The distracted teenage brain

Most teenagers have a reputation of not making smart decisions, and having a different way of thinking. Some researchers blame those bad decisions on the immaturity of a teenager’s prefrontal cortex. It is the part of the brain that makes decisions and plans (a way of thinking).

 

 A phycologist named Zackary Roper and his team worked with two groups: 13-16 year olds and 20-35 years old. Each person had to play a game. During the game, a computer had six circles on the screen, they were all different colours. The players had to find a red or green circle. These targets had a horizontal or vertical line inside. The other targets had lines at different angles. When a player found the right circle they had to press two keys on a keyboard. The keys they pressed meant they found the circle with the vertical or the horizontal line. When one of the players hit the right key, the screen would flash of how they got it correct.

 

For some players, green circles provided a large (10-cent) reward and red circles rewarded a small (2-cent) reward. For all of the players, the amounts were reversed. With red circles worth more. All other colors had no reward.

 

When the scientist asked the players about the value of red vs. green colors, both teens and adults didn’t know that a circles colour had any effect of how much they earned during the game.

 

 After the game was done, the scientists told the players that they had a new target. Each player had to report the orientation of the line inside the blue diamond. Again, groups of six symbols were on the screen. Only one was a diamond. The other five were still circles. In other trials there were no red and green circles.

 

The researchers checked how long it took for the players to find the diamond and record their answers. When no red or green circles were among the onscreen options, both adults and teens responded quickly. But when a red or green circle showed up, both groups took a bit longer. Adults, though, quickly stopped paying attention to the colored circles.

 

Teens reacted differently. They took longer to respond whenever a red or green circle showed up. Their response times never sped up. Their attention still was drawn to the previously valued circles, even though the shapes no longer brought any reward. The red and green circles were distracting teens from their objective. The game demonstrates that the attention of adolescents is especially drawn to rewarding information. Texting or using social media, trigger the brain’s reward system. Once the teenage brain has linked a behavior to that reward, it continues to seek the reward again and again.

 

This shows that teenagers have a different way of thinking, how will you think it will affect teenagers in life by thinking that way?

What is another reason why teenagers think this way?

Why do adults have a different way of thinking?

India kitchen

Meet a woman who trains robots for a living

Andrea Thomaz worked on a new invention. Can you imagine a robot, who can do cooking or cleaning your house? Andrea Thomaz think that robot will soon learn how to do what we want to do.

She explained that we have to teach the robot, example, how to cook, so how to grab the bowl or how to put sauce on the food. After you show to the robot how to do it, the robot will try to do the same thing or it will ask questions about how it should grab it or how it should hold the plate.

She said that with a little bit of practice, the robot will have a good built of a better model. Mrs. Thomaz said that people want to see the robot doing their chores that they don’t want to do. People wants to see robots doing everything, so they can have more free time.

For a lot of people in the community of human-robot interaction, that is the target—getting robots to a low enough price point that somebody could purchase one to be in their home and do something useful. We’re definitely not there yet, but we’re going to get there. The part of Robot & Frank that matches the vision she has for her lab is that the robot is adaptable.

Soon, human will be able to communicate with robots and soon, it will have to be some part of the end-user interaction.

Questions:

1.    Are robots will be a new treat for the population?

2.    Is it absolutely good for the habitants to have robots, doing their chores and the food? Are we going to be lazier if robots are doing everything? 

By Kim Botton

Surprises lurk inside a Saturn moon

Researchers could find how Mimas, the smallest of Saturn's moons diverse entourage of icy satellites formed because there is a surface sea or a roughly-shaped core might lie in it.

Like in all the moons they turn around in its own axis and facing its planet, but this astronomer Radwan Tajeddine from the Cornell University, noticed that his turn its further than the other moons. The researchers suggest in the Oct. 17 Science that the large twists must be caused by an unusual distribution of mass inside Mimas, which is just under 400 kilometers across.

Tajeddine and colleagues think the most likely culprit is an elongated core, a possible remnant from the moon’s formation.  An underground ocean is also possible, such as the one inside another Saturnian moon.

A few flybys with Cassini, the spacecraft that took the pictures, could let scientists map the moon’s gravity and unearth what Mimas is hiding.

Question1.- What do you think would happen if researchers could understand how Saturn’s diverse entourage of icy satellites formed?

 

Question2.- Why would an ocean affect this moon?

Yellowstone National Park, how the wolves changed rivers

How wolves changed Yellowstone National Park

In 1995, wolves where reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. They had been absent for 70 years. The elk and deer population was big since no other animals where there to cut it down. The deer ate all the grass in the valleys and gorges so no grass or flowers lived there.

When the wolves arrived, they didn’t just kill some deer, the deer moved away from those valleys which lead to the growth of grass and flowers. The trees became taller which brang in plenty of different species of birds. Beavers came in to live there since they ate the trees. They created dams  and niches which allowed other species such as muskrates and otters to live in. The wolves killed the coyotes so the number of rabits and mice went up, which gave life to more hawks and eagles.

The wolves didn’t just change the Yellowstone National Parks ecosystem but also its physical appearence; the wolves changed the rivers. More trees started to grow close to the river banks, reinforcing the banks. The banks stopped collapsing so the river was healthier and wider.

The wolves kept the Yellowstone National Park alive by changing the ecosystem and its physical appearance.

Questions:

1.     Do you know another animal that changed the ecosystem or physical appearance of an area?

2.     How do you think the wolves kept the park alive in a way?

Site of the article:

http://www.geekexchange.com/see-how-wolves-can-change-an-entire-ecosystem-102645.html

Komodo dragon lizard

The Komodo dragon is the biggest lizard I the word. The Komodo dragon can grow up to 10 ft. and weights 70 kilograms. The lizards lives in the Indonesian islands of komodo. The Komodo dragon is a carnivores which means that they just eat meet. They eat invertebrate, birds, pigs, fish, snake and water buffaloes.

The lizard has a venomous bite which contains toxic proteins. The Komodo dragon has bit and eaten several people in the western manggaria regency.

There mating season begins in May and august and the eggs are laid in September. They lay about 20 eggs. The eggs are incubated for seven to eight months hatching in April. Young komodo dragons live in trees safe from predators. They take up to 8 to 9 years to mature and they live up to 30 years. They are also popular zoo exhibits because they are so big.

 

1. do you know another animal who has the same diet as the komodo dragon?

2.do u know another animal who lays eggs at the same months as the komodo dragons

New Species of Mushrooms were Discovered.

        Very recently in the city of London, Bryn Dentinger and Laura Martinez-Suz, mycologists at the Royal Botanic Gardens discovered three new types of mushrooms. But this mushrooms were not funded in the middle of the woods, neither in the middle of a rain forest, but they were founded in a package of dried porcini mushrooms from a grocery store in southwest greater London.

        After founding this rare mushroom species the scientist, using a technique called  DNA barcoding they tested this mushrooms. The technique involves matching the DNA profile of a sample to a database of known species so they can identify the sample. But in three out of 15 pieces tested from the porcini mushroom package, no match was found. This means that this mushrooms are new.

"None of them had scientific names, so these were essentially new species to science," Dentiger told CBC science columnist Torah Kachur. "And we found three different species in the 15 pieces that we sampled from."

        By thinking about this article, in three knew type of mushrooms can be created in a grocery store because of human activity, imagine of what can be created in the future because of us...

Do you think that there are more existing plant or animal species in the natural world than the ones we know?

Do you think that this kind of evolutions can cause a problem in the future?

Scientists find tiny, poisonous new mystery frog

Poison dart frogs many of which are threatened species live in Central and South America and secrete poisons that are used by hunters to make blow-darts. They are often brightly coloured, with varied colour patterns that scare off predators.

The new animal, found in Panama, is only 12.7 millimetres long. The frog’s smooth skin and its unique call mark it out as different from any of the other frogs in the region, and researchers are unsure how it came to look like it did.

Other frog’s poisons have been harnessed by hunters for weapons, but it is unlikely that the new discovery’s poison has ever been used in that way. It has been called andinobates geminisae, and a specimen was first collected in 2011. Scientists have been working since then to understand whether the animal was a new species, and to sequence its DNA.

Though researchers have seen the frog before, it was unclear whether it was just another variety of a similar species. Little is known about the species, but it appears to care for its young.

Because the animal can only be found in such a small area and so its existence could easily be threatened, scientists have laid out plans for how to protect the frog. That will involve including the frog in a captive breeding programme that helps protect amphibians from diseases and habitat loss.

 Read the article here: 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-find-tiny-poisonous-new-mystery-frog-9760614.html 

Discussion Questions:

Do you know about any other new specie discovered?

What would you do so this new specie remains existing?

An Animal Gamble in the Arctic

Ice in Arctic waters shrank this summer to the sixth-lowest level in 36 years of monitoring, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Monday. The ice reached its seasonal minimum on Wednesday, at 1.9 million square miles. That is down only slightly from 2013 but is still 19 percent below average.

The Arctic is changing — fast. Two experts who have spent decades working there believe that the marine mammals who call the high latitudes home are now locked into a human-forced ecological game of chance. Jeffery DelViscio

Scientists are concerned about the ice melting from human-caused global warming because the melting may change the weather farther south. Studies have linked the ice melting to changes in the jet stream, which can produce extreme weather. Ice in Antarctic waters, meanwhile, is hitting record-high levels, which scientists attribute to local climatic conditions.  I think that one day the water will get so high that it will start spreading.

questions:  Do you think that this could cause lots of problems?

                   Do you think that this problem could continue?