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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 18, 2013 at 8:41am

India’s Blood Pressure Skyrockets
Hypertension is skyrocketing in India, with rural-to-urban migrants at especially high risk.
Cardiological Society of India

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 18, 2013 at 8:40am

Study: Probiotics Not Effective For Preventing Childhood Asthma
Taking probiotics during pregnancy or giving them to infants doesn’t prevent asthma, according to a new study.

http://www.asianscientist.com/health-medicine/study-probiotics-effe...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 18, 2013 at 8:29am

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/bacteria-turn-threa...
In less than 30 days, nonthreatening E. coli can transform into dangerous microbes in mice.

As benign E. coli continuously faced immune system cells, the bacteria began to grow in small colonies and develop genetic mutations that could help them survive immune cells' attacks. The mutant E. coli were more resistant to being engulfed by the immune cells and were also more likely to cause disease in infected mice than the original strains, researchers report December 12 in PLOS Pathogens.

The results could help scientists develop ways to combat the disease-causing bacteria.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 18, 2013 at 8:26am

http://blog.peerj.com/post/69605870494/ask-me-anything-the-neurosci...
Ask Me Anything - The Neuroscience of Magic Illusions

Live Event – ‘Ask Me Anything’ session with Drs. Macknik and Martinez-Conde, and Mr. Hector Rieiro

Who & What: Ask Drs. Macknik and Martinez-Conde and Mr. Rieiro about visual neuroscience, magic illusions, or anything else relevance to their field!

When: Tuesday, December 17, 8am-10am PST

Where: Visit https://www.peerj.com/ask/VisualNeuroscience

They are pleased to announce that Tuesday, December 17, from 8 am – 10 am PST (4 pm – 6 pm UK time), they will be holding their second ‘Ask Me Anything’ live session, with Drs. Macknik and Martinez-Conde and Mr. Rieiro.

In a recent study, Drs. Macknik and Martinez-Conde and Mr. Rieiro reported on a magic trick filmed in magician duo Penn & Teller’s theater in Las Vegas, to illuminate the neuroscience of illusion. “Cups and Balls,” a magic illusion in which balls appear and disappear under the cover of cups, is one of the oldest magic tricks in history, with documented descriptions going back to Roman conjurors in 3 B.C. The trick has many variations, but the most common one uses three balls and three cups. The magician makes the balls pass through the bottom of cups, jump from cup to cup, disappear from a cup and turn up elsewhere, turn into other objects, and so on. The cups are usually opaque and the balls brightly colored.

In this study, Penn & Teller’s variant is performed with three opaque and then with three transparent cups. The transparent cups mean that visual information about the loading of the balls is readily available to the brain, yet still the spectators cannot see how the trick is done! The authors tracked when and where observers looked during some of Teller’s signature moves. By quantifying how well observers tracked the loading and unloading of balls with and without transparent cups, they determined that some aspects of the illusion were even more powerful at controlling attention than those originally predicted by Teller.

Their results advance our understanding of how observers can be misdirected and will aid magicians as they work to improve their art.

If you want to learn how magic tricks hack your neural wiring, or if you are just curious about visual neuroscience in general, visit https://www.peerj.com/ask/VisualNeuroscience, leave your questions at any time - before, during, and after the event - and get all your questions answered by three world-experts in this field!

Drs. Macknik and Martinez-Conde and Mr. Rieiro will be online and interacting on Tuesday, December 17, 8am-10am PST.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 18, 2013 at 8:23am

https://peerj.com/articles/19/
Perceptual elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick
Magic illusions provide the perceptual and cognitive scientist with a toolbox of experimental manipulations and testable hypotheses about the building blocks of conscious experience. Here we studied several sleight-of-hand manipulations in the performance of the classic “Cups and Balls” magic trick (where balls appear and disappear inside upside-down opaque cups). We examined a version inspired by the entertainment duo Penn & Teller, conducted with three opaque and subsequently with three transparent cups. Magician Teller used his right hand to load (i.e. introduce surreptitiously) a small ball inside each of two upside-down cups, one at a time, while using his left hand to remove a different ball from the upside-down bottom of the cup. The sleight at the third cup involved one of six manipulations: (a) standard maneuver, (b) standard maneuver without a third ball, (c) ball placed on the table, (d) ball lifted, (e) ball dropped to the floor, and (f) ball stuck to the cup. Seven subjects watched the videos of the performances while reporting, via button press, whenever balls were removed from the cups/table (button “1”) or placed inside the cups/on the table (button “2”). Subjects’ perception was more accurate with transparent than with opaque cups. Perceptual performance was worse for the conditions where the ball was placed on the table, or stuck to the cup, than for the standard maneuver. The condition in which the ball was lifted displaced the subjects’ gaze position the most, whereas the condition in which there was no ball caused the smallest gaze displacement. Training improved the subjects’ perceptual performance. Occlusion of the magician’s face did not affect the subjects’ perception, suggesting that gaze misdirection does not play a strong role in the Cups and Balls illusion. Our results have implications for how to optimize the performance of this classic magic trick, and for the types of hand and object motion that maximize magic misdirection.
Rieiro H, Martinez-Conde S, Macknik SL. (2013) Perceptual elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick. PeerJ 1:e19 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.19

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 18, 2013 at 8:09am

Polynesian People Used Binary Numbers 600 Years Ago
The base-2 system helped to simplify calculations centuries before Europeans discovered it
Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But a study now shows that a kind of binary system was already in use 300 years earlier among the people of the tiny Pacific island of Mangareva in French Polynesia.

The discovery, made by analysing historical records of the now almost wholly assimilated Mangarevan culture and language and reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that some of the advantages of the binary system adduced by Leibniz might create a cognitive motivation for this system to arise spontaneously, even in a society without advanced science and technology.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=polynesian-people-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 18, 2013 at 6:45am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 17, 2013 at 7:10am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 16, 2013 at 9:27am

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/270122.php
Scientists discover way to enhance self-control
Some people lack self-control. A habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time is one example. But now, scientists have developed a way of improving a person's self-control through electrical brain stimulation. This is according to a study published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHealth) at Houston and the University of California, San Diego, say their findings could be useful for future treatments of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Tourette's syndrome, among other self-control disorders.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 16, 2013 at 9:11am

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/health/female-scientists-are-mo...
Female scientists are 'more creative'
Female scientists may be more creative and ground-breaking than their male colleagues judging by the way they view abstract art, according to psychologists.
Experts tested scientists and non-scientists who were asked to look at a range of art works, classified as either "abstract" or "figurative".

Participants filled in questionnaires designed to explore art they preferred.

Analysis of the results revealed a "significant difference" in how male and female scientists responded to abstract art, said the University of Reading team.

Women seemed to prefer abstract works, such as Picasso's cubist paintings, and were more at ease with the moody or "affective" aspects of this kind of art.

Men, in contrast, were more drawn to realistic figurative artworks such as portraits and landscapes.

Researchers said women's responses were evidence of a "better balance between different ways of thinking".

In a report entitled 'How Scientists Look At Art', they wrote: "We might even speculate . . . that women scientists are more likely to be open to a more anarchic, creative and radical approach to science."

The study also found that common perceptions about the gap between science and the humanities were false. Overall, scientists and non-scientists regarded art in much the same way.

(I was one of the participants in this research  and filled in the questionnaires  - Krishna)

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