First graders are using Kinect for Xbox 360 to get to places like Disneyland (on a map, at least), and high school students are graphing mathematical equations with their bodies.
CRAIG, Colo. – March 6, 2012 – First-grade teacher Cheryl Arnett spent much of last summer playing Kinect for Xbox 360 with her grandkids. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Just a few minutes of listening to mainstream rock music was enough to influence white college students to favor a student group catering mostly to whites over groups serving other ethnic and racial groups, a new study found.
However, white students who listened to more ethnically diverse Top 40 pop music showed equal support for groups focused on whites, African Americans, Arab Americans and Latino Americans. (more…)
UD prof honored for research on sexuality, religion in American history
Rebecca Davis, assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware, has received a Religious History Award from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Religious Archives Network for her essay titled “‘My Homosexuality Is Getting Worse Every Day’: Norman Vincent Peale, Psychiatry, and the Liberal Protestant Response to Same-Sex Desires in Mid-Twentieth-Century America.”
Norman Vincent Peale, to whom the title refers, was famous for his self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking. As a renowned Protestant minister, he encouraged people to heal themselves through prayer and believed heterosexual marriage was essential to personal happiness. (more…)
*More Than 100 Million U.S. Mobile Subscribers Now Use Smartphones*
RESTON, VA, March 6, 2012 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore 
MobiLens service, reporting key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month average period ending January 2012. The study surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers and found Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 25.4 percent market share. Google Android continued to grow its share in the smartphone market, accounting for 48.6 percent of smartphone subscribers.
OEM Market Share
For the three-month average period ending in January, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices. Device manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 25.4 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, followed by LG with 19.7 percent share and Motorola with 13.2 percent share. Apple continued to capture share in the OEM market with 12.8 percent of total mobile subscribers (up 2.0 percentage points), while RIM rounded out the top five with 6.6 percent. (more…)
Pikaia is most primitive vertebrate known
Researchers from the University of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the University of Cambridge have confirmed that a 505 million-year-old creature, found only in the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Canada’s Yoho National Park, is the most primitive known vertebrate and therefore the ancestor of all descendant vertebrates, including humans. (more…)
Evolutionary biologist Sir Peter Crane has been dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) since 2009. A former director of Chicago’s Field Museum and chief executive of England’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he recently spoke with Yale News about F&ES’ internationalism, the role of business in environmental management, and what it was like to be knighted at Buckingham Palace, among other topics. The following is an edited version of that conversation. (more…)
*British singer-songwriter’s aggressive bass and soulful lyrics underscore the emotional impact and the beauty of the Web in a new TV spot.*
REDMOND, Wash. — March 5, 2012 — When the newest TV ad for Internet Explorer airs tonight, viewers will see powerful visuals and a message about how the browser brings the beauty of the Web to users. But it is what they will hear that will really strike a nerve: the powerful bass line beat and the soulful lyrics of Alex Clare’s new hit “Too Close.” The song, from Clare’s debut album, “The Lateness of the Hour,” is bringing the British singer to the attention of a new global audience.
Born and bred in southeast London, Clare is a rising singer-songwriter whose style reflects the bebop, blues, electronic and U.K. garage influences of his youth. Whether he’s performing live or recording, Clare works to bring together heartfelt lyrics and melodic lines with aggressive bass and percussion to let the full emotional impact of the song come through. (more…)
New, free Web-based software described in the journal Bioinformatics analyzes DNA sequences to determine if mutations are likely to cause errors in splicing of messenger RNA. When gene splicing goes awry, a wide variety of diseases can result.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In a brief paper in the journal Bioinformatics, Brown University researchers describe a new, freely available Web-based program called Spliceman for predicting whether genetic mutations are likely to disrupt the splicing of messenger RNA, potentially leading to disease.
“Spliceman takes a set of DNA sequences with point mutations and computes how likely these single nucleotide variants alter splicing phenotypes,” write co-authors Kian Huat Lim, a graduate student, and William Fairbrother, assistant professor of biology, in an “application note” published in advance online Feb. 10. It will appear in print in April. (more…)
