Saturday, 16 February 2013

12:22:26

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.”

― Plato

Train the Brain

 

HANDS up if your youth is behind you, to put it politely, and you have trouble from time to time remembering where you put your car keys, or the thread of a conversation, or why you entered a particular room.

There should be quite a lot of hands because most people are acutely aware when their powers of recall start to dull, which they inevitably do, albeit to varying degrees, once one's prime of life is firmly in the rear-view mirror.

Adding to the angst is fear, not just of forgetfulness but that the memory lapses may be the harbinger of something even more feared: Alzheimer's disease.

An analysis done last year for Alzheimer's Australia by consultancy firm Deloitte Access Economics estimated there were 266,574 Australians affected by the disease last year but that number will more than double, to 553,285, by 2030. By 2050, it forecast nearly one million Australians would be affected.

Source:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/train-the-brain/story-e6frg8y6-1226495664610

The principal of John Monash Science School in Victoria, Peter Corkill, says the assessment system is changing to include greater focus on advanced skills such as analysis rather than pure memorisation, but either way true learning has never been about teaching to a test or encouraging children to memorise blocks of meaningless information such as whole English essays or complete maths solutions.

''So if you've learnt something you can apply it but if you've memorised it there's no guarantee you can apply it in any context.''

Source:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/study-gains-train-the-brain-20120826-24uqu.html#ixzz2L0jgDqIQ

 

Microfluidic Ballet by Albert Folch's lab

(University of Washington, BioE dept., Seattle,Washington US )

Uploaded on 2 Jul 2010

Here we present a microfluidic ballet to the music of Dimitri Shostakovich. The "dancers" of this ballet are seven streams of food-coloring dye controlled by microvalves (bottom of the image). The device operates essentially as a flow equalizer: each of the seven microvalves opens when the music volume exceeds a set threshold in a given band of frequency arbitrarily assigned to that microvalve. Flanking the microvalves is a constant background flow of colorless water, which keeps the colored fluids focused in separate streams. Due to a microfabrication defect, the microvalves leak fluid even when closed, but that produces a pleasant artistic effect. We have displayed the movie in negative tone to convey the ambiance of a theater at night.

-- Albert Folch, Associate Professor of Bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle, USA (afolch@u.washington.edu).

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