When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.”

In the nearer future, neuroscientists might also help you focus by observing your brain activity and providing biofeedback as you practice strengthening your concentration.

Cool info, but this is what I got out of the article:

Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”

She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

CitySense is a Mashup application created by Sense Networks:

Sense Networks, Inc. indexes the real world using real-time and historical location data for predictive analytics across multiple industries.

CitySense uses geographic data and real-time cell network data to track the movement of people (currently by opt-in cell phone location data) in San Francisco. Privacy issues aside, the application is impressive. Tracking the real-time flow of people across an urban landscape has applications in just about any social field.

So where does the science come in? One of my favorite researchers, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, recently co-authored an article in the journal Nature, Understanding individual human mobility patterns. In this study, he and the other researchers were able to track 100,000 cellphone uses over the course of 6 months (in Europe, where privacy laws are… well, more realistic). They find:

After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns.

Perhaps it’s not new news, and, in fact is somewhat predictable, but we now have evidence to say it is true, as well as means to begin manipulating the data and running scenarios. Barabasi has a fascinating and easy to read primer on network theory, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means.

I just love connections.

He knew low frequency radio waves could heat metals without heating surrounding materials (tissue). He also realized heat could destroy cancer cells. And as a self-described tinkerer, he brought it all together…in his garage. He’s know working with researchers to further refine the technology.

There are a facets to this story worth remembering. 1) He was a tinkerer. This provided early prototyping. And 2) (most important) He was willing to tell his story AND someone listened.

Oh… and he had time. Few great ideas develop in there entirety overnight. Creativity takes time. My personal experience has found being rushed and having a million things on my plate greatly hinders creativity.

High school biology teachers, take note! This story from the New York Times is a great wrap up to the year. To really appreciate the “gross” factor, your students will need to know a little cell and/or cancer biology.

Laboratory mouse stem cells are usually grown in a petri dish, constantly bathed in a nutrient broth. The cells are constantly dividing and will crowd the plate if not kept thinned out. To keep the population under control, you have to occasionally wash the plate of most of the cells, keeping a few to continue their division and maintain the population.

With the proper substrate, the cells can grow on anything, provided they are continually fed. This modern art project, on display at the MoMA in New York City, has a matrix in the shape of a small coat, with nutrients constantly feeding the cells.

Apparently, no one is there to clear off the cells and keep the population at bay:

The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

I’d be interested in knowing your students reactions, especially if they bring in ethics! Is this really art?

Scientists are to sail to the mid-Atlantic to examine a massive “open wound” on the Earth’s surface.

Dr Chris MacLeod, from Cardiff University, said the Earth’s crust appeared to be missing across an area of several thousand square kilometres.

The expedition is being logged at a site for teachers and students here. (Image linked from this website).