Christofer Toumazou (DNA Electronics Ltd): 99 seconds for the future – Video

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Christofer Toumazou (DNA Electronics Ltd): 99 seconds for the future
Innovations that make a difference: day after day scientists work hard to make our life better. Christofer Toumazou is one of those, who will revolutionise t...

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Christofer Toumazou (DNA Electronics Ltd): 99 seconds for the future - Video

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash: DNA forensics tests identify 298 victims – Video

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Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash: DNA forensics tests identify 298 victims
Malaysian and Dutch teams are working together to identify and tag bodies recovered from the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 that crashed last Thursday in Ukra...

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Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash: DNA forensics tests identify 298 victims - Video

Dissecting DNA to cure cancers: the legacy of Dr. Janet Rowley | Victoria Forster | TEDxJesmondDene – Video

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Dissecting DNA to cure cancers: the legacy of Dr. Janet Rowley | Victoria Forster | TEDxJesmondDene
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Inspiration can be found in many ways! The Person: Dr. Vicky Forste...

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Dissecting DNA to cure cancers: the legacy of Dr. Janet Rowley | Victoria Forster | TEDxJesmondDene - Video

Scientific Proof God Exists (Odds of life without a creator)(DNA part6) – Video

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Scientific Proof God Exists (Odds of life without a creator)(DNA part6)
God does exist!!! watch the other videos in this series watch the odds of life without a creator section of this series part 1: http://youtu.be/beJe3i5bM6k part 2: http://youtu.be/Owwic6b2Iug...

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Scientific Proof God Exists (Odds of life without a creator)(DNA part6) - Video

Israel is not my birthright

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Im writing this in my new baby nieces room. I am here in Florida visiting my family because of this niece, this tiny pudgy innocent baby. We are Jewish, and its time for my niece to receive her Hebrew name in a sweet little ceremony at our longtime synagogue.

Last night I sat at the synagogue next to my 19-year-old daughter. I felt a swell of joy as the services began; Id been away too long. Id loved services as a child and teenager.

And then we hit the first mention of Israel as the Promised Land, and I burst into tears.

On the way to services, Id caught up on Twitter a bit. Id read about the Israeli missiles still falling on Palestine. Id read about the outright murder of Palestinian children.

And I sat there and listened to the rabbi call Israel our Promised Land, and it broke something in me.

I am an American Jew of a certain age (40), and what that means is that I was raised to believe that Israel was ours by divine right.

It sounds ridiculous when you say it aloud. Especially because, like many of my generation of Jews, Im not particularly religious. Many Jews my age slid into paganism, a sort of ambivalent agnosticism, or outright atheism; we are cultural Jews rather than religious Jews. And yet when I first spoke about the conflict between Israel and Palestine some years ago, I found that falling out of my mouth that God promised us Israel. Its ours because God said so.

My daughter, trying to comfort me after the services, said, Maybe it is the Promised Land, just not right now.

My daughter is an atheist. And the narrative got her, too.

The history we are taught in our Sunday school is that we were there first, and that therefore the Palestinians are occupying our land. How long ago were we there, though? And who, exactly, is we? I find myself using that we We need to stop bombing Palestine, we need to give land back, but I am not Israeli. I have never been to Israel. This is how deep it runs, this idea of possession.

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Israel is not my birthright

Learning To Read May Take Longer Than We Thought

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Most of what we know or think we know about how kids learn comes from classroom practice and behavioral psychology. Now, neuroscientists are adding to and qualifying that store of knowledge by studying the brain itself. The latest example: new research in the journal Developmental Science suggests a famous phenomenon known as the "fourth-grade shift" isn't so clear-cut.

"The theory of the fourth-grade shift had been based on behavioral data," says the lead author of the study, Donna Coch. She heads the Reading Brains Lab at Dartmouth College.

The assumption teachers make: "In a nutshell," Coch says, "by fourth grade you stop learning to read and start reading to learn. We're done teaching the basic skills in third grade, and you go use them starting in the fourth."

But, Coch's team found, that assumption may not be true. The study involved 96 participants, divided among third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders as well as college students. All average readers, the subjects wore noninvasive electrode caps that could swiftly pick up electrical activity in the brain.

They were shown strings of letters/symbols that fell into four different categories: words ("bed"); pseudo-words ("bem"); strings of letters ("mbe") and finally, strings of meaningless symbols (@#*). The researchers then observed the subjects' brains as they reacted, within milliseconds, to each kind of stimulus.

The children in the study handled the first three categories roughly as well as the college students, meaning their brains responded at a speed that suggested their word processing was automatic. The difference came with the fourth category, meaningless symbols. As late as fifth grade, children needed to use their conscious minds to decide whether the symbols were a word.

The study suggests there is nothing so neat as a fourth-grade shift. It found that third-graders exhibit some signs of automatic word processing while fifth-graders are still processing words differently from adults.

Why is this important? "From my perspective, this concept of automaticity is key to learning to read," says Coch. "If you're not automatic, you're using a lot of effort to decode and understand individual words, meaning you have fewer resources for comprehension."

Coch's team also administered a written test, covering the same set of real words, fake words, and symbol strings. This task was designed to test the participants' conscious word processing, a much slower procedure.

Interestingly, most of the 96 participants got a nearly perfect score on the written test, showing that their conscious brains knew the difference between words and non-words. Future research will no doubt try to pinpoint when that process becomes automatic ... research that could change the way we teach reading in the higher grades.

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Learning To Read May Take Longer Than We Thought