Gizmorama - February 10, 2014

Good Morning,

A star is born! Actually, a storm of stars were born. According to the article below: NASA says its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has captured an image of a storm of stars brewing in a distant nebula, as baby stars burst into being. Amazing!

Learn about these interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

P.S. Did you miss an issue? You can read every issue from the Gophercentral library of newsletters on our exhaustive archives page. Thousands of issues, all of your favorite publications in chronological order. You can read AND comment. Just click GopherArchives

***
*-- Scientists probe mystery of how brain identifies speech sounds --*
SAN FRANCISCO - Researchers in California say analysis of how speech sounds are identified by the human brain offers insights into the basis of human language. While scientists have known for some time the location in the brain where speech sounds are interpreted, little has been understood about how exactly the process works, neuroscientists at the University of California, San Francisco, said. Writing in the online journal Science Express, they say they've found the brain does not respond to the individual sound segments known as phonemes -- such as the b sound in "boy" --but is instead exquisitely tuned to detect simpler elements, which are known to linguists as "features." "Features" are distinctive acoustic signatures created when speakers move the lips, tongue or vocal cords. For example, consonants such as p, t, k, b and d require speakers to use the lips or tongue to obstruct air flowing from the lungs, then release a brief burst of air linguists call "plosives." Others, such as s, z and v, are grouped together as "fricatives," because they only partially obstruct the airway, creating friction in the vocal tract. An area of the brain known as the superior temporal gyrus is precisely tuned to robustly respond to these broad, shared features rather than to individual phonemes like b or z, the UCSF researchers said. This improves the brain's ability to interpret speech, they said, since the articulation of phonemes varies considerably across speakers and even in individual speakers over time, making it advantageous for the brain to employ a sort of feature-based algorithm to reliably identify phonemes. "It's the conjunctions of responses [to features] in combination that give you the higher idea of a phoneme as a complete object," neuroscientist and lead study author Edward F. Chang said. "By studying all of the speech sounds in English, we found that the brain has a systematic organization for basic sound feature units, kind of like elements in the periodic table."


*-- NASA spacecraft sees storm of baby stars brewing in distant nebula --*
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA says its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has captured an image of a storm of stars brewing in a distant nebula, as baby stars burst into being. The stellar nursery is located in the Trifid Nebula, where radiation and winds from massive stars have blown a cavity into the surrounding dust and gas, triggering the birth of new generations of stars, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reported Thursday. Yellow bars in the nebula appear to cut the cavity in the nebula into three sections, hence the name Trifid Nebula, JPL scientists said. The Trifid Nebula is located 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Colors in this image represent different wavelengths of infrared light detected by WISE, JPL said, with a main green cloud made up of hydrogen gas and the stellar nursery showing up in yellow and orange.

Missed an Issue? Visit the Gizmorama Archives