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Wednesday, May 2, 2012
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Barnes & Noble's Nook e-readers getting NFC, says CEO
Now that all of that Microsoft-related news is out in the open, Barnes & Noble's CEO William Lynch is ready to talk about the future. Fortune sat down with him to discuss the deal and what's next for the Nook. The answer to the latter is, at least in part, near-field communication. The exec talked up plans to begin embedding NFC chips into the readers, offering up a bit of synergy between physical books and their electronic counterparts. Says Lynch:
We can work with the publishers so they would ship a copy of each hardcover with an NFC chip embedded with all the editorial reviews they can get on BN.com. And if you had your Nook, you can walk up to any of our pictures, any our aisles, any of our bestseller lists, and just touch the book, and get information on that physical book on your Nook and have some frictionless purchase experience.
As for whether that functionality will actually be hitting this year, Lynch offered up a big old "maybe."
Barnes & Noble's Nook e-readers getting NFC, says CEO originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 May 2012 15:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Bilingualism fine-tunes hearing, enhances attention
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2012) ? A new Northwestern University study provides the first biological evidence that bilinguals' rich experience with language "fine-tunes" their auditory nervous system and helps them juggle linguistic input in ways that enhance attention and working memory.
Northwestern bilingualism expert Viorica Marian teamed up with auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus to investigate how bilingualism affects the brain. In particular, they looked at subcortical auditory regions that are bathed with input from cognitive brain areas.
Kraus has already shown that lifelong music training enhances language processing, and looking at subcortical auditory regions helped to tell that tale. "For our joint study, we asked if bilingualism could also promote experience-dependent changes in the fundamental encoding of sound in the brainstem -- an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain," said Marian, professor of communication sciences.
The answer is a resounding yes, according to the study in the April 30 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found the experience of bilingualism changes how the nervous system responds to sound.
"People do crossword puzzles and other activities to keep their minds sharp," Marian said. "But the advantages we've discovered in dual language speakers come automatically simply from knowing and using two languages. It seems that the benefits of bilingualism are particularly powerful and broad, and include attention, inhibition and encoding of sound."
Co-authored by Kraus, Marian and researchers Jennifer Krizman, Anthony Shook and Erika Skoe, "Bilingualism and the Brain: Subcortical Indices of Enhanced Executive Function" underscores the pervasive impact of bilingualism on brain development.
"Bilingualism serves as enrichment for the brain and has real consequences when it comes to executive function, specifically attention and working memory," said Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor at Northwestern's School of Communication. In future studies, she and Marian will investigate whether these advantages can be achieved by learning a language later in life.
In the study, the researchers recorded the brainstem responses to complex sounds (cABR) in 23 bilingual English-and-Spanish-speaking teenagers and 25 English-only-speaking teens as they heard speech sounds in two conditions.
Under a quiet condition, the groups responded similarly. But against a backdrop of background noise, the bilingual brains were significantly better at encoding the fundamental frequency of speech sounds known to underlie pitch perception and grouping of auditory objects. This enhancement was linked with advantages in auditory attention.
"Through experience-related tuning of attention, the bilingual auditory system becomes highly efficient in automatically processing sound," Kraus explained.
"Bilinguals are natural jugglers," said Marian. "The bilingual juggles linguistic input and, it appears, automatically pays greater attention to relevant versus irrelevant sounds. Rather than promoting linguistic confusion, bilingualism promotes improved 'inhibitory control,' or the ability to pick out relevant speech sounds and ignore others."
The study provides biological evidence for system-wide neural plasticity in auditory experts that facilitates a tight coupling of sensory and cognitive functions. "The bilingual's enhanced experience with sound results in an auditory system that is highly efficient, flexible and focused in its automatic sound processing, especially in challenging or novel listening conditions," Kraus added.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Northwestern University. The original article was written by Wendy Leopold.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Jennifer Krizman, Viorica Marian, Anthony Shook, Erika Skoe, and Nina Kraus. Subcortical encoding of sound is enhanced in bilinguals and relates to executive function advantages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1201575109
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
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Tuesday, May 1, 2012
The Wanted Apologize To Christina Aguilera, Sort Of
'We shouldn't have said it,' says Tom Parker of group's calling singer 'scary.'
By Gil Kaufman
The Wanted
Photo: Derek Storm/ Splash News
Sometimes, sorry is the hardest word to say. That's the tough new celebrity lesson learned by The Wanted member Tom Parker, who got hit pretty hard by Christina Aguilera's fans last week after he went on a New York radio station and tore into "The Voice" coach, calling her a "total bitch."
After dropping the b-bomb several more times and claiming that the singer-turned-reality competition judge refused to look at or speak to the British lad band, fellow member Siva Kaneswaran added, "she was quite rude."
Well, Xtina's fans were not impressed and started flaming the group, and two days after dissing her, Parker walked the comments back a bit, according to TMZ. Caught by the gossip site's cameras outside Hollywood's Mondrian hotel on Sunday, Parker said, "We shouldn't have said it, to be honest with you. We just think manners cost nothing, you know what I mean? The rest of the judges were really nice, and she didn't even walk over to us and talk to us. We apologize for the comment."
Told that the original dis was all over Google when the Wanted's name was searched, Parker shook his head and lamented, "I know!" During the original radio appearance, The Wanted were also asked to compare their interactions with Aguilera on "The Voice" with an earlier meeting with "American Idol" judge Jennifer Lopez, when Max George planted a kiss on J.Lo and then the boys openly pined for her hand in marriage backstage. And, as you can probably expect, they definitely preferred one experience to the other.
"[Aguilera] was a bit scary, to be honest," George said. Then, when asked about smooching Lopez, he laughed: "Yeah, well J.Lo's hot, Christina's nothing special."
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Science fair winner publishes new study on butterfly foraging behavior
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2012) ? University of Florida lepidopterist Andrei Sourakov has spent his life's work studying moths and butterflies. But it was his teenage daughter, Alexandra, who led research on how color impacts butterflies' feeding patterns.
The research shows different species exhibit unique foraging behaviors, and the study may be used to build more effective, species-specific synthetic lures for understanding pollinators, insects on which humans depend for sustaining many crops.
In a study appearing online in April in the journal Psyche: A Journal of Entomology, researchers used multi-colored landing pads and baits in the Florida Museum of Natural History's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity on the UF campus to determine that some butterflies use both sight and smell to locate food, while others rely primarily on smell.
"Butterflies are a great model for studying the environment and we can move in different directions from here in terms of application," said Florida Museum collection coordinator and study co-author Andrei Sourakov. "We've shown choosing certain scents or colored plants might depend on what species you want to attract -- if we can determine how to attract butterflies, perhaps we can also trap pest moths that lay eggs in agricultural fields."
Alexandra Sourakov began the research for a local science fair competition in 2009, spending weekends and after-school hours conducting experiments in the Florida Museum's Butterfly Rainforest exhibit.
"In eighth grade, we had to design a project, and I spend a lot of time around butterflies because my dad works with them," said Eastside High School sophomore Alexandra. "I've always been curious how they were able to locate their food, whether they fed on flowers or fruit, and so I started looking at it in the Butterfly Rainforest."
Alexandra placed red, yellow and black cardboard landing pads covered with honey, and observed flower-feeding species had a greater preference for the red color. But the exclusively fruit-feeding Blue Morpho showed no preference for a particular color. Mango, honey and green, ripe and fermented bananas were presented to fruit-feeding butterflies, and fermented bananas proved most attractive.
After winning first prize in eighth grade at the state science fair, Alexandra Sourakov was invited by study co-author and science fair judge Adrian Duehl to expand her study and conduct chemical analysis at the U.S. Department of Agriculture on UF's campus.
"Of about 600 butterflies attracted to bait, half of them were the Blue Morphos, so it was a logical species to focus on for the chemical part of the study," Andrei Sourakov said.
Gas chromatography coupled with parallel detection by mass spectrometry and electroantennography (measuring antennae output to the brain) were used to determine which chemicals that smelled like fermented bananas cause reactions in the Blue Morpho butterflies' body parts, including antennae, proboscis, legs and labial palpi, which are small projections protruding from the head. Surprisingly, all the organs reacted to the same range of chemicals except the labial palpi.
"It might have been expected that the results were species-specific because each species feeds on different food, but I was surprised by the results from the body parts because I wasn't even sure if any of them except the antennae would react to the volatile chemicals," Alexandra Sourakov said. "That was interesting because it shows a joint message may be sent to the brain from these different organs. This expands our understanding of butterflies' sense of smell."
Little is known about the function of the labial palpi and their contrasting reaction to the chemicals poses new questions about how different organs are used in finding food, said Adriana Briscoe, an associate professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Irvine who studies how color vision affects foraging behavior in butterflies.
"What's nice about this study is that it's multi-disciplinary, in that it looks at both vision behavior and olfactory behavior and physiology," Briscoe said. "It's very interesting that they found the different compounds in fruit are sensed by different body parts of the butterfly and it suggests that different organs are specialized for detecting different compounds."
Andrei Sourakov initiated the study as a means to involve young people in research and Briscoe agrees that, "the more young kids or high school kids that can get involved in doing science, the better off we are as a society."
"I would love to see more of this sort of thing done," Briscoe said. "It's challenging to engage high school students with science, and I think butterflies are a wonderful way to draw them in."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Florida. The original article was written by Danielle Torrent.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Alexandra Sourakov, Adrian Duehl, Andrei Sourakov. Foraging Behavior of the Blue Morpho and Other Tropical Butterflies: The Chemical and Electrophysiological Basis of Olfactory Preferences and the Role of Color. Psyche: A Journal of Entomology, 2012; 2012: 1 DOI: 10.1155/2012/378050
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
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