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DENA HEADLEE: Smartphones keep you connected to the world.
But now that phone could actually save your life!
NSF-funded engineers at Cornell University have created a smart
phone accessory called "smartcard." The technology
uses a smartphone's camera to read your cholesterol level.
DAVID ERICKSON: The system comprises of an accessory that
fits over all smartphones just like this. Test strip--you put
a small drop of blood on the test strip, fit it into the
back, open up the app, press a button and it tells you what
your cholesterol levels are.
DENA HEADLEE: Erickson feels that with the popularity of
mobile health rapidly increasing, this kind of
technology may become easier and more commonplace.
DAVID ERICKSON: The problem is right now most people have a
difficult time being able to tell either, "A," what their
cholesterol levels are or if what they're doing actually
makes a difference. With this type of technology, go to
the store... five minutes later, figure out what your
cholesterol levels are on your smartphone, archive
them; and you're ready to go.
DENA HEADLEE: Although smartcard could be brought to
the market immediately, Erickson is optimistic that the accessory
will have even more advanced capabilities in less than
a year. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the
water... a collaborative research team has discovered
that great white sharks actually grow much slower and live
significantly longer than previously thought. The team
applied cutting-edge isotope geochemistry to answer the
age-old question of sharks' longevity.
The team studied radiocarbon signatures in archived vertebrae
samples of four females and four males from the Northwestern
Atlantic Ocean. The radiocarbon produced by thermonuclear device
testing during the 1950s and 60s left an unmistakable
timestamp on the tissues of marine organisms living during
this period. The team believes this timestamp in white shark
vertebrae provides irrefutable evidence of white shark
longevity that had proved impossible to verify using
traditional methods. This NSF-funded research was a
collaboration between the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
NOAA's fisheries service and the Massachusetts Division of Marine
Fisheries. Ever wonder how your fingers know where the keys are
on a keyboard as they whiz across at 90 miles an hour?
NSF-funded cognitive psychologists at Vanderbilt and
Kobe Universities have discovered that skilled typists
can't actually identify the positions of many of the keys on
a standard qwerty keyboard and beginners don't seem to learn
key locations in the first place.
The team recruited 100 university students and members
of the surrounding community to participate in an experiment.
First, they completed a short typing test. Then each were
shown a blank qwerty keyboard and given 80 seconds to
correctly identify letter locations. Surprisingly,
they could only correctly identify half of the keys and
made mistakes on about a quarter of them.
GORDON LOGAN: So it was surprising when you asked
them where the keys are, they don't know where they are, but
if you have them type the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy
dog, they can get all of those letters correct. Their fingers
know where the keys are but their… they have no explicit
knowledge of it. Their conscious awareness
is pretty hazy.
DENA HEADLEE: The team was surprised to find that the
typists never appear to memorize the key positions, not even when
they were first learning to type. The team believes the
lack of explicit knowledge of the keyboard may be due to the
fact that computers and keyboards have become so
commonplace that students learn to use them at a very young age
by looking at the keyboard as they type, so they don't need
to memorize it. Adelie Penguins' unique ability to
adapt and survive at the bottom of the world
depends on easily accessing the ocean for food while
raising their young on land. For 12,000 years,
this sea-ice dependent creature has adapted to normal seasonal
changes in the amount of ice covering the ocean. During an
18-year, NSF-funded study, researchers observed the
breaking off and grounding of giant icebergs and how these
extreme events affected Adelies. The icebergs increase the
amount of sea ice and the distance the penguins need to
walk to reach their food. The team believes that if the
frequency of these extreme events increases--as it has in
the distant past--it may become hard to predict how penguin
populations will cope. It is even possible,
they say, that the penguins might temporarily disappear
from their current habitat.
For more information about these stories, visit us at NSF.gov.
This is NSF Science Now, I'm Dena Headlee.
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