GEMS Field Trip to Georgia Tech

We are extremely excited about our first field trip of the year happening next Tuesday, October 5th. We will be going to Megan's laboratory at Georgia Tech to see how people are fit for prosthesis.

It is important to know that for the girls to be able to attend this field trip they must first be a registered girl scout and they must also have filled out the girl scout permission form. Permission forms are being sent home with the girls today at GEMS as well as being emailed to the GEMS email list.

We are also looking for volunteer drivers to help us get from Inman to Georgia Tech and back. If you are able to be a volunteer driver, please email Megan or Debbie at inmangems@gmail.com.

We hope to see everyone at Georgia Tech next week!

Learning Sign Language

While cochlear implants are an incredibly powerful technology, they are not the best solution for every individual with hearing loss. In fact, most people with profound hearing loss instead communicate using American Sign Language (ASL). Contrary to popular belief, ASL is more than just a simple translation from English to hand motions, but it is a distinct language in it's own right. What happens when a child is born to parents who don't know this language and cannot teach it to them? Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a video gaming technology to teach children (and adults, like parents) in situations like this. Called "CopyCat" the game requires the player to wear special gloves that track hand movements and copy sign language motions shown on the screen. When the player gets the sign right, they earn points and move on to harder levels. Technology like this is meant to be used in classrooms, but have also helped teach parents and their hearing impaired children to successfully communicate!

Learn how to sign using this dictionary of American Sign Language.

Here is a news story about CopyCat and its inventors

Women in Science: Dr. A. Belén Elgoyhen, Ph.D.

This week in GEMS we learned all about sound. We modeled how sound moves differently through different materials, like solids, liquids, and air. We generated sounds on computers using a program called LabVIEW and observed how sound waves change when their frequency and amplitudes are adjusted. We also learned about how our ears are able to decode sound waves, and how devices like hearing aides and cochlear implants can restore the sense of hearing to people who have experienced ear injuries.

Much like our noses, our ears take stimuli from the outside world (sound waves in this case) and turn them into electrical signals for transmission to the brain on the vestibulocochlear nerve. This process of changing a mechanical signal (pressure waves) into an electrical nerve impulse is called "transduction" and is not very well understood. Dr. Elgoyhen and her colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute are working to understand how chemical signals are used to transduce the deflection of hair cells in the cochlea in response to changing pressures into electrical nerve signals to send to the brain. Dr. Elgoyhen has identified two previously unknown cellular receptors (parts of cells that collect and respond to certain chemicals) that are a part of this transduction process. She has also worked to identify some of the genes that are responsible for making these receptors. Dr. Elgoyhen hopes that by furthering our understanding of how our ears hear, we will be able to understand how certain drugs and loud noises can cause hearing loss, which will in turn allow doctors to prevent some people from experience significant hearing loss.

Dr. Elgoyhen currently works at the Institute for Research on Genetic Engineering and Molecular Biology, National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She recieved her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires, and was awarded the L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science for Latin American region in 2008.

See more about Dr. Elgoyhen and her research

Learn more about the L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science and this years winners

Here is some more information about cochlear implants

Want to learn more about biochemistry and molecular biology?

Women in Science: Dr. Marina Cole, BSc, PhD

Do you know how your nose smells? When chemical signals travel through the air, some of them go up your nose and are trapped by the mucous membrane lining the inside of our nose. These chemicals then diffuse through the water-like substance and are changed into an electrical signal (a process called "transduction") so the information can be transmitted to the brain along the olfactory nerve.

Scientists and engineers are trying to replicate this process with an electronic device in order to detect very specific chemical signals. Dr. Cole and Smart Sensors and Devices Research Group at Warwick University are working to develop a device that can detect certain chemical signals in the air. They hope that some day such a device will be able to do things like: tell the difference between different pheramones (chemicals secreted by animals that trigger some social response), determine whether or not food products have gone bad before they make anyone sick, pick up scents of individual people during search-and-rescue missions, and locate mines buried underground. Eventually, Dr. Cole and her team hope to also be able to collect time and distance data from detected scents.

Dr. Cole received her undergraduate degree (Bachelor of Science) from the University of Montenegro and earned her Doctorate from Coventry University in the United Kingdom. She is trained as an Electrical Engineer

Learn more about Dr. Cole and her research

More information about the Sensors Research Laboratory (they do lots of other research about smell and smelling devices)

Learn more about Electrical Engineering and engineering in general

Here's some more information about how we smell

The Sense of Smell

Wow! Forty girls at GEMS today!!!!!

Today at GEMS, we used our sense of smell to identify and rank spices from Megan's kitchen. It was very interesting to see that while some people really liked things like cinnamon, others really liked taco spices. Here is the graph of how we ranked the smells.

Check out the pictures! We also saw a video on youtube.com that was made by UCDavis, called, "This is why we stay in school." Megan told us that this is like the research that she does at Georgia Tech. We are so excited that we will be going to her lab at Georgia Tech on October 5th. Megan puts "dots" on people and the computer watches the dots to help her figure out how they move. She looks at how hard they push down when they walk and other things. She told us that it was the same type of technology used to make the movie "Avitar." That is so cool!!!!

Pinhole Cameras and moving pictures - Sept 7

This week at GEMS we made pinhole cameras and tricked our minds into thinking that we saw something that was not really there. As one girl commented, "so your telling me that our eyes can play tricks on us AND our mind also plays tricks on us?" Another asked if people like Einstein were also "tricked" like this. It was a lot of fun and a new student, "Ben" from Georgia Tech joined us for the day. We took two group photos with all of the Georgia Tech students. We cannot be serious all of the time!

If you are a Georgia Tech student and want to be involved in GEMS, please contact us.

If you are an Inman Middle School student and want to be involved in GEMS, come to the meetings on Tuesdays at 4:00pm in Ms. Price's room!

Women in Science: Sylvia Elfar, PhD

This week in GEMS, we constructed pinhole cameras to model how the human eye is able to see images. We also made optical illusion spinners to illustrate how our brain can sometimes be "tricked" because it can't work fast enough. What about if you have trouble seeing? How do doctors help people with vision impairments?

Anyone who has ever worn glasses or contacts can tell you that life is very difficult when you have trouble seeing. now imagine if you clinically blind. Dr. Sylvia Elfar is a researcher who is working on designing and developing retinal (in the eye) and cortical (in the brain) visual prosthetic devices to help people with severe vision loss regain some of their independence. She is conducting her research at the Ligon Research Center of Vision at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. She went to college for Experimental Psychology at Berkeley where she learned about how the brain works to allow us to complete every day activities, including interpreting all the things we see.

Learn more about Dr. Sylvia Elfar, PhD

More information about the Kresge Eye Institute at Wayne State University Medical School

Learn more about how the eye works

"How Stuff Works" explain how corrective lenses (ie contacts and glasses) work