where learning and memory are regulated. The study, which used an animal model, found that over-expression of the TLX gene resulted in smart, faster learners that retained information better and longer.
Understanding the link between this gene and the growth of new neurons or neurogenesis is an important step in developing therapies to address impaired learning
and memory associated with neurodegenerative diseases and aging. The new research was published June 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ph d.,lead author of the study and a neurosciences professor at City of Hope. In our study, we manipulated the expression of this receptor by introducing an additional copy of the gene
the region of the brain associated with learning and memory. Abstract of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper The role of the nuclear receptor TLX in hippocampal neurogenesis and cognition has begun just to be explored.
the TLX transgenic mice exhibited enhanced cognition with increased learning and memory. These results suggest a strong association between hippocampal neurogenesis and cognition,
as well as significant contributions of TLX to hippocampal neurogenesis, learning, and memory y
#Mobile can drive down healthcare costs and improve care Jawbone, wearable technology for a healthier lifestyle.
and open-source operating system and is inviting universities to help research and build it. He threw in a little dig at Microsoft
e want to reignite in all of our universities around the world operating system research which we think has been dormant or stagnant for decades.
According to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts institute of technology, who is working on 3-D displays for MIT s Media Lab,
Video)##Apparently not satisfied with giving you the instant equivalent of military sniper training, the folks at Trackingpoint#have whipped just up another super power for you:
The research team also included scientists at Fudan University in Shanghai, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Diamond Light source.
The team, led by Professor Daniela Rus, has introduced thebakeable robots in the hope that they lead to a variety of self-assembling designs that function on their own and fold together like origami.
#Classcraft a new way to teach students by turning the classroom into a giant role-playing game Classcraft Shawn Young,
This is education as it s happening for over 7, 000 kids in more than 25 countries right now.
and refining Classcraft, his classroom-based role-playing game for the past three years, and he says it creates a collaborative
and supportive learning environment that can help turn around students who are failing. Currently a free service, Classcraft will introduce a pay structure this fall that embraces the free-to-play model more commonly seen in mobile apps and online games like League of Legends and Runescape.
It s going to turn heads in an education system used to strict budgets and paying per-head for software solutions,
especially when they realize that the students will be buying gear and pets for their Classcraft avatars on itunes. Playing in class If you re a gamer,
being in Shawn Young s physics classroom sounds like a blast. At the start of class, his students come in
and check their stats on the screen projected at the front of the room. When the bell rings, its time for a random event,
like a pupil s game character dying, or it could be something goofy like someone getting up to sing.
This helps focus the students, Young told Gamesbeat during a video call, asthe second they get into class,
and collaboration and will give hit damage to students who lack focus or misbehave. Students can gain powers specific to their character class by levelling up,
and they can use these to help and protect their teammates (or themselves), activating them live as events that unfold in the classroom.
The teacher can track all this activity in Classcraft, or, as in Young s case, the kids can use their laptops to interact with it in real-time.
Come September, they ll be able to use their smartphones to keep up with the game too,
Cutting class and eating chocolate As the Game Master, Young s students are playing by his rules,
but the chance to turn things in their favor is always there. Some powers have potent individual and team effects,
and the students can get pretty creative with them. There s one power, Teleport, where you can leave the class for 2 minutes,
If a pupil s hit points run out, they die. They then face a punishment that a roll of the die determines
Students don t typically respond happily to punishments. But they are. It s weird. Transforming the classroom through collaboration Young had the Classcraft idea in his head for several years before acting on it.
Before making it he tried various ways of getting kids to collaborate better in class,
though, and he doesn t think the education system values it enough. Our whole system of pupil rewards is based on individual assessments
he says, and that s not useful for them. What s useful for them is seeing the value of your team succeeding as opposed to yourself,
That really transforms the classroom. The history teacher Ricardo Higuera teaches seventh grade world history in a rural corner of Southern California called Thermal.
Nearly all the students in his middle school are eligible for free or reduced school lunches. Higuera s been trialling Classcraft for the past 4 months
and he s thrilled with how it s making his students care about their grades.
Academically, I have noticed quiz scores and class-participation increase, Higuera told me via email. Before, some of my more apathetic students wouldn t care
if they failed a quiz. Now, they re more wary to because they know it affects their character s level
I pride myself in running a smooth, fun classroom even before Classcraft but I ve noticed a huge tick in the pulse of the class
So far, Higuera is the only teacher in his school to try Classcraft. Some of the other staff are unsure of
Being the Game Master is a big part of that. The game like anything else in education,
depends on how it s used by the teacher, said Higuera. Like role-playing games of old, the game depends a lot on the Game Master.
He or she holds the power to engage players and make the game come alive. Higuera already thinks Classcraft will be part of his teaching arsenal for years to come.
I do think Classcraft is ideal for the age group and subject matter I work with, he told me.
Middle school, medieval world history I mean, how cool is that to play a World of Warcraft-like game as you re learning about samurai
but many teachers using Classcraft are reporting success. We have some really surprising statistics, says Young.
We have teachers saying their class averages have gone up 20,25 percent in the months following implementing Classcraft.
and encouraging a classroom dynamic rooted in collaboration. The first year I did started this, I it mid-year,
what makes you a good learner. Participating well in class doing your work, collaborating. It really rewards that.
Classcraft permeates every aspect of school for Young s students. They get XP for doing well in sports or helping each other after school.
They even tidy the classroom in the hope of leveling up quicker. They become obsessed with becoming a better learner,
says Young. They just don t know about it. Carrot on a stick Not everyone is convinced fully of Classcraft s merits as an educational motivator.
I spoke to Frank Noschese, a high school physics teacher from Cross River N y.,who has a different take on gamifying the classroom.
I don t really look at competition as a good thing in the classroom, Noschese told me over Skype.
At least, he believes, not when kids are striving to earn rewards in a game. You do the work to do better at the game rather than do the work to learn the material,
It sends the wrong message that it s not the learning that s important but the game aspect.
And I don t think that laying a game over the classroom is really going to fix that scenario.
They need a different schooling experience. Noschese thinks that teachers can make classway more engaging without turning it into a game.
He says that his subject, physics, isreally cool just of itself, and describes using a video of NBA star Kobe Bryant jumping over a pool of snakes embedded below to spark a lab-based session where students try to answer the question,
Is it real or is it fake? Despite his reservations about Classcraft, Noschese says he doesn t want to fault Young for trying something new:
Any teacher that s willing to try something new or change their craft is great.
As students level up, they ll get gold coins as part of their reward. They can use these to customize their character s look.
I don t know any products that do that for education. I asked Young whether there would be a cap on the amount of money that students could spend.
They cant spend that much money, he said. After $5 or $6 it doesn t make sense to spend money.
That poses, for some teachers, a certain ethical dilemma of do they want to bring a product into their class that is soliciting kids to spend money?
So, for teachers and schools who aren t happy with that principle, Classcraft will have a premium version charged at a rate of $4 per student per year.
That way, pupils can still access the customizable features, but it will be the teachers who hold the keys to the gold.
There will still be a free version of Classcraft without microtransactions available come September, but this will be miss out certain features.
It won t have customizable avatars, pets, ios app support, or interactive class forums. However, the base game will still be fully functional.
For me, it was important that teachers hop on and just start playing whenever they wanted.
We have teachers playing Classcraft in China and India and Namibia. A lot of these premium education products are only available in the U s. and Canada.
It was really important that we were available for these poorer countries. That a teacher who wanted to start playing just could.
The freemium reality For Higuera, the free-to-play or freemium pay models are the only way his class can keep using Classcraft.
Not enough of our teachers would use it to make it viable. And I doubt I could afford to pay out of my own pocket.
Higuera thinks his students will love the opportunity to customize their characters but doubts whether many will actually do it.
The ios app due in September will enable the whole system to run on a teacher s ipad
and will give students more immediate ownership of the game. German and Spanish translation will add global appeal to a system which Young says he always intended being an international concern.
Students as young as 8 and as old as 20 are already playing the game,
And the free-to-play business model will permit any teacher, in any country, to jump into the game, regardless of school budgets.
While it doesn t offer an across the board solution to engaging kids in education, it does provide an innovative and unique way of capturing those pupils that might
otherwise shrug their way through school. Video games in a very short time, have become this common cultural reference point that everybody knows,
For students whose grades are suffering because they re not engaged or they re not motivated.
The University of California, San diego School of medicine researchers have erased and reactivated memories in rats, profoundly altering the animals reaction to past events.##
said Roberto Malinow, MD, Phd, professor of neurosciences and senior author of the study. Scientists optically stimulated a group of nerves in a rat s brain that had been modified genetically to make them sensitive to light
DNA-templated synthesis allows researchers without a lot of expensive equipment to more quickly evaluate all the potential small molecule interactions that could occur from a library of building blocks. single student with only minimal equipment
the country largest organisation of farmers and ranchers, is drawing up a code of conduct, saying that farmers own
#Demand for computer science programs is booming at colleges across the U s. People in the tech industry have worked to persuade more young people in the U s. to become interested in studying computer science for years.
Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U s, . according to data presented this past week at the NCWIT summit for Women in IT by Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer science and Engineering at the University of Washington,
and Stanford Computer science professor Eric Roberts. Demand is also booming for the less expensive Micro Colleges that teach programming skills like Davinci Coders near Boulder, Colorado,
which only costs $6, 000. At Lazowska own school, the number of incoming freshman who plan to major in computer science is soaring the graph below,
published earlier this week by Geekwire, speaks for itself. It not just UW that seeing A CS boom.
According to Lasowska and Roberts, our higher education institutions today aren prepared adequately to handle the surge in computer science education demand.
At the moment, there just aren enough instructors to teach all the students who want to learn. Many schools are torn currently between either limiting the number of CS degrees they give out,
#Mind-controlled exoskeleton to help paralyzed teen to kick first ball at World cup Thanks to an international collaboration between universities such as Colorado State university, the Technical University of Munich and the Lily Safra
Dr. James C. Perry, Professor of Pediatrics at University of California San diego and Director of Electrophysiology and Adult CHD at Rady Children Hospital in San diego explains,
A recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan says 25 percent of Americans now look online for doctor reviews before making an appointment.
including those of memory and learning. Lennart Mucke, the director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological disease, said:
#UC Irvine School of medicine to add Google glass to its curriculum The University of California at Irvine (UCI) School of medicine announced that it is integrating the already-iconic wearable into its four-year curriculum for medical students.
UCI will be the first medical school to do so. Glass has seen its strongest professional reception in medicine, with a variety of pilot programs in hospitals, operating rooms,
and other parts of medical life. t way too early to tellif Glass will become standard in medical schools,
ut a lot of people in medical education are interested. She heads up Medtech Boston a nonprofit organization that has been conducting projects
Medical schools in the U s. are generally slow to adopt new technologies, and perhaps nly half require students to use a laptop or tablet.
But, she added, if Glass did get widely adopted and was used for collecting data as well as video t would dramatically change medical education.
Imagine an attending physician seeing what you saw during a simulation, Joe said, and guiding you through the procedure using Glass.
Initially, ten pairs will distributed at UC Irvine this month to third-and fourth-year students in the operating room and emergency room departments.
In August, another 20 to 30 pairs will go to first-and second-year students, for use in anatomy labs, the medical simulation center, the ultrasound institute,
assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at the UCI medical school and head of the Glass program there.
The school curriculum includes mock sessions between students and patient actors, which are recorded by several cameras in the room that can how only gross movements,
ike whether the student is facing the patient, unconscious eye rolls from the student doctor, head rolls.
With the patient actor wearing Glass, faculty outside the room can see the video feed from the patient point-of-view in real-time
and the student can watch the recording later. Right now, Wiechmann said, the video/audio and communication capabilities of Glass are the primary functions being used by the school,
The Office of Naval Research will award $7. 5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic institute, Brown,
University of Denver scholar Heather Roff, in an op-ed for the Huffington Post, calls that a isconcertinglack of oversight and notes that ielding of autonomous weapons then does not even raise to the level of the Secretary of defense, let alone the president.
Around six or seven years ago, scientists at Kyushu University started working on nanotechnology and material breakthroughs in the laboratory of applied chemistry professor Tatsumi Ishihara that could raise the capacity (how much electric charge can be delivered at a certain voltage) of those early dual carbon batteries.
Now Power Japan Plus co-founded by Japanese tech entrepreneurs Dou Kani (the CEO and president) and Hiroaki Nishina (the COO) is looking to commercialize the research done at Kyushu.
A plastic developed by the University of Illinois is one of the latest plastics developed that regenerates when damaged.
Said the university s Professor Sottos, Vascular delivery lets us deliver a large volume of healing agents which,
In Harvard professor Clayton Christensen 1997 management classic The Innovator Dilemma, he coined the term disruptive innovation.
From vital signs scanners to solar classrooms, mosquito patches to aerial robot photography, it is helping meaningful projects come to life.
governments and universities develop), mainstream (when VCS and startups widely invest in it), and financially viable (when the technology is generally available on Kickstarter).
Professor David Hinde of the Australian National University told I Fucking Love Science. As with other transuranium elements, ununseptium is highly unstable,
Researchers at King College London and the San francisco Veteran Affairs Medical center report they have cleared those hurdles. ur new method can be used to grow much greater quantities of lab-grown human epidermal equivalents,
and require training to use. A new startup, however, wants to make it easy as running an app and pairing a bluetooth dongle.
#Fewer high school graduates enroll in college after graduation The proportion of high school students in the U s. who go on to college rose regularly for decades
Last October, just 65.9 percent of people who had graduated from high school the previous spring had enrolled in college,
when 70.1 percent of new graduates had gone on to college. alling college enrollment indicates that upward mobility may become more difficult for working-class and disadvantaged high school graduates,
and students who would have worked their way through college a few years ago, and added that many parents in the past paid for college by refinancing mortgages, an alternative no longer available to many families.
At the same time, there were some encouraging signs in the report, which is released annually. The bureau reported that 51 percent of the high school graduates who did not go on to college had jobs by October
and that 74 percent were in the labor force, meaning they either were employed or were looking for work.
On the other hand, only 43 percent of new high school dropouts were part of the labor force in October, a figure that was the lowest for the last 20 years, the period for
But there was an increase in the proportion of new high school dropouts who had jobs to 31 percent from 24 percent in 2012,
The bureau said the estimated 65.9 percent figure for high school graduates who went on to college could be off by as much as 2. 4 percentage points in either direction.
Still, there seems to be little doubt that the long-term trend of more and more high school graduates going to college has halted, if not reversed.
while a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has printed retinal cells to form complex eye tissue.
Last year, Lewis and her students showed they could print the microscopic electrodes and other components needed for tiny lithium-ion batteries.
Before coming to Harvard from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last year, Lewis had spent more than a decade developing 3-D printing techniques using ceramics, metal nanoparticles, polymers,
The gloves are the product of years of research and development, building upon original research at University of the West of England.
Braille, however, does require some training to understand, and even now, most books, magazines, and newspapers are unavailable in braille format.
It could also be used as a learning tool to teach the illiterate to read d
The app costs $49. 95 a month per household and is compliant with federal health privacy regulations. ur culture of learning, innovation,
#The impossible $10k degree marches on in Texas Governor Perry wants public universities to craft four-year degrees costing no more than $10, 000 in tuition, fees, and books.
Perry challenged Texas public universities to craft four-year degrees costing no more than $10 000 in tuition, fees,
and to achieve the necessary cost reductions by teaching students online and awarding degrees based on competency.
000 college degrees preposterous, adding that obody in higher education believes that is even possible. Peter Hugill, a Texas A&m professor who at the time was president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors,
posed the rhetorical question: o you really want a stripped-down, barebones degree? Hugill went on to declare that 10,000 seems to
the public reaction suggested that defenders of the status quo had fallen out of step with students, their parents, and taxpayers.
finding that 81 percent of Texas voters believed public universities could be run more efficiently.
Nationally, a 2011 Pew study found that 57 percent of prospective students believed a college degree no longer carries a value worth the cost.
Seventy-five percent of respondents declared college simply unaffordable. But would Perry plan meet the public need One year after the governor challenge,
announcing a bachelor degree in information technology costing students just under $10, 000 in tuition and fees.
Florida governor Rick Scott recently asked his state public universities to craft $10, 000 degrees of their own.
In May of 2013, Georgia Tech announced an online master degree in computer science for $7
Moreover, they point out, a number of the new offerings charge students $10, 000 but do not actually reduce their schoolscost of instruction and materials.
These otherwise valid critiques ignore the fact that Perry requested only that 10 percent of public undergraduate degrees meet the $10, 000 standard,
More important, the $10, 000 degree programs that reduced the price charged to the student but not the cost incurred by the school did not employ the means Perry specified online learning and competency-based exams.
That changing. Three higher-education partners Texas A&m University-Commerce, South Texas College, and the Texas Higher education Coordinating Board (THECB) just launched the ffordable Baccalaureate Program, the state first public university bachelor degree combining online learning and competency-based standards.
Developed by community-college and university faculty, with an eye to meeting the needs identified by community and business leaders,
a new degree in organizational leadership can cost as little as $750 per term and allows students to receive credit for as many competencies
and courses as they can master each term. According to THECB website, students arriving ith no prior college credits should be able to complete the degree program in three years at a total cost of $13, 000 to $15, 000.
Students who enter having already satisfied their general education requirements can complete the degree in two years,
while those entering with 0 credit hours and no credentialcan complete the degree n one year for $4,
500 to $6, 000. Will this latest salvo strike the decisive blow in the revolution?
students and their parents have taken on historic student-loan debt. Total student-loan debt has risen to $1. 2 trillion,
for the first time ever exceeding total national credit-card debt. In the past, the debate over the college tuition and debt crisis has produced calls to action on two fronts
both fiscally unsustainable: First, federal taxpayers have been asked to pay more through subsidizing student loans so that students can borrow more to pay inflated tuitions.
Second, state taxpayers have been asked to pay more in order to increase state subsidies for education. But today, with the $10, 000 degree, universities themselves are beginning to lower the tuition
and fees they charge students, parents, and taxpayers. Finally, the ground is beginning to shift.
The impossible may be starting to look inevitable
#Facebook and Google are drooling over drone companies Last month it seemed as if Facebook would acquire the long-range solar-powered drone maker Titan Aerospace
and use its technology to deliver Internet to remote areas of the world. It was ostensibly a hedge against Google balloon-driven Project Loon and the possibility that Google,
rather than Facebook, would connect the ext billioninternet users. Today that picture is opaque at best.
director of MIT Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and senior author of the paper.
which will make it an amazing tool for robotics education. It also means that if your pet completely shreds your robot, youe only out one piece of paper.
Levner and his colleagues at Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, made the nanobots by exploiting the binding properties of DNA.
says co-author Ido Bachelet of the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar Ilan University. nlike electronic devices,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011