It took me a good couple days to believe this in-development appliance was real, and not from The Onion – but once I did, I was staggered by it. The tubby little box follows a proven kitchen appliance formula: it lives on your counter, accepts single-use pods into its top, and in a few seconds, dispenses a fresh, hot … tortilla?
Dubbed the Flatev, the tortilla maker was developed by Carlos Ruiz, who was confronted by a dearth of authentic Mexican cuisine when he moved to Switzerland. He attempted to make tortillas by hand with his mother’s recipe, with Infomercial-Fail-like results. A fan of the Keurig, Carlos envisioned a tortilla maker that would take the mess and labour out of the whole process, much like the revolutionary coffeemaker.
Unlike the Keurig, the Flatev’s website assures us, the used dough pods will be recyclable. In addition, the dough inside the pods will be organic and preservative-free – which, the developers enthuse, produces a significant difference in flavor from pre-made supermarket tortillas.
Gee-whiz factor aside, I have a bit of a mental block about this. This is a gadget for a very specific sub-set of the population: people who a) eat lots of tortillas, b) are hung up about the freshness of said tortillas, and c) have enough money to not just purchase this one-purpose machine, but to afford a home with a kitchen big enough that it doesn’t take up all the counter space! (I may be biased, I also loathe Keurigs.)
But I also think of what users of the Flatev might miss out on by letting a machine take over. Progress is great. But it’s one thing to have your weekly trip to the creek with a washboard and lump of soap replaced by a washing machine; it’s another entirely to miss out on the fascination of trying a new skill, and the pride when your unbalanced, weird looking tortillas start getting better and better!
However, I would not turn down a tortilla, whether hand- or machine-made. Here’s hoping the Flatev crew gets lots of pre-orders: It would be worth seeing if this little guy lives up to the dream.
As the days grow shorter and the wind blows colder, thoughts turn to how the heck to keep from freezing every time I leave my cozy, wood stove heated house. I sometimes think of the animals who don’t have it so lucky, and have to stay outside over the winter in dens or burrows, or especially anywhere near water.
Turns out, I should save my pity! Science has finally quantified how well the fur of animals like beaver and otter traps air to keep them warm in their semi-aquatic adventures – with an eye to developing tech that will keep us warm too.
The team of MIT engineers is particularly interested in creating wetsuits for surfers – whose amphibious sporting lifestyle requires a wetsuit that stays warm in the water, but that sheds water quickly when they leave it. They were intrigued by this problem because it had never been properly measured. Indeed, the actual mechanics of the air trapping in aquatic mammals, surmised to be the work of long “guard hairs” protecting the downier fur underneath, was unobserved. Once this process was cracked, the team would be one step closer to humanity producing “furry” heat retaining surfaces artificially.
The experiments first took a rigorous form of trial and error:
“To make hairy surfaces, [lead author and grad student Alice] Nasto first created several molds by laser-cutting thousands of tiny holes in small acrylic blocks. With each mold, she used a software program to alter the size and spacing of individual hairs. She then filled the molds with a soft casting rubber called PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane), and pulled the hairy surfaces out of the mold after they had been cured. […]
[The] researchers mounted each hairy surface to a vertical, motorized stage, with the hairs facing outward. They then submerged the surfaces in silicone oil — a liquid that they chose to better observe any air pockets forming.”
From their observations of the different amounts of air trapped by different hairy surfaces, the team then constructed a model that described the air-trapping in a mathematical manner. They turned these results into a scalable equation: hair density and length, and speed of dive can now be used to determine air trapping – and heat saving – capabilities. (This precision prevents the need for a “Cookie Monster” level of hairiness to maintain warmth.)
While I’m no surfer, I am a fan of aquatic mammals, and I’m fascinated at the science behind this innovation! I can’t wait to see the eventual application – in wetsuits and other fields, like industrial dip-coating. We still have so much to learn from Nature, and this just proves it.
A team out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has done a serious assessment of studies of brain training games, like those featured in programs like
Lumosity and Learning Rx. They hoped to get a final answer on whether playing these skill-specific games can result in general memory and cognition strengthening, as these companies assert, and some scientists support. The results don’t bode well: many of the studies looked at did not “adhere to what we think of as best practices,” says project leader Daniel Simons, professor of psychology at UIUC – thus casting doubt on the assertion that overall brain power can be improved by several rounds of Word Bubbles.
Some of the studies’ sample sizes were too small, or they didn’t have a control group; others didn’t consider the placebo effect. And the studies that did have sound methodologies showed that task-based brain training games do indeed improve your brain’s function – but only when later performing that exact task.
“‘You can practice, for example, scanning baggage at an airport and looking for a knife,’ [Prof. Simons] says. ‘And you get really, really good at spotting that knife.’
But there was less evidence that people got better at related tasks, like spotting other suspicious items, Simons says. And there was no strong evidence that practicing a narrow skill led to overall improvements in memory or thinking.
That’s disappointing, Simons says, because ‘what you want to do is be better able to function at work or at school.’”
Some scientists are holding out hope that a longer term use of brain training games, which hasn’t yet been studied in depth, may lead to overall improvement in brain functioning, and stave off age-related decline.
Until then, Lumosity and Learning Rx have been knocked back on their heels by fines levied by the U.S. Federal Trade commission, which found their advertising of general cognitive improvement through gameplay to be unsupported. We’ll just have to see how this shakes out. I will be playing Word Bubbles while I wait – because it’s fun.
Schadenfreude, an originally German term, is used to describe a very human emotion — translated by a certain hit Broadway musical as “happiness at the misfortune of others.”. Now, a team of neuroscientists, who were actually studying neurons associated with observational learning, has found the particular brain cells that activate when they see someone else fail — which may show the physical manifestation of this complex emotion.
The phenomenon of observational learning — taking lessons from others’ experiences so we don’t have to undergo them — is central to human cognition. The behaviour of “schadenfreude neurons” adds an interesting extra dimension to this action.
“For the study, ten epileptic patients who had electrodes implanted deep in their brains — standard procedure for epileptic studies — were asked to play a card game in which they would draw a card from one of two decks. The odds were stacked against them in one deck, so that they only had a 30 percent chance of winning. The other deck was rigged in their favor […]
The researchers noticed a change in the firing of brain cells deep in the frontal lobe—specifically in a brain area associated with decision-making, emotion, and social interactions—that corresponded to whether the players thought their opponents would win or lose. Furthermore, the cells responded differently after players learned whether their prediction was correct or not. […]
The most surprising observation was that those cells also showed increased firing activity whenever a player won, or his or her opponents lost, and decreased activity when a player lost and the opponents won. That’s the basic definition of schadenfreude: we experience pleasure when we win, but also when others lose.”
Proving the connection between neuronal activity and human feeling has proven notoriously difficult for scientists, so this study is a step in an exciting direction, even if it emphasizes a sometimes-nasty impulse. But we’re complicated: “There’s a Fine, Fine Line” between good and bad in us, and the next time someone you know thinks “What Do You Do With A B.A. In English?” or why “It Sucks To Be Me,” or how much they miss “My Girlfriend Who Lives In Canada,” and you feel good about it, imagine the wonders your neurons are busy performing! “For Now” at least.
Sometimes, the foods that make you sickest are the ones that passed the – literal and figurative – sniff test. In determining food safety, there can be more guesswork than is comfortable. But soon, standing in front of your fridge wondering if that package of frozen hamburgers, whose batch number isn’t quite the one that was recalled, is worth the risk, will be a thing of the past.
Scientists have developed a new weapon for the food contamination detection arsenal, which can make the presence of the bacteria E. coli too obvious to miss. (E. coli, usually found in the guts of healthy people, can cause severe gastric distress if ingested by mouth. It can be found in ground beef, unpasteurized milk, and produce, like lettuce or spinach, that may have been exposed to farm runoff.) It’s a virus called NanoLuc, engineered from Oplophorus gracilirostris, a deep-sea shrimp that glows blue. NanoLuc is designed to infect only E. coli, and when it does so, the bacteria glows visibly, much like the shrimp. That “makes contaminant detection as simple as turning off the lights”!
Researchers are now busy creating a virus that will infect Salmonella, another cause of food-borne illness. An invention like this can not only prevent the personal discomfort of a bout of food poisoning, but can save food companies the money usually spent on giant recalls — as well as the medical system’s time and resources. (E. coli infections can be life-threatening). Delicious!
Earlier this week, we (meaning the dogs & humans living here) had some excitement in the backyard. The excitement started when Jill hit, no pounced, on the back door to go outside. Both she and Samson started some serious barking and jumping. I looked outside to see what all the excitement was about and it was a BIG PORCUPINE!!! Instead of 
opening the door to let them out because electric fence or not I believe they both would have gone after that prickly rodent in our yard, I locked the door and called out to my husband. (I think Jill would have gotten the door open) My husband took out his shotgun and played Elmer Fudd, except he didn’t want to hunt “wabbits”, he just wanted to scare away the porcupine. Porcupines seems to march to their own drummer, so when the shotgun was discharged over the porcupines head, all it did was raise his quills and continue plodding it’s way into a bush on the side the woods. Porcupines must be stupid or extremely confident to act so nonchalantly when a shotgun is shot at them…..
Bees + Elephants = Conservation
I have always thought of elephants as the gentle giants of the animal world. Turns out, if you live alongside them in Africa, they can often be the opposite of gentle: destroying crops and pushing over trees in their effort to get enough food to power their massive bodies.
Farmers and researchers in communities in Africa have long sought a way to limit elephants’ destructive tendencies in a way that doesn’t compromise the elephants’ well being. They seem to have found it, and are now steering one of the largest animals on earth away from damaging behaviour by harnessing their natural reaction to a very small animal: African bees!
Elephants are terrified of these particularly relentless insects, specifically because they can fly up their trunks and sting them from inside. So they will quickly evacuate an area where they hear the sound of an active beehive. This has led farmers and community members to put up hives along elephants’ routes towards tasty crops — when the bees are disturbed, they buzz, and the elephants turn right around!
Similarly, as conservationist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Paula Kahumbu explains in this video for the venerable magazine, elephants are also repelled by the bee-like sound of drones. So drones can be used to “chase” elephants away from places they can damage — as well as from the resulting conflict with humans that could end up injuring them.
I love how nature and low-impact technology is being used to help these beautiful, intelligent creatures live their lives, as they battle back from the terrible effects of poaching. There’s a lesson for humans in here too: there are ways to work with many animals, if what they’re doing harms our way of life.
If you spend your days in a workplace where teamwork is paramount, here’s something to think about: a new study shows that groups of people working together to recall information may actually be compromising that recall. The team behind the study, a collaboration between the University of Liverpool and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, has dubbed this phenomenon “collaborative inhibition.”
It has everything to do with the mechanism of retrieving memories. Different people usually have different preferred strategies to get their brains to cough up what they’re looking for. And, if that process is interrupted by other people verbalizing their own strategies during group work, recall for everybody in the echo chamber is lowered.
“Several factors were also found to influence the extent to which collaborative inhibition occurs. One of these findings was collaboration is more harmful to larger groups than smaller groups. Another was that friends and family members are more effective at working together than strangers.
[Says Dr. Craig Thorley of the University of Liverpool, study leader]: ‘Smaller groups perform better than larger groups as they contain fewer competing (disruptive) retrieval strategies. Friends and family members perform better than strangers as they tend to develop complementary (and not competing) retrieval strategies.’”
However, in the same study, the team discovered a happy flip side to this phenomenon: individuals who worked in groups to synthesize information for later, on-their-own, recall, have higher rates of memory retention than if they had initially worked alone.
So, if you and your colleagues live on brainstorming sessions, keep at it! But perhaps think twice about studying for those certifications together…
Researchers at the University of Calgary have demonstrated a principle in physics that even Einstein himself called “spooky action at a distance.” They have done so with an experiment of elegant simplicity, even though the concept seems seriously dense to the layperson (i.e. me!).
Basically, the team — headed by Professor Wolfgang Tittel and made up of postdoctoral fellows in the Physics department — has achieved teleportation of the properties of a tiny particle of light, to another particle 6.2 kilometers away, without an object having to move through the space between them.
This is a real world demonstration of a quantum principle — that observing a particle’s quantum state changes it. The team used particles that were “entangled,” that is, connected in such a way that their properties mirror each other.
“The U of C team used a specialized laser to create a pair of entangled photons — elementary particles of light — and sent one to Calgary City Hall via a dedicated fibre-optic line while keeping the other in their lab at the university in the city’s northwest.
At the same time, a third photon was sent to city hall from another location (a data centre in the southeast community of Manchester) so that it would meet and interact with the entangled photon.
‘We had to make sure it arrived at the same time at city hall as the photon that was created at the data centre,’ said Tittel.”
The whole thing was a delicate operation, as the fibre-optic line could be affected by the weather, and even the slightest resulting mis-timing could have sunk the experiment. But it worked, and the team reported their findings in the same issue of Nature Photonics as a team from China, who succeeded in proving the same principle with a different experiment.
For me, the coolest fact is that the fibre-optic line used in the Calgary experiment was actually part of City Hall’s regular infrastructure — they just loaned it to the University for their amazing uses! This means humanity could be on the cusp of a functional “quantum internet,” a hypothetical method of exchanging information that is faster and more secure, and could change the way we live our lives fundamentally. It’s only a matter of time (and space).
One of the many interesting threads that I picked out of the hot economics tome of 2014, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, was that, given that the success of the 20th century was a short-lived economic fluke because of an 
unprecedented confluence of world events, we in the 2000s in the West are seeing a gradual return to the kind of economic inequality that we saw in the 19th century and before. Already, the value of inherited wealth in relation to the economy as a whole is at par with where it was in 1910, and steadily rising.
I thought of this when grappling with this week’s topic, the redevelopment of the “Human Intelligence Task:” a 21st century, Western spin on piece work. We are returning to the 1800s economically in more ways than one, it seems — but there are thinkers out there searching for ways to make this reality work for the workers
In his article “Say Goodbye To Your Highly Skilled Job. It’s Now a Human Intelligence Task” journalist Mark Harris delves deep into the world of “Meatware:” digital crowdworkers who do multiple tiny online tasks from anywhere for a few cents to a buck or two. Most of these tasks are one step above automation — tagging suspected cancer cells in scans of patient tissue, for example, or filling out surveys, or transcribing information from format to format. Companies like CrowdFlower, zCrowd, and others sprouted up in the wake of the industry behemoth, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Scary headline aside, Harris investigates the current state of the market, where tasks can run the gamut from interesting and well-paid, to too complicated and not worth it. Until recently, crowdworking companies have been mostly content to connect tasker and task, without thinking of the quality of life this working style affords. But, industry development is now looking further into the future:
“‘The very ephemeral, very shallow kind of work on Mechanical Turk is going to generate some economic activity, but is generally not sustainable in the very long term,” [Praveen Paritosh, Google research scientist in human and machine intelligence] says. ‘What is sustainable is moving crowdworking further along the computational spectrum, where there is room for more skill, more education, more training.’”
Crowdworking companies are starting to realize that this “room,” and the engagement it brings, should result in more contented, higher paid workers — and therefore, productivity above and beyond that which results from the current, simple, dangling-carrot arrangement.
“[Isaac Nichols, founder of zCrowd] believes that workers will ultimately prefer an environment where they feel part of the larger business. […] ‘Look at any company structure and there’s a ladder to climb where people get paid more as they move up. There’s a similar structure to be built on top of the crowd,’ he says. ‘I’d love to see the day where someone can have a career in crowdworking: to work whenever they want, wherever they want, and get paid more for their experience.”
It will be really interesting to see where this trend towards higher quality of working life takes us. Even as we careen back towards 19th century economic conditions, what we know about the possibilities of technology will ensure our future will always be unique!
My dogs Jill and Samson have never been shy about telling me what they think about what I’m saying to them – either through vocalizing or cocking an expressive eyebrow. But now researchers at Eotvos Lorand University have quantified exactly how the brains of dogs in general respond to language – and have found an interesting parallel with how humans respond to language too.
In the study, a group of dogs were trained to enter an MRI scanner — a feat in itself! — and stay still while technicians imaged their brains responding to positive words of praise, as well as neutral words. As an added twist, the team also observed the dogs’ brains while both types of words were spoken in positive and neutral tones of voice. The researchers discovered that, like humans, dogs use different parts of their brains simultaneously to respond to both content and tone. And the reward systems of the dogs in the study lit up the most when positive words were matched with a cheery voice!
“For dog owners […] the findings mean that the dogs are paying attention to meaning, and that you should, too.
[…] In terms of evolution of language, the results suggest that the capacity to process meaning and emotion in different parts of the brain and tie them together is not uniquely human. […] Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University who was not involved in the study, said he thought the experiment was well done and suggested that specialization of right and left hemispheres in processing information began to evolve well before human language. But, he said, it was still possible that dogs had independently evolved a similar brain organization.”
And while I’m glad to hear that the well trained dogs were free to leave the MRI tube at any time, I’m gladder they toughed it out, and helped facilitate this research. I will happily continue in my belief that Jill and Samson know exactly what I’m talking about — because science is now backing me up!