Infants much smarter than you may think!

Does a baby know that a dog can jump a fence while a school bus cannot or a cat can avoid colliding with a wall while a table being pushed into a wall cannot?

According to an interesting study, infants as young as 10-months old can tell the difference between the kinds of paths naturally taken by a walking animal, compared to a moving car or piece of furniture.

"You can understand something about what babies know based on how long they look at something. Babies will look at something new longer than they will look at something that is already familiar to them," explained Rachel Baker from Concordia University's department of psychology.

This is important because the ability to categorise things as animate beings or inanimate objects is a fundamental cognitive ability that allows toddlers to better understand the world around them, added fellow researcher Tamara Pettigrew.

To understand this, researchers looked at about 350 babies - who participated at 10, 12, 16 and 20 months - to find out when children clue in to the fact that animals and objects follow different motion paths.Researchers used a technique called the "visual habituation paradigm" that measures how long one looks at a given object.

Since computer animations of a bus or a table jumping over a wall held the attention of infants for longer than a bus or table bumping into a wall, it indicated the former was newer to them than the latter.

In contrast, infants' attention was held just as well by a cat jumping over a wall as by a cat rebounding after running into a wall, indicating that infants think that cats can both jump and rebound.

"Animals do bump into objects. The bigger picture is that the motion of objects is more predictable than the motion of animals. This research shows that even 10-month-old babies have some understanding of this," Baker noted.

The study reveals that even the youngest among us absorb more details than some might think through eyes that are usually open wider than adult ones.

The findings were shared in the journal Infant Behavior & Development.

Cell phones charging using sound is possible now!!!

Cell phones charging using sound is possible now. This may seem impossible to many people, but it can be true.

If you have a cell phone then chances are that you are always worried about charging it. And things become a bit difficult when you are on a journey. The first thing that comes to our mind when the battery of the cell phone goes low is to find some power point.

But it appears that all this could be past soon. Now sound can be used to charge cell phones. Traffic noise, music, chants from a football could be very helpful to you in charging your phone.

Moreover, even your own voice could be used to charge your cell phone. That is wonderful indeed. This is only shows that the advancement in technology is going to change a lot the way we live in these days.

This has been confirmed by scientists from Queen Mary University of London and Nokia. It has been reported that these scientists have created an energy-harvesting prototype (a nanogenerator) to accomplish the task of charging a cell phone using everyday background noise.

Dr Joe Briscoe from QMUL’s School of Engineering and Materials Science said: “Being able to keep mobile devices working for longer, or do away with batteries completely by tapping into the stray energy that is all around us is an exciting concept.”

First time women won 'noble prize for maths'!!im proud to me a women!!!....

South Korean President Park Geun-hye, sixth from left, poses with award winners during the opening ceremony of the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul on Tuesday. Iranian mathematics professor Maryam Mirzakhani, sixth from right, is the first female winner of the Fields Medal. (Yonhap News Agency via European Pressphoto Agency).

 

Although Albert Einstein praised another as “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began” after her death in the ’30s, she couldn’t get a teaching job. When she finally did, the Nazis took it away because she was Jewish.

The struggles of female mathematicians Hypatia (killed in the 5th century), Sophie Germain (1776–1831) and Emmy Noether (1882–1935) are now history. However, not until Tuesday did a woman win the Fields Medal — “the Nobel of math,” as Time magazine put it — first awarded in 1936.

The achievement of Stanford University professor Maryam Mirzakhani is not just unprecedented, but unlikely in a field where women remain underrepresented. As few as 9 percent of tenure-track positions in math are held by women, according to a 2010 study.

“This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians,” Mirzakhani said in a Stanford University press release. “I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.”

A native of Iran, Mirzakhani studies “geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces, such as spheres, the surfaces of doughnuts and of hyperbolic objects,” as Stanford phrased it.

What this means for people who couldn’t hack trigonometry: Her work may help engineers and cryptographers.

And she’s not working on any single problem.

“I don’t have any particular recipe,” Mirzakhani said. “It is the reason why doing research is challenging as well as attractive. It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck you might find a way out.”

Did you know about the most complicated organ of human body?

The human brain is the most complex organ in the human body and probably the most complex creation present on this universe. It is evident that, the world’s greatest man made wonders are a result of the human brain making it the most amazing feature in a human being. The human brain with its complexity acts like a storage device which holds safely a person’s most cherished memories. A person’s personality is by far influenced by the brain as well as generation of human consciousness which gives a person passion, motion and emotion. A command center for the central nervous system, the brain serves human beings with ample physical and cognitive abilities. This are just a few vital roles that the human brain performs but the most amazing thing about the human brain are the many facts that are less known by many people with a fully functional brain.

1 – The human brain is the only organ in the human body that lacks nerves despite the fact that it acts as the central command for the central nervous system. This simply implies that, the human brain feels no pain.

2 – The human brain consumes the largest portion of the total energy that is generated in the human body. To be precise, the brain consumes 20% of that energy despite the fact that it only represents only 2% of the total body weight. The energy is vital for maintaining healthy brain cells and fueling nerve impulses.

3 -The number of neurons present in the brain is approximately 100 billion which is about 15 times of the total human population on earth. This high number of neurons increases the processing ability of the brain.

4 – The human brain is regarded as the fattest organ in the human body. About 60% of the human brain is comprised of fat which is the highest concentration of fat that is present in a single organ in a healthy human being. Furthermore, 75% of the total brain mass is comprised of water which regulates various functions in the brain.

5 – The neocortex is the portion of the human brain that is responsible for language and consciousness. It makes up approximately 76% of the human brain and making it the largest when compared to that in other animals.

6 – It is believed by many that, human beings use less than 10% of their brain. This is a misconception because each and every part of the brain has a known function.

7 – During early pregnancy, neurons have shown to multiply at a rate of 250,000 neurons per minute

8 – About 15-20% (750ml) of the total cardiac output is directed to the brain every minute.

9 – The energy consumed by the brain which is approximately 25 watts is sufficient enough to illuminate a light bulb.

10 – The human brain is not as perfect as it is thought of since in many instances it has been found to fool human beings making them to perceive things differently from the reality.

There can be little doubt, the human brain is truly an incredible body organ that requires maximum care to keep vital body processes running.

British Scientists Supposedly Cloned a Dinosaur — Here's What Really Happened!

Scientists at the University of Florida have successfully cloned a dinosaur, a spokesman from the university said yesterday.

The dinosaur, a baby Apatosaurus nicknamed “Spot,” is currently being incubated at the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

The scientists extracted DNA from preserved Apatosaurus fossils, which were on display at the university’s museum of natural science. Once the DNA was harvested, scientists injected it into a fertile ostrich womb.

“Ostriches share a lot of genetic traits with dinosaurs,” said Dr. Norman Trudell, a biology professor at UF and the project’s leading scientist. “Their eggshell microstructures are almost identical to those of the Apatosaurus. That’s why the cloning worked so perfectly.”

The scientists extracted DNA from preserved Apatosaurus fossils, which were on display at the university's museum of natural science. Once the DNA was harvested, scientists injected it into a fertile ostrich womb.

"Ostriches share a lot of genetic traits with dinosaurs," said Dr. Gerrard Jones, a biology professor at LJMU and the project's leading scientist. "Their eggshell microstructures are almost identical to those of the Apatosaurus. That's why the cloning worked so perfectly."

Those in the scientific community say the dinosaur cloning – the first ever of its kind – is a milestone for genetic engineering.

"I used to think this kind of thing could only happen in the movies," said Dr. Gemma Sheridan, a LJMU chemistry professor. "But we're making it happen right here in our lab. It's astounding."