brainrow

On the forty-fifth anniversary of his Mercury space flight, John Glenn talked about that flight in a crowded auditorium at COSI here in Columbus, Ohio.

Ohio governor Ted Strickland introduced Glenn with lavish praise. That prompted Glenn to recall an earlier occasion, when he had been introduced by someone who said, “There are very few authentic heroes in the world today, but our speaker tonight is one of them.”

Glenn said he’d been embarrassed by such praise, but on the way home he mused to his wife Annie, “You know, there really aren’t many real heroes in the world today.”

Annie replied, “You’re right, and I’ll tell you something: there’s one less than you think there is.”

He discussed his Mercury flight in some detail. He showed slides, including the first hand-held photo taken from earth orbit. At the time of Glenn’s flight, NASA didn’t have a photography department. They thought taking pictures would distract the astronaut from his other tasks. Glenn found a $45 Minolta camera with automatic film advance and persuaded NASA brass to let him take it along and take some pictures during his flight. (The photo shown here may not be the photo shown during the slide show. It was the closest match I found.)

He said several times that he felt fortunate to have had the opportunities to do the things he had done. He said he wasn’t the type of person to feel envious of others, but he might make an exception for Neil Armstrong.

Glenn was the oldest of the original seven Mercury astronauts. He became the oldest person to go into orbit in 1998 when he flew on Space Shuttle Discovery, when he was 77 years old. Now he is 85, and he still has the Right Stuff.

Via The Frontal Cortex, an NPR story about growing smarter:

A new study in the scientific journal Child Development shows that if you teach students that their intelligence can grow and increase, they do better in school.

All children develop a belief about their own intelligence, according to research psychologist Carol Dweck from Stanford University.

“Some students start thinking of their intelligence as something fixed, as carved in stone,” Dweck says. “They worry about, ‘Do I have enough? Don’t I have enough?'”

…

So, about 100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.

The students in the latter group “learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter.”

Basically, the students were given a mini-neuroscience course on how the brain works. By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.

“When they studied, they thought about those neurons forming new connections,” Dweck says. “When they worked hard in school, they actually visualized how their brain was growing.”

This is better than the old rubber band analogy of the mind stretching to hold more and more knowledge. I always worried that my mind would snap, which is … uh, never mind.

Read Shakespeare. Listen to Beethoven. Study Michelangelo’s Pieta. Can these be the works of mortal human beings?

What are the limits of the mind’s power? How is it tapped? Might genius exist, suppressed, in every one of us? The depth, breadth and convolutions of the human mind are endlessly astonishing.

Via Neurontic:

I’ve spent a good chunk of time reading about autistics with peculiar gifts, but I’ve never seen a savant in action. (No. Rain Man doesn’t count.) And let me tell you, it’s enough to make you wonder if “normal” intelligence is all it’s cracked up to be. According to the voiceover, after just 45 minutes of surveying Rome from a helicopter, Wiltshire was able to faithfully recreate virtually everything he saw. His completed panorama stretched across 5 and half yards of paper. Even more impressive, Steven’s masterpiece required no preliminary sketching, or “roughing out of space.” “It [was as] if the panorama already [existed] in his head, with all the proportions, all the roads, all the details.”

Via Boing Boing, Colin Purrington offers some stickers for your textbooks.

Wording for the first disclaimer (top left) is taken verbatim from the sticker designed by the Cobb County School District (“A community with a passion for learning”) in Georgia, which actually plagiarized Alabama’s evolution disclaimer… Really, I’m not making any of this up. The other 14 are mildly educational variants that demonstrate the real meaning of a scientific “theory” as well as the true motivations of the School Board members and their creationist supporters.

There’s more — visit the site.

John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth on February 20, 1962. He rode in a Mercury capsule dubbed Friendship 7, launched atop an Atlas rocket at 9:47 AM EST.

Next Tuesday is the 45th anniversary of Glenn’s flight, and at 9:47 AM Glenn himself will talk about the flight at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), 333 West Broad Street, here in Columbus, Ohio.

The event is called “Friendship 2007: A Conversation with John Glenn.” Tickets are required, but they’re free. They must be picked up at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, room 350 Page Hall, 1810 College Road, on the Ohio State University campus. The phone number is (614) 292-4545.

Have you ever had a creepy feeling that you were being watched? From Living the Scientific Life: the Helix Nebula.

And, from the New York Times, this completely unrelated article:

Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun?

Compelling answers are beginning to emerge from biologists and computer scientists who are gaining new insights into how the brain recognizes and processes facial data.

Long before she had heard of Diana Duyser’s grilled-cheese sandwich, Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, had an inkling that people might process faces differently from other objects. Her suspicion was that a particular area of the brain gives faces priority, like an airline offering first-class passengers expedited boarding.

“Some patients have strokes and are then able to recognize everything perfectly well except for faces,” Dr. Tsao said. “So we started questioning whether there really might be an area in the brain that is dedicated to face recognition.”

More here.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, by carefully inspecting every bite of food in order to make sure it wasn’t Jesus or somebody, I was eating a lot less and finally losing some weight. On the other hand, I feel more relaxed now without that creepy eye spying on me all the time.

Today is also the 198th birthday of Charles Darwin. (Links to many Darwin Day posts here.)

From ScienceBlogs:

For scientists, the human fascination of Darwin’s life is only part of the picture. He is also admired because he was a scientist’s scientist — a role model for the ages. He had a keen insight into the way that nature worked, and he was able to use his observations to formulate hypotheses. He was also a very careful and methodical scientist. In the years between when he first formulated his evolutionary hypothesis and when he (reluctantly) published it, he conducted experiment after experiment, looking at different aspects of life. He bred pigeons to study how selection could result in changes in offspring. He spent years dissecting barnacles and observing the similarities and differences within and among species. He (with some help from his son and butler) soaked seeds in a tub of saltwater for months at a time to study dispersal. He gathered information from a web of collaborators that spanned the world, on a range of topics that covered a great deal of the science of biology. Darwin’s combination of insight and patience is what makes him a role model for scientists, and it’s one of the reasons that most of us have such great respect for him.

Darwin’s importance is only growing:

In his own way, Darwin emancipated the sciences. By producing a coherent theory that unified biology, he established biology as a theoretically sound and intellectually exciting science. Lawrence Summers … is right to say that “If the 20th century was defined by developments in the physical sciences, the 21st century will be defined by developments in the life sciences.” It will be Darwin’s century, a century in which his ideas will be the strong bedrock on which great inventions are built.

The Creator sure was busy 198 years ago today, and He did some of His best work then, too.

A few days ago, there was a little poll over on a science blog: Pick a number between 1 and 20. I picked 17. I wasn’t alone.

The idea is that 17 will always be the most common answer when people are asked to choose a number between 1 and 20. But neither Cosmic Variance nor Pharyngula offered a reasonable means of testing this proposition. That’s where our poll came in. This morning, I took a look at our data, and with 347 responses, I can confirm that 17 is significantly more popular than any number.

And here I thought I just had a remarkable feel for the will of the people.

Speaking of memory: today is the 21st anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and its crew of seven: Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnick, Dick Scobee and Michael Smith.

In a comment below, Adam Frix posted a link to an interview with a pad technician who was present at the Apollo 1 fire. A couple excerpts:

All professional opinions about the dangers which had been studied, hashed and rehashed, had been ignored.

The same problems came up on the Challenger. They ignored ground safety data, flight equipment test data and violated flight safety rules to make rigid flight schedules set by Congress. The needed changes were ignored, or put off because of a lack of funding. The problem with the solid rocket boosters’ seals were well known for at least 18 months before Challenger, even to many of us outside the program, but they wanted to get one more flight. It would be too expensive to make the changes and hold to the flight schedules.

Both shuttle disasters were the result of the same overall root problems.

…

I feel that [the Apollo 1 spacecraft] should be displayed at Kennedy Space Center in a special section apart from the astronaut memorial and not on Pad 34 as a reminder to America that it must never happen again.

The story of Apollo 1 should be told over and over again because its not just about three men who were killed, but it is more about the conditions that created the fire. We must always be reminded that it can happen again. Men and women who go to space deserve the best and nothing must be left to chance.

Experience, they say, is the best teacher. But the cost of tuition is very high.

Lest we forget: today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that cost the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, the second American in space, Ed White, the first American to walk in space, and Roger Chaffee.

It is said that the accident set back the Apollo program by more than a year. A thorough review of the accident put the flight schedule on hold, and revealed carelessness, sloppiness and design defects throughout the spacecraft and throughout the entire Apollo program. NASA had developed “go fever.”

It never flew, but Apollo 1 may have been the most important Apollo mission of all. Without the review and the corrective measures that followed the accident, I’m convinced that Project Apollo would never have reached the moon. After the accident, NASA faced the facts, worked to fix defects, and learned from its mistakes.

Let’s never forget that lesson, or the men who died for us to learn it.

Via ScienceBlogs, Google’s Gapminder provides an interesting way to visualize statistics about wealth, life expectancies, pollution, with trends over time.

Some of the results are counter-intuitive, and sometimes you have to pay close attention to what is being mapped — for example, economic growth in the United States isn’t a steadily expanding circle, but a slowly-pulsing one, because the animated chart is tracking the rate of growth each individual year.

The Gapminder requires some effort and attention, but it’s worth exploring.

We earthlings are so vain. We send the Cassini spacecraft billions of miles to study Saturn, and then we have it send back photos of — what else? — the earth.

In this image, the bluish dot between Saturn’s rings is Earth (also inset).

We’re so vain, we probably even think Carly Simon’s writing songs about us.

Via Coyote Gulch: the Union of Concerned Scientists have put together The A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science:

In recent years, scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information….

From air pollution to Ground Zero, the A to Z Guide showcases dozens of examples of the misuse of science on issues like childhood lead poisoning, toxic mercury contamination, and endangered species.

The January issue of MAD magazine is the source of this parody cover of Scientific American.

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day today has a ghostly look fitting for Halloween.

Pretty scary, huh, kids?

Unstructured play is vital for children, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently reported.

Aaron Swartz may have uncovered why play is important:

There’s an interesting little experiment you can do. If you have a classroom of kids and you give them a bunch of tasks they can work on of varying difficulty, the kids will pick the tasks that are just outside their level, that stretch them to do a little bit more. (This is, of course, if they aren’t getting graded on this. If they’re getting graded, they’ll always pick the easy ones.)

When I first heard about this experiment, I just assumed it was because they were good kids. But now I think there’s a different explanation. It’s because doing this is fun.

Children are built to grow — they want to stretch and learn. Is it possible that our current relentless focus on testing is exactly the wrong prescription for real education?