You might know that the size of the pupils in our eyes changes depending on how well lit our environment is, but there’s more to the story: Scientists have now discovered that the pupil also shifts in size depending on how many objects we’re observing.
The more objects in a scene, the bigger the pupil grows, as if to better accommodate everything that it has to look at. This “perceived numerosity” is a simple and automatic reflex, the new research shows.
In a new study, researchers observed the pupil sizes of 16 participants while they looked at pictures of dots. In some of the pictures, the dots were linked together in dumbbell shapes – creating the illusion that there were fewer objects – and pupil size then shrank.
Circa 2020 o.o Basically a molecular printer could make your own vaccine for any disease.
Tesla Inc is building mobile molecule printers to help make the potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed by CureVac in Germany, the electric-car maker’s Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk, tweeted on Wednesday.
Dr. Ann Marie Kimball (https://epi.washington.edu/faculty/kimball-ann-marie/) is a physician, epidemiologist and currently holds the roles of Associate Fellow at the international affairs think tank Chatham House, and Vice Chair, COVID 19 task force, at The Rotary Foundation / Rotary International.
Previously, Dr. Kimball served as a strategic advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation, supporting the strengthening and development of strategies for Ebola, post-Ebola, and health crisis response, including planning and guiding the formation of a regional disease surveillance network in collaboration with Connecting Organizations for Regional Disease Surveillance (CORDS).
Before joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Dr. Kimball served as technical and strategic lead for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation surveillance strategy formation.
Prior to Gates, Dr. Kimball served as Professor of Epidemiology for the University of Washington (UW), School of Public Health, with adjunct appointments in Medicine (Bioinformatics and Infectious Diseases) and the Jackson School of Foreign Affairs. During her tenure at UW, Dr. Kimball founded and directed the APEC Emerging Infections Network, and led research and training programs in Surveillance and Informatics in Peru and Thailand.
Dr. Kimball’s research focus on global trade and emerging infections earned her a Fulbright New Century Scholars award and a Guggenheim Scholars award.
Dr. Kimball is also the author of Risky Trade: Infectious Diseases in an Era of Global Trade, which was highly reviewed by NEJM, Emerging Infections and Lancet. She has authored numerous scientific publications, and served on numerous Institute of Medicine panels. She is also a fellow in the American College of Preventive Medicine and member of the National Biosurveillance Advisory group (NBAS) from the Centers for Disease Control.
If you haven’t been to Nunavut, you may not know it’s home to a vast variety of flowering plants, lichens, mosses, and more found on the land. Lynn Gillespie, a Canadian Museum of Nature botanist, has built a career studying Arctic botany. Lynn will be on Facebook LIVE on October 27th discussing plants you can find in Nunavut, what it’s like to conduct field research in the Arctic, and answering your questions. This interview will be facilitated by Joni Karoo, SOI Arctic 2019 alum from Taloyoak, Nunavut!
A Canadian aerospace company has chosen an eyebrow-raising name for a hypersonic space plane it plans to launch in 2022: “Sexbomb.”
Space Engine Systems (SES) announced that it wants to launch the, uh, Sexbomb in Manitoba, according to a press release from the company. The vehicle will be used to test the company’s spacecraft engine prototype.
Signs of a planet transiting a star outside of the Milky Way galaxy may have been detected for the first time. This intriguing result, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, opens up a new window to search for exoplanets at greater distances than ever before.
The possible exoplanet candidate is located in the spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51), also called the Whirlpool Galaxy because of its distinctive profile.
Exoplanets are defined as planets outside of our Solar System. Until now, astronomers have found all other known exoplanets and exoplanet candidates in the Milky Way galaxy, almost all of them less than about 3,000 light-years from Earth. An exoplanet in M51 would be about 28 million light-years away, meaning it would be thousands of times farther away than those in the Milky Way.
