Monday
Learning instrument does not make children more intelligent, experts claim
Common claims that learning music boosts children's IQ and helps them perform better at school can not possibly be true, psychologists said.
Evidence linking musical children to high achievement in school can be better explained by the fact they generally come from more privileged backgrounds, it was claimed.
Children who take music lessons tend to have better-educated, higher-earning parents, and to do more extra-curricular activities than other children their age.
Their upbringing, and not the music lessons themselves, helps the children develop characteristics such as conscientiousness which boost mental processes like memory, learning and reasoning, researchers said.
Prof Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist from the University of Toronto studied the link between musical training and intelligence in a group of 130 children who were aged 10 to 12.
His team studied whether the association could be explained by two key personality traits, conscientiousness and openness to new experiences.
Prof Schellenberg explained: "We were motivated by the fact that kids who take music lessons are particularly good students, in school they actually do better than you would predict from their IQ, so obviously something else is going on and we thought that personality might be the thing."
Presenting the study at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Sunday, he revealed that the association between music lessons and intelligence was mainly down to the children's personalities.
When researchers took into account the likely contribution of each child's personality to their school grades and IQ scores, and removed it from the overall equation, the link between music training and intelligence disappeared.
The study also showed it was possible to predict how long a child had been taking music lessons based on their answers to a personality questionnaire, Prof Schellenberg added.
"What this means is that kids who take music lessons have different personalities, and many or virtually all of the findings that have shown links between music and cognition may be an artifact of individual differences in personality," he said.
"You can explain almost all of the data that are out there by saying that high-functioning kids take music lessons."
The findings show that paying for a child to take music lessons purely for the presumed educational benefit is a "complete waste of time," he said.
"Primarily the associations are driven from the other direction, in that people with specific personalities and with higher levels of cognitive abilities and from more well-off families are more likely to take music lessons."
Prof Daniel Levitin, a psychologist from McGill University in Montreal, said this did not mean music lessons were of no value, however.
"There are benefits to having a society where more people are engaged with the arts, so even if music instruction doesn't make you a better mathematician or a better athlete, even if it only gives you the enjoyment of music, I think that is a good end in and of itself," he said.
To read more click here
Tuesday
Got Food Allergies? You Can Now Test Your Meal On the Spot Using a Cell Phone
Are you allergic to peanuts and worried there might be some in that cookie? Now you can find out using a rather unlikely source: your cell phone.
A team of researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has developed a lightweight device called the iTube, which attaches to a common cell phone to detect allergens in food samples. The iTube attachment uses the cell phone's built-in camera, along with an accompanying smart-phone application that runs a test with the same high level of sensitivity a laboratory would.
Food allergies are an emerging public concern, affecting as many as 8 percent of young children and 2 percent of adults. Allergic reactions can be severe and even life-threatening. And while consumer-protection laws regulate the labeling of ingredients in pre-packaged foods, cross-contaminations can still occur during processing, manufacturing and transportation.
Although several products that detect allergens in foods are currently available, they are complex and require bulky equipment, making them ill-suited for use in public settings, according to the UCLA researchers.
The iTube was developed to address these issues, said Aydogan Ozcan, leader of the research team and a UCLA associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering. Weighing less than two ounces, the attachment analyzes a test tube-based allergen-concentration test known as a colorimetric assay.
To test for allergens, food samples are initially ground up and mixed in a test tube with hot water and an extraction solvent; this mixture is allowed to set for several minutes. Then, following a step-by-step procedure, the prepared sample is mixed with a series of other reactive testing liquids. The entire preparation takes roughly 20 minutes. When the sample is ready, it is measured optically for allergen concentration through the iTube platform, using the cell phone's camera and a smart application running on the phone.
The kit digitally converts raw images from the cell-phone camera into concentration measurements detected in the food samples. And beyond just a "yes" or "no" answer as to whether allergens are present, the test can also quantify how much of an allergen is in a sample, in parts per million.
The iTube platform can test for a variety of allergens, including peanuts, almonds, eggs, gluten and hazelnuts, Ozcan said.
The UCLA team successfully tested the iTube using commercially available cookies, analyzing the samples to determine if they had any harmful amount of peanuts, a potential allergen. Their research was recently published online in the peer-reviewed journal Lab on a Chip and will be featured in a forthcoming print issue of the journal.
Other authors of the research included graduate student and lead author Ahmet F. Coskun and undergraduate students Justin Wong, Delaram Khodadadi, Richie Nagi and Andrew Tey, all of whom are members of the Ozcan BioPhotonics Laboratory at UCLA. Ozcan is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.
"We envision that this cell phone-based allergen testing platform could be very valuable, especially for parents, as well as for schools, restaurants and other public settings," Ozcan said. "Once successfully deployed in these settings, the big amount of data -- as a function of both location and time -- that this platform will continuously generate would indeed be priceless for consumers, food manufacturers, policymakers and researchers, among others."
Allergen-testing results of various food products, tagged with a time and location stamp, can be uploaded directly from cell phones to iTube servers to create a personalized testing archive, which could provide additional resources for allergic individuals around the world. A statistical allergy database, coupled with geographic information, could be useful for future food-related policies -- for example in restaurants, food production and for consumer protection, the researchers said.
From:Sciencedaily
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)