Technology

A disabled African penguin at Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut has gotten a new boot, thanks to 3-D printing and some middle school students. Yellow/Purple (AKA “Purps”), a resident of Mystic Aquarium’s endangered African penguin colony,  was left with a nonfunctional flexor tendon in her ankle following a fight with another penguin. In an initial effort to immobilize, support and protect the site of injury, veterinarians at Mystic Aquarium fashioned a boot for Purps from moldable plastic material. While adequate, the animal care team at Mystic Aquarium knew there were more modern…

23andMe has launched Genotyping Services for Research (GSR) so that researchers – no matter their level of genetics expertise – can infuse genetics into their studies.   Their intent is to simplify the genotyping process and reduce costs for academic researchers recruiting for cohorts. GSR will be used to help generate and study new genetic data and will enable researchers to give information back to the research participants in the form of 23andMe Personal Genome Service reports. Typically most researchers fail to implement reciprocity-based reasons for trial participationand many…

Outdoor learning can have a significant and positive impact on children's quality of life but needs to be introduced more formally into global school curricula in order for its potential benefits to be fully realised, a new report suggests. Yet reality says just the opposite. Any kid with a cell phone can now learn all about landmarks and their neighborhood, just by playing Pokemon Go. And in the United States, it happened with the White House spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns telling kids to go outside.  Learning in the natural environment was once highly…

Friends, don’t let friends play Pokémon go alone unless they are known to be very situationally aware.  One or two images will show the problems that arise from not watching what you are doing while playing this game.  Consider where the “Pokéstops” are located.   By the by that is a name which is just begging for a double entendre meaning.    Much of the danger stems from the very thing that makes this game almost unique, it is based on augmented reality.  The space you play in is comprised of the very streets, buildings, and hazards of the real world…

The case of Reo, a male chimpanzee that learned to walk again after being paralyzed due to illness, shows how much can be done to rehabilitate animals injured in captivity. So says lead author Yoko Sakuraba of Kyoto University, in an article in Primates, the official journal of the Japan Monkey Centre published by Springer. In their normal work, researchers of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University use chimpanzees' interaction with computers and touch screens to study the cognition and perception of these primates. When Reo was paralyzed from the neck down, dedicated staff put…

There has been plenty of criticism about academic clinical trial reporting mandated by government funding and now a new paper analyzing four companies finds that the private sector is better about it, though results vary. In JAMA, Isabelle Boutron, M.D., Ph.D., of Paris Descartes University, Paris, and colleagues investigated the proportion of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) registered at ClinicalTrials.gov that were listed at the Clinical Study Data Request website, where companies voluntarily list studies for which data can be requested. Access to individual patient-level data from…

KFC is launching a 5-in-1 meal with a built in power bank so you can charge your phone while you eat lunch. Watt a Box is designed to offset the drop in discretionary spend brought on by the moribund economy. One way to gain a competitive advantage over other companies is to introduce a feature they don't have. And that feature is a phone that won't die during chicken. Sorry, US diners, right now it is exclusive to Delhi and Mumbai.

If you paid 23andMe to take a look at your DNA, maybe you wanted to know more than why you like cilantro or are related to Genghis Khan, maybe you thought you were advancing science. Well, you are, in the same old way marketers have long advanced science - by selling information about customers. In this case, the DNA information of 1.2 million people, sold to more than 13 drug companies. Genentech paid $10 million to look at the genes of people with Parkinson’s disease. Now, that's good, it isn't like a Parkinson's treatment is going to come from the government, but 23andMe customers paid to…

A chain saw, sporting all the safety interlocks, might still kill you if you use it carelessly. You’re self-confident and you suffer the usual optimism bias. Do you buy the chainsaw? A driverless car (autonomous vehicle, or AV) is programmed to kill you under certain conditions. It’s clear, up front, that those conditions will be beyond your control; your self-confidence is irrelevant. Will you pay for this machine? Is the manufacturer insane to believe you would buy your own possible execution? The second scenario refers to the Trolley Problem – the (usually) hypothetical dilemma in which…

A big push is under way in higher education to measure how students are learning and how good lecturers are at teaching them. Universities can track how much time a student spent on a learning module or how often they accessed a journal article or online book. Some universities are starting to use these “learning analytics” to study how students are accessing data. But that is currently all they can do – because of the limits of using this kind of “big data” to measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning. In the UK, the government has confirmed plans to measure teaching excellence at…