Stephen's Untold Stories

Google celebrates this annual event. Anybody going to do a lot of watching?

Thanks to Rick for this one.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Pretty good stuff here.

Head over to the NASA Apollo 40th Anniversary Page!

More amazing stuff from NASA.

A team of Apollo-era engineers who helped produce the 1969 live broadcast of the moonwalk acquired the best of the broadcast-format video from a variety of sources for the restoration effort. These included a copy of a tape recorded at NASA’s Sydney, Australia, video switching center, where down-linked television from Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek was received for transmission to the U.S.; original broadcast tapes from the CBS News Archive recorded via direct microwave and landline feeds from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston; and kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson that had not been viewed for 36 years.

“The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video,” said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who oversaw television processing at the ground tracking sites during Apollo 11. “The restoration project is scheduled to be completed in September and will provide the public, future historians, and the National Archives with the highest quality video of this historic event.”

See them all here!

Astronaut Mark Polanksy is Twittering from the Space Shuttle.

http://twitter.com/Astro_127

I don’t care if you have a Twitter account yourself, or even if you hate Twitter. This might change your mind.

High school students in Georgia have long feared the science and social studies portions of the High School Graduation Test. This new program has helped a lot more of them pass this year.

Nearly 1,400 students are a big step closer to graduation thanks to an innovative partnership between the state and local school districts.

The Exam Preparation for Science and Social Studies (ExPreSS) program was a state-funded effort aimed at students who had not passed the Georgia High School Graduation Tests (GHSGT) in Science or Social Studies. More than 2,000 students received two weeks of intensive instruction June 8-18 and then had the opportunity to retest on June 19.

The overall pass rate on this retest was 68 percent; more than double last year’s pass rate on GHSGT retests in science and social studies.

There were 2,043 students from over 100 school districts that attended the ExPreSS program – 1,072 for social studies and 971 for science. The instruction took place at 29 sites around the state. The classes were led by 180 educators: 89 science teachers and 91 social studies teachers.

In social studies, 73 percent of the ExPreSS participants passed the retest. By comparison, the 2008 summer retest pass rate on the Social Studies GHSGT was 27 percent.

In science, 63 percent of the ExPreSS participants passed the retest. By comparison, the 2008 summer retest pass rate on the Science GHSGT was 29 percent.

Read the rest here.

This is great news for people who are in real need.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYDSPFuWFDM

Here’s the story.

Google celebrates his birthday.

In 1890, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli drew this map of Mars. Today, on his 174th birthday, we are excited to include his work with many other new features for Mars in Google Earth.

We salute Schiaparelli’s pioneering spirit, his drive to explore, and his desire to understand the universe. His observations impacted the way humans viewed Mars for nearly a century and started a revolution in Astronomy.

More here.

I used to play a lot of music when I was a classroom teacher. Most of the students seemed to enjoy it once they got used to it. Maybe it was even more beneficial than I thought.

People have long known that music can trigger powerful recollections, but now a brain-scan study has revealed where this happens in our noggins.

The part of the brain known as the medial pre-frontal cortex sits just behind the forehead, acting like recent Oscar host Hugh Jackman singing and dancing down Hollywood’s memory lane.

“What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head.” said Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of California, Davis. “It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye.”

Read the rest here.

Outstanding stuff!

This is the coolest picture of Venus I’ve ever seen.

See the rest here!

Wow…this is sure to be felt in a lot of places.

University of California, Berkeley, researchers have shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids.

In a study recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.

Brain function was measured by means of an electroencephalograph (EEG) – basically, a cap fitted with electrodes to measure electrical activity in the brain – like that used to assess epilepsy, sleep disorders and brain tumors.

“Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult,” said Robert Knight, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. “We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response.”

Previous studies have shown a possible link between frontal lobe function and behavioral differences in children from low and high socioeconomic levels, but according to cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, first author of the new paper, “those studies were only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors that tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity.”

Read the rest here.

Yes, that’s exactly what Eddie Adcock did.

A musician who underwent brain surgery to treat a hand tremor played his banjo throughout to test the success of the procedure.

Eddie Adcock is one of the pillars of Bluegrass Music and realised his tremor could threaten his ability to perform professionally.

Surgeons placed electrodes in Mr Adcock’s brain and fitted a pace maker in his chest which delivers a small current which shuts down the region of his brain causing the tremors.

A surgeon filmed the operation at the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

Click here for the video.

Very well done!

“The world changed today. What I say or do is very minor compared to the significance of what happened to our country today when it was attacked.” So said Expedition 3 Commander Frank L. Culbertson, upon learning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.

Larger version here

Bravo!!  Be sure to say for the end!