My sister has her choir concert at school today. It will probably be great. It’s so weird when you’re listening to passionate live music, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up!
Next week is our band concert, where I play trombone. I’m not confident that we’ll do very well. 
This is another article I summarized for school. I personally like this one more.
Rise of the Cyborgs
Scientists are currently examining ways to help people with disabilities do what they were unable to do before. Hopefully, people with locked-in syndrome will be able to move and communicate freely with technology. Scientists say “by connecting intimately with computers, we will take the human brain to a whole new level.”
Phillip Kennedy’s first major finding came from experimenting on rats. He found that certain neurons only responded to certain whiskers. When these whiskers were removed, the neurons adapted to respond to different whiskers. This proved that neurons’ wiring can change. Phillip Kennedy’s first human test subject was Johnny Ray, a man paralyzed save for a few muscles in his face. He agreed to participate by blinking his response. Ray imagined moving a mouse with his hand, and the neurons associated with those muscles became active. Eventually, he was able to move the cursor with just his mind.
At Duke University, experiments have been carried out on monkeys. Scientists from Duke University taught a monkey to move a joystick in sync with a light. From observing the neurons’ activity, scientists were able to predict the exact moment that she would move the stick. Then, scientists connected her neural readings to two robots in two different parts of the country. Then, all of the electronic arms moved in perfect sync, without her needing to use her biological arms. A similar experiment involved the walking of a monkey, and the simultaneous walking of a robot in Japan.
Successes like these have made it legal to perform implants on willing people in certain conditions. People with these electrode implants have learned to control a cursor on a screen, and even control their own wheelchair.
Scientists are developing way to allow people with no muscle movement to be able to speak. So far they have let people speak vowels. This is using a different method from the one Steven Hawking used. Steven Hawking created a code that his computer recognized by Hawking moving a muscle in his lip. This new neural method should be natural enough that to the speaker’s mind, there is no difference between the two.
Cyborging brings a new and strange future to our attention. Neuroscientists hope that eventually, cyborging will bring a new level to our intelligence. “We have freed the brain from the body. We have created a profound new paradigm for the brain- and not just the disabled brain- to enact its will without the limitations of the biological machinery that we call a body.” -Miguel Nicolelis
The original article can be found at Discover
This is something I did for school a while, which I enjoyed. It is from Focus magazine, which I mentioned earlier.
Bioterrorism is a form of terrorism that involves spread deadly or harmful pathogens. The more feared pathogens in bioterrorists’ arsenals are anthrax, plague, and smallpox. In fact, anthrax has already been used as a weapon. Recently after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, several senators and important people received letters with anthrax spores inside. Five people inhaled the spores and died. Bioweapons are less easily detectable by authorities, which makes them especially dangerous. Currently, the most feared possible bioweapon is smallpox. Smallpox caused a pandemic in the 20th century that killed 500 million deaths. Although smallpox has been eradicated from nature, it is still kept in secure laboratories.
Fortunately, bioterrorism has its downsides too. It would be very difficult to aquire the pathogen in usable amounts in the first place. Then, after they aquired it, they would have to keep it alive before it was released. Then, after the pathogen is release, it has to be protected from wind and harmful UV radiation. It would be very hard to pull all of this off. Compared to the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks did very little, but they did do enough to tell us that we must tread carefully in the future.
From “Bioterrorism,” BBC Focus Magazine http://www.bbcfocusmagazine.com/feature/bioterrorism
It’s the weekend! I am so glad that I don’t have to go to school. I do, however, have some homework .
Yesterday was the day that we dress up in our costumes for halloween. I was a gangsta/rapper guy. It was pretty awesome 
It was pretty fun, considering my personality is nothing like that of a gangster 
In science yesterday, we were learning about balancing chemical equations. We used little models for it, which was pretty fun. Different atoms had different holes to put sticks into to connect them to others. This is basically showing the opportunities for bonding that that element has.
The models worked sort of like this. We didn’t do any molecules as complicated as this sucrose though!!
I have two magazines that I especially like to read. I don’t really like reading Sports Illustrated magazines and the like, because I don’t find much content to be in them.
Magazine number one: Discovery Magazine, not to be confused with Discovery channel. It has science articles from all sorts of different categories, like medicine, the brain (one of my personal favorites), and physics.
Magazine number two would have to be BBC Focus. It has all sorts of science, technology, and future articles. Its question and answer section is pretty amazing.
Speaking of Discovery, I think my favorite commercial ever is worthing noting.
I love Steven Hawking’s Synthesised voice towards the end 
Wow. Yesterday we CRAZY weather. By that I mean torrential rain.
I was scheduled to have a game at 12:00 yesterday, but the coaches wanted us there early. It started drisling as we got in the car, but my dad and I went anyway. By the time we got to the field, it was really coming down hard. There was a line of cars parked, and nobody on the field, so we parked next to the nearest car. Everyone rolled down their windows, and using a relay system from car to car, we found out that the game had been rescheduled. I was sitting shotgun, and we had to open my window. I got soaked.
Later, it started thundering a lot, and just for fun, I ran outside in flip flops. In 15 seconds I was already soaked to the bone. By the curb, it was 3 inches deep. In our driveway, it was easily one inch deep.
The rain didn’t stop all day.
My parents tell me that I used to speak like this when I was this age. lol
And then this video:
Looks like this kid got a little too much laughing gas at the dentist!
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