Smithsonian.com

Can this help to improve your vision? (courtesy of flickr user Majicdolphin)

Yes, you read that headline right. Video games, specifically first-person shooter games, train your brain and help you see better.

Twenty-two lucky students and staff at the University of Rochester participated in this new study, the results of which were published online this week by Nature Neuroscience. They were paid $8/hour to play 50 hours of video games over a nine-week period. Half played the action games “Unreal Tournament 2004” and “Call of Duty 2” while the other half played the “The Sims 2” (a strategic life-simulation game).

During and after the study, the researchers evaluated the participants’ contrast sensitivity—defined as “the ability to discern slight differences in shades of gray.” Loss of this sensitivity is a primary factor in limiting a person’s ability to see, but it was thought to be correctable only through changing the optics of the eye, such as through glasses or surgery.

Players of the action games saw an improvement in their contrast sensitivity of 43 percent on average, whereas the Sims players saw no improvement. Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester explained:

When people play action games, they’re changing the brain’s pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it, and we’ve seen the positive effect remains even two years after the training was over.

Bavelier had previously found that game players had better vision when compared with non-game players. She says that these video games, and spending time in front of the computer, may not be harmful to our vision. (There may be other problems, though.)

Visitors to the National Mall will get a treat today. Parked just outside the National Air and Space Museum is a mockup of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the spacecraft that will replace the Space Shuttle, which will go out of service next year.

The Orion CEV mockup on the National Mall

NASA and the U.S. Navy built this replica of the Orion CEV for water testing. One of the advances with the Orion system is the ability to abort a mission after takeoff—NASA will be able to pull the CEV away from the rocket, then blow up the rocket and let the capsule splash down into the ocean. But they need a way to safely recover the crew, even in heavy seas like those that can kick up in the North Atlantic. The mockup CEV has been undergoing testing at a facility outside Washington, D.C. and is now being sent to Florida for further tests in the Atlantic Ocean. This will include testing how it behaves with water on the inside to simulate what would happen if the heat shield (that’s the bottom part) were damaged.

Orion, so the plan goes, will be used to visit the International Space Station and then to return to the Moon, carrying four to six astronauts at a time. The CEV seems fairly small for so many people, which was why I was somewhat surprised when Don Pearson of the Johnson Space Center called it a “fairly large capsule.” It is larger than the Apollo spacecraft (I checked out the Apollo 11 command module in NASM), but the CEV still seems small, particularly when Pearson said that NASA intended to use it, or a modified version of the CEV, to go to Mars. The journey to Mars would take six to nine months. The space explorers would then spend about two years on the red planet before a return journey to earth, also six to nine months. That is an incredible amount of time to spend with three to five other people in a space the size of a couple of office cubicles.

Tethys, Titan and Saturn. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

No, the picture of the week is not going to be of baby clouded leopards. The National Zoo’s new bundles of joy are unbearably cute, it’s true. But for a real ooh-aah experience, check out the Jet Propulsion Lab’s gallery of images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission.

Cassini has been zipping around Saturn and its 52 moons (they keep finding more) for almost five years now, and it’s sent back awesome shots of the planet, its rings, and those moons.

The image above is one of my favorites: Tethys is in the foreground and Titan (Saturn’s largest moon and the setting for a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. book) is rising from behind Saturn.

If you’re near D.C., stop by the National Air and Space Museum’s “Spectacular Saturn” exhibition of gorgeous and huge images from Cassini. It’s worth elbowing your way past the spring-breakers to get an even better look at this part of the solar system.

UPDATE: According to a report from the Dallas Morning News, the Texas Board of Education rejected  restoring the “strengths and weaknesses” proposal by a 7-7 split vote. A final vote will come on Friday, but the vote is expected to remain deadlocked.

My freshman year of high school, when the teacher reached the section about evolution, he began by telling us that though there may be alternative explanations, they were not science and would not be discussed in class. He would be happy, however, to speak with any students about them after class. The evolution chapter then proceeded like any other lesson, with lectures and labs and an exam at the end.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that my experience may have been somewhat rare, particularly for conservative Indiana. I once met an elementary school teacher who feared being asked questions about evolution and wouldn’t answer them, telling her students to ask their parents instead. One friend’s high school skipped over the topic completely. But by this point in my life, I wasn’t surprised by these stories, having seen efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in Georgia, Kansas and Pennsylvania (and since then Louisiana). Avoiding the topic seems somewhat mild compared with efforts to foist creationism or its cousin, intelligent design, on students.

The battle has now moved to Texas, where this week the state’s Board of Education is considering requiring teachers to instruct high school students on the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, particularly evolution. Weaknesses, though, is simply code for “evolution is wrong.” Those who pull out that argument do not argue for science; they want creationism or intelligent design taught in its place, though they have learned to be circumspect about their goals. You can see from this liveblog of the board’s meeting this week, by a Houston Chronicle reporter, that several of the people who spoke out on the first day for the “strengths and weaknesses” language had a religious agenda. And they have half of the board on their side, including the board chairman, who believes the earth is only 6,000 years old.

You would think that a board of education would have education (i.e., teaching children things that are not false) be their first priority, but it appears that the Texas board, or at least part of it, does not. Of course, the really scary bit of all of this is that where Texas goes in textbooks, so does much of the country. Because it’s such a big market, textbook publishers try to make their books fit Texas’s standards. If Texas requires weaknesses to be included, those false arguments could end up in your child’s schoolroom, even if you live thousands of miles away.

So, Texans, speak up. Teach your children about the wonder of evolution. Tell the board to leave out that silly “strengths and weaknesses” line. If you live elsewhere, keep a lookout for efforts like these.

Some resources:
National Center for Science Education
Evolution Resources from the National Academies
Science, Evolution and Creationism (free PDF download)

The Chesapeake oyster is the subject of a documentary at the Environmental Film Festival. Image courtesy of director Michael Fincham

A mass grave lies on the seafloor of the Chesapeake Bay. What was once a living reef of oysters is now hundreds of thousands of shelled caskets, battered by sediment and tides.

It’s been nearly 30 years since the collapse of the Chesapeake Bay oyster fishery, once a main source of commerce for communities there. Fishermen would easily harvest boatloads of the shellfish. They thought the supply was endless.

So what happened? That’s the questions posed by Who Killed Crassostrea Virginica? The Fall and Rise of the Chesapeake Oyster, a documentary that premiered on Friday at Washington D.C.’s Environmental Film Festival. Produced and directed by Michael Fincham, the film shows how the fishery collapse affected watermen and how science is trying to bring the oysters back.

Though a compelling story, one of the film’s weaknesses was its moderate approach to the problem. Fincham depicts the watermen and scientists as allies, whose common purpose is to replenish the Bay with oysters. There may be truth to this, but it neglects a very real controversy. The watermen want to keep up a tradition that died decades ago. Meanwhile, the scientists want the oyster reefs back to restore lost ecosystems.

It was the lack of human versus human conflict that made the film slightly dull. You sit through at least five minutes of an oysterman talking about how beautiful oyster fishing is, complete with historical reenactments of his younger self on a boat, before the film reveals what actually killed the oysters. It wasn’t overfishing, as one might expect, but a parasite from Japan.

Once the audience knows a parasite is the main culprit, Fincham covers the search for its mysterious origin.  A bit of suspense is added with the revelation that an oyster biologist who worked in the Chesapeake Bay in the 1960s and 1970s may have accidentally introduced the parasite while studying how well Japanese oysters survive in the bay; those oysters have developed defenses to the parasite and may carry it.

Fincher goes through great pains not to point fingers, keeping the problem entirely ecological. However, it would be naive to think the fishermen don’t blame the scientists to some extent or vice versa, opinions that were left out of the film.

Fincham does deserve credit for trying to tell such a difficult story. The challenge is that there are no concrete answers to what killed the Chesapeake oyster.  In addition to the biologist’s accidental introduction, possible origins of the Japanese parasite include early experiments by oyster farmers and the ballast waters from American warships docked in the Bay.

While the film brings in some nice visuals, such as the “ghost warships” and footage showing baby oysters swimming, it doesn’t take advantage of its bizarre cast of characters. Why do the scientists care so much about the state of Chesapeake Bay’s oysters? Do they think the restoration efforts are worth the trouble? As a record of the events and science surrounding the oyster fishery over the past hundred years, the documentary does very well. What it lacked was the ability to answer why this issue is relevant today. We still get oysters, granted from farming or other parts of the world, so why work so hard to grow them in a place teeming in deadly parasites?

Despite the documentary’s problems, it still makes for an informative hour of viewing. Learning how quickly nature can sour, via disease or depleted stocks, is a powerful reminder that an endless ocean is only an illusion.

– Written by Joseph Caputo

Doris Mable Cochran

Though underrepresented in some fields, female scientists are no longer rare. That wasn’t the case for a very long time. Usually when you see historical photos of scientists, there will be only a woman or two among them. The Smithsonian Institution Archives, though, has put together a collection of historical photos of female scientists and published it on its Flickr page.

My favorite is this 1954 photo of Doris Mable Cochran (1898-1968) as she measures a turtle shell. Cochran was a herpetologist here at the Smithsonian Institution. Through the course of her career, she described more than 100 species and published dozens of papers and several books on reptiles and amphibians. To learn more about Cochran, check out this post from The Clutter Museum.

And for more blog posts about women in science, go to findingada.com. More than 1,500 bloggers have pledged to blog about women in science today in honor of Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Byron and one of the world’s first computer programmers.

Dust blows over the Mediterranean from Africa

German movie + subtitles + art museum venue = ack. I should have known what I was getting myself into when I attended this selection from the Environmental Film Festival.

Dust as a topic can be interesting (I’ve been fascinated with it since I first read about the theory that Britain’s outbreak of foot and mouth disease could have originated with dust blown from the Sahara), but this movie is really just a topic; it’s not a story. There isn’t much that connects the segments except for the title.

There are some good ideas, but at 90 minutes, the film was twice as long as it should have been. The filmmaker could have focused on his point of how humans are the source of dust, but we continue in a never-ending battle to get rid of it. (There was a very funny segment in which the photographer baits a woman on this point as she cleans her apartment. She’s so cleaning-obsessed that she says she will even regularly take apart her TV to get rid of the dust inside.) There are also bits about the science of dust, such as how dust is involved in the formation of planets, but they get lost in this movie.

Several people got up and left the theater after about an hour. I would have gone with them, except that I didn’t want to go back into the rain so quickly.

(Image courtesy of NASA, created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the MODIS Rapid Response team)

A Great Egret fishing in shallow waters

Voting continues for the Reader’s Choice in Smithsonian magazine’s 6th Annual Photo Contest. This photo, A Great Egret fishing in shallow waters, a finalist in the Natural World category, was taken by Dan Holland in Reelfoot Lake State Park in Tennessee back in July 2007. You can almost hear the splashing water in this scene.

If you have a photograph you’d like to share with the world, enter our 7th Annual Photo Contest.