Tag: science

Music Training Has Biological Impact on Aging Process

The NCFR Video on this page has the quote
National Children’s Folksong Repository
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/NCFR/NCFR.html
Einstein’s thoughts on Musi
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Music/musicsmart.html
Creativity and Dreams
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/IEC/creativity-dream.html
Music Smarts!
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Music/musicsmart2.html
 
Music Training Has Biological Impact on Aging Process
Aging-related hearing loss is not set in stone, study finds
January 30, 2012 | by Wendy Leopold
EVANSTON — Age-related delays in neural timing are not inevitable and can be avoided or offset with musical training, according to a new study from Northwestern University. The study is the first to provide biological evidence that lifelong musical experience has an impact on the aging process.
Measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds, researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage.
“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.”
Kraus, professor of communication sciences in the School of Communication and professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is co-author of “Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing” published online in the journal “Neurobiology of Aging.”
“These are very interesting and important findings,” said Don Caspary, a nationally known researcher on age-related hearing loss at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. “They support the idea that the brain can be trained to overcome, in part, some age-related hearing loss.”
“The new Northwestern data, with recent animal data from Michael Merzenich and his colleagues at University of California, San Francisco, strongly suggest that intensive training even late in life could improve speech processing in older adults and, as a result, improve their ability to communicate in complex, noisy acoustic environments,” Caspary added.
Previous studies from Kraus’ Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory suggest that musical training also offset losses in memory and difficulties hearing speech in noise — two common complaints of older adults. The lab has been extensively studying the effects of musical experience on brain plasticity across the life span in normal and clinical populations, and in educational settings.
However, Kraus warns that the current study’s findings were not pervasive and do not demonstrate that musician’s have a neural timing advantage in every neural response to sound. “Instead, this study showed that musical experience selectively affected the timing of sound elements that are important in distinguishing one consonant from another.”
The automatic neural responses to speech sounds delivered to 87 normal-hearing, native English-speaking adults were measured as they watched a captioned video. “Musician” participants began musical training before age 9 and engaged consistently in musical activities through their lives, while “non-musicians” had three years or less of musical training.
Kraus, who co-authored the study with Northwestern researchers Alexandra Parbery-Clark, Samira Anderson and Emily Hittner, is available at nk****@**********rn.edu or at (847) 491-3181. For more about the work of Kraus’ Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory on music perception and learning-associated brain plasticity, visit http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/brainvolts/.
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/01/kraus-neural-timing.html
 

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NASA confirms Voyager 1 has left the solar system

NASA confirms Voyager 1 has left the solar system

http://www.latimes.com/la-sci-sn-nasa-confirms-voyager-1-has-exited-the-solar-system-20130912,0,6990209.story
By Monte Morin
September 12, 2013, 11:00 a.m.
After 36 years of space travel and months of heated debate among scientists, NASA confirmed Thursday that Voyager 1 has indeed left our solar system and had entered interstellar space more than a year ago. “Voyager has boldly gone where no probe has gone before, marking one of the most significant technological achievements in the annals of the history of science,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate.
At a Thursday news conference in Washington, D.C., officials said the belated confirmation was based on new “key” evidence involving space plasma density. The evidence was outlined in a paper published online Thursday in the journal Science. Lead author Don Gurnett, an Iowa State plasma physicist and a Voyager project scientist, said the data showed conclusively that Voyager 1 had exited the heliopause — the bubble of hot, energetic particles that surrounds our sun and planets — and entered into a region of cold, dark space called the interstellar medium.
“When we got that data, I and my colleagues just looked at each other and said, ‘We’re in the interstellar medium.’ It was just that clear to us,” Gurnett said. Gurnett calculated that Voyager crossed the edge of the heliosphere, or heliopause, at or around Aug. 25, 2012. “Even though it took 36 years, it’s just an amazing thing to me,” said study coauthor Bill Kurth, a radio and plasma researcher at the University of Iowa.
wide V shape. The antennas, which are connected to a radio transmitter, detect the oscillation, or vibration, of excited plasma particles. The device will convert the oscillations into an audible noise that is recorded on Voyager’s vintage eight-track tape recorder.
The frequency of the noise is associated with a specific density of plasma. The higher the frequency, the denser the plasma.
The only trouble is that something has to excite the plasma for it to “ring,” something like a large solar flare. Waiting for a solar flare can take years during a solar minimum (a period of low solar activity).
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Proposal announcement from NASA to partner on STEM Education

“NASA Office of Education, in cooperation with NASA Headquarters’ Office of the Chief Technologist and Mission Directorates (Aeronautics Research, Human Exploration and Operation, and Science), is publicizing an opportunity to partner with NASA on a noexchange-of-funds basis to achieve high-impact, nation-wide results for STEM education.
NASA has a variety of resources, including those listed in Appendix 1, which may be available for STEM education partnerships. NASA turns to partners to leverage the Agency’s STEM education resourcesto achieve mutually beneficial goals. NASA seeks high-impact national scale results that will help the Agency achieve its strategic goals and outcomes for education (see 2. Background). NASA seeks to broaden the STEM education audience and include diverse individuals who are underrepresented in STEM education. NASA Education recognizes the untapped potential of strategic partnerships, including public-private partnerships, for advancing national goals for STEM education. This Announcement specifically seeks requests for partnering with NASA outside of traditional tools such as grants, cooperative agreements, or contracts.
Federal STEM efforts (National Science and Technology Council 2012) advocate forbroadening participation and inclusion of diverse individuals (such as
persons with disabilities, women, and ethnic or racial minorities) in STEM education.
NASA Education, therefore, continually strives to increase its impact in areas of greatest
national need by casting a wider geographic net and increasing programs and services to
underserved and underrepresented populations.