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Checking Cholesterol & Long-Living Sharks 🦈 | NSF Science Now - YouTube
Channel: National Science Foundation
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DENA HEADLEE: Smartphones keep you connected to the world.
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But now that phone could actually save your life!
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NSF-funded engineers at Cornell University have created a smart
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phone accessory called "smartcard." The technology
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uses a smartphone's camera to read your cholesterol level.
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DAVID ERICKSON: The system comprises of an accessory that
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fits over all smartphones just like this. Test strip--you put
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a small drop of blood on the test strip, fit it into the
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back, open up the app, press a button and it tells you what
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your cholesterol levels are.
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DENA HEADLEE: Erickson feels that with the popularity of
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mobile health rapidly increasing, this kind of
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technology may become easier and more commonplace.
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DAVID ERICKSON: The problem is right now most people have a
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difficult time being able to tell either, "A," what their
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cholesterol levels are or if what they're doing actually
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makes a difference. With this type of technology, go to
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the store... five minutes later, figure out what your
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cholesterol levels are on your smartphone, archive
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them; and you're ready to go.
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DENA HEADLEE: Although smartcard could be brought to
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the market immediately, Erickson is optimistic that the accessory
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will have even more advanced capabilities in less than
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a year. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the
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water... a collaborative research team has discovered
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that great white sharks actually grow much slower and live
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significantly longer than previously thought. The team
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applied cutting-edge isotope geochemistry to answer the
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age-old question of sharks' longevity.
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The team studied radiocarbon signatures in archived vertebrae
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samples of four females and four males from the Northwestern
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Atlantic Ocean. The radiocarbon produced by thermonuclear device
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testing during the 1950s and 60s left an unmistakable
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timestamp on the tissues of marine organisms living during
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this period. The team believes this timestamp in white shark
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vertebrae provides irrefutable evidence of white shark
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longevity that had proved impossible to verify using
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traditional methods. This NSF-funded research was a
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collaboration between the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
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NOAA's fisheries service and the Massachusetts Division of Marine
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Fisheries. Ever wonder how your fingers know where the keys are
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on a keyboard as they whiz across at 90 miles an hour?
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NSF-funded cognitive psychologists at Vanderbilt and
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Kobe Universities have discovered that skilled typists
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can't actually identify the positions of many of the keys on
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a standard qwerty keyboard and beginners don't seem to learn
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key locations in the first place.
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The team recruited 100 university students and members
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of the surrounding community to participate in an experiment.
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First, they completed a short typing test. Then each were
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shown a blank qwerty keyboard and given 80 seconds to
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correctly identify letter locations. Surprisingly,
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they could only correctly identify half of the keys and
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made mistakes on about a quarter of them.
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GORDON LOGAN: So it was surprising when you asked
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them where the keys are, they don't know where they are, but
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if you have them type the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy
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dog, they can get all of those letters correct. Their fingers
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know where the keys are but their… they have no explicit
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knowledge of it. Their conscious awareness
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is pretty hazy.
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DENA HEADLEE: The team was surprised to find that the
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typists never appear to memorize the key positions, not even when
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they were first learning to type. The team believes the
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lack of explicit knowledge of the keyboard may be due to the
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fact that computers and keyboards have become so
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commonplace that students learn to use them at a very young age
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by looking at the keyboard as they type, so they don't need
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to memorize it. Adelie Penguins' unique ability to
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adapt and survive at the bottom of the world
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depends on easily accessing the ocean for food while
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raising their young on land. For 12,000 years,
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this sea-ice dependent creature has adapted to normal seasonal
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changes in the amount of ice covering the ocean. During an
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18-year, NSF-funded study, researchers observed the
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breaking off and grounding of giant icebergs and how these
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extreme events affected Adelies. The icebergs increase the
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amount of sea ice and the distance the penguins need to
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walk to reach their food. The team believes that if the
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frequency of these extreme events increases--as it has in
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the distant past--it may become hard to predict how penguin
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populations will cope. It is even possible,
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they say, that the penguins might temporarily disappear
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from their current habitat.
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For more information about these stories, visit us at NSF.gov.
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This is NSF Science Now, I'm Dena Headlee.
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