#5ThoughtsFriday
05/31/2019
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#5ThoughtsFriday is Powered By
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Here are the 5 things we thought were
worth sharing with you this week:
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By the time the doors open 15 minutes early that Saturday night, dozens are lined up to get inside. Women wear wedges and bodysuits that hug their curves. Men sport collared shirts and their favorite sneakers. Some have caregivers guiding them; others need wheelchairs. Many wear the signature T-shirts stamped with the logo, Club 1111.
It’s the long-awaited evening when the League for People with Disabilities at 1111 E. Cold Spring Lane transforms into a glittering nightclub for adults with disabilities. The classrooms become dance floors with disc jockeys playing pounding club music. Merchandise, like sunglasses and blinking rings, is stacked up and ready to be sold, and volunteers wait in a makeshift spa to do fingernails and put on temporary tattoos. A lounge with dim lights is set up for chilling.
The only one of its kind in Maryland and possibly the country, Club 1111 is where hundreds come to dance and make friends. Some want to find love. All are drawn because of the sense of safety, the feeling that no one is judging them, that they can be like anyone else out for the night.
“It is one of my favorite places in the whole wide world,” says Stephen Jones, 29, one of 503 people who packed the club this night.
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Our hands are incredibly sensitive to texture. Even with your eyes closed, you can easily tell apart fine from coarse sandpaper, slick silk from soft cotton, planed wood from smooth plastic. How do our brains allow us to experience this rich textural world?
Sliman Bensmaia, associate professor at the University of Chicago, is one of the few neuroscientists who investigate the sense of touch. They are few for a reason, Bensmaia says: “It’s only the self-hating neuroscientists that are going to study the sense of touch. If you study vision, you buy a nice monitor. If you study hearing, you buy great speakers. But when you study touch, there is no such thing. You have to build a device specifically for your research question.”
To study texture, Bensmaia and his colleagues built a device consisting of a rotating drum covered in strips of coarse and fine textures, such as sandpaper of different grading, various fabrics, and patterned plastics. This drum runs the textures across the fingertips of Rhesus macaques, monkeys whose somatosensory system is similar to that of humans.
CLICK HERE
t
o see more on the many dimensions of texture
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While these news titles may sound like science fiction stories come to life, they highlight real scientific studies that are utilizing a pioneering gene editing technique known as CRISPR Cas-9. But this new method isn’t all about de-extinction or naturally occurring insect repellents, it also offers great promise to the field of neuroscience—both as a research tool and, potentially, a treatment for brain-related disorders.
“This is an incredibly powerful technique that allows geneticists to do what nature has done—to introduce variation into the DNA, whether it’s inactivating a particular gene or simply changing the genetic sequence,” says James Gusella, Ph.D., former director of the Center for Human Genetic Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. “This type of gene editing offers tremendous opportunities for research, but also, ultimately, for therapeutics. It really has a remarkable number of applications.”
Researchers in the fields of neuroscience and neurobiology also hope CRISPR can further our understanding of the brain and its role in disease and behavior, and one day offer treatments for a range of neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders.
CLICK HERE to what CRISPR is and why its so important.
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What We are Reading We Think
You Might FInd Interesting
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As we age, our bodies process what we eat and drink— including medicines—differently.
A medicine that worked well in the past could start causing side effects now or in the future.
CLICK HERE
to download a PDF version of this new fact sheet.
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5)
Quote We Are Contemplating...
"It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water."
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Pearson, the world’s leading education company and producer of clinical and educational assessment tools, needs help from YOU to improve our tools! We are working to develop the next edition of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS) tests, which are used as measures of cognitive ability and memory ability. We would love to include you in our data collection efforts!
In addition to a large sample of typically developing candidates, we have a high need for candidates aged 16-90 who are diagnosed with Mild Alzheimer’s, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), or Adult Autism to help us standardize and co-norm the WAIS 5 and WMS 5.
A little information about participating with the Pearson Field Research team:
We offer monetary compensation to the qualified examiner, examinee, and any sites who help the examiner identify, recruit, and coordinate with testing candidates
We provide all necessary materials, including tablets and training on our digital testing platform.
Candidate participation is completely voluntary. The data collected is not used to diagnose the participant and will not be released to the participant – we take privacy extremely seriously. We abide by HIPPA and HI-TECH to ensure data is secured properly. Data is kept confidential and will only be used for research purposes
Additional special studies we are collecting include: Intellectual Disability (mild and moderate), Learning Disability in Reading and/or Writing, and Major Depression Disorder.
We would be happy to answer any questions you may have. You can reply to this email or call me at (800-233-5686).
Educationally Yours,
Jasmine Crabtree
Field Research Coordinator
Pearson Field Research
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Have you ever clicked on the beautiful pictures posted at the end of every #5ThoughtsFridays? Try it. You might learn something fun!
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Stay Safe. Enjoy the Warmth.
HAVE A TERRIFIC WEEKEND.
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Want to find a story from a past #5ThoughtsFriday blog posts, visit the archive by clicking
HERE
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Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful weekend.
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