7,500 acres. These horses have very little space to live in and they don’t have many natural predators. As a result, the herd has become increasingly inbred and many scientists predict a genetic collapse in only a couple of generations. One way in which scientists believe this problem can be solved is by placing new mares into the herd so there is an “introduction of fresh genes.”  In addition, a bill has been passed in Congress which sets a herd size at 110 to 130 with the new mares. This bill was passed because of Dr. Cothran’s hypothesis that a herd of 60 horses could live if, and only if, a new mare was to enter the group each generation (about every 8 years). However this plan is not as simple as it sounds. By placing new mares into the herd, the size will increase and so will the needs of the herd. The herd will need to use up more space on the beach but there are other endangered species which need the space. Furthermore, the increased size of the herd could lead to detrimental environmental effects. In addition, the horses do not stay strictly on the beaches. On numerous occasions the horses have been found grazing in people’s backyards and walking down roads. Moreover, tourists present another problem. Many tourists feed the horses food that they can’t digest and are careless on the roads. A horse died from an intestinal blockage from food that it could not digest and many others have died from being hit by reckless drivers. 

I found this article to be extremely relevant to our society today. There is a lot to learn about breeding and species from this article, but also about our effect, as humans, on a species of animals. Oftentimes we forget the enormous impact that we can have on animals and the environment. For example, the tourists which fed the wild horse watermelon rinds probably thought he was doing the horse a favor. However, the watermelon rinds proved to be that horse’s last meal. This article is very important and should serve as a warning to people that we must treat animals with respect and reverence and not take them for granted.

I thought that this article was very well structured and extremely well written. I thought that the author was able to get his point across to the reader without being too preachy. I also enjoyed the fact that the author moved from topic to topic with good transitions and was, as a result, able to cover many points within the article. In addition, I thought that the author explained the problem clearly and concisely and was able to outline the solutions as well. 

Beil, Laura. "Wild Horses’ Fate in Outer Banks Lies in Preservation Clash." The New York Times. The New York Times, 08 May 2012. Web. 09 May 2012. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/science/wild-horses-fate-in-outer-banks-lies-in-preservation-clash.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=science

Action Video Games Change Brains

           

There have been many studies done recently to find differences in brain activity between action video game players and non-videogame players. A recent study, by psychology professor Ian Spence at the University of Toronto, tested and proved that playing action video games causes differences in both brain activity and improvements in visual attention. This was the first time research linked these differences directly to playing video games. This experiment used 25 people (who were not regular “gamers”) who played ten hours of video games in one to two hour sessions. Sixteen of them played a first-person shooter game and 9 people played a 3-D puzzle game (the control group). The people used in the experiment had their brain waves recorded both before and after playing the video games. Those who played the shooter video game showed significant changes in their brain waves and a greater improvement on visual attention than those who played the 3-D puzzle game. "After playing the shooter game, the changes in electrical activity were consistent with brain processes that enhance visual attention and suppress distracting information," said Sijing Wu, a PhD student in Spence's lab and lead author of the study. Spence said that different studies, on this topic, have shown that action video games can improve selective visual attention but no one has previously proven that different brain activity is a direct result of playing an action video game.

             

              This article is very relatable to many people’s lives. I know many children, including my brother, were nagged by their parents to stop playing video games because it was “going to hurt their brains,” or some other lame excuse to try to get their children to stop playing. But now, after all this research and experiments have been done, playing action video games may actually help children that play them, helping them expand their visual attention.

           

               I thought this was a very interesting article to read and I thought the outcome of the experiment was also fascinating. Before reading this article, I also believed that playing video games was bad for you, so it was very cool to find out almost the opposite and that playing video games is almost good for you.

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2012/04/27/action_videogames_change_brains.html

Posted for J. Carroll