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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 25, 2021 at 2:10pm

In 2008, researchers used functional MRI to scan participants while they tasted wines that were deceptively labeled. When the price of a wine was increased, participants reportedly enjoyed the flavor more, while intensity ratings remained the same. 

In 2017, follow-up research was able to confirm these results. Scanning the brains of those tasting wines, researchers found increasing the price of the product once again improved subjective reports of flavor without changing its perceived intensity.

What's more, this deceptive pricing increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex of the brain, which is thought to encode for experienced pleasantness. 

"The reward and motivation system is activated more significantly with higher prices and apparently increases the taste experience in this way," said behavioral economist Bernd Weber from the University of Bonn in Germany in 2017. 

Such studies have allowed us to better understand how marketing might influence our brains and our perceptions of pleasantness, but few experiments have replicated these effects in a real-world setting. Previous fMRI studies fed wine to participants through plastic tubes, which means the color and smell were not taken into account, just the price and taste.

This has helped narrow down confounding factors, but it also misses out on several of the ways experts normally judge wine.

The current study is more realistic, measuring both pleasantness and intensity "to get a more comprehensive understanding of the influence of price...."

Unlike previous studies, the authors found decreasing the price of an expensive wine by four fold did not change the overall wine ratings for its pleasantness among laypeople. Only when the price was deceptively increased, did the average person seem to prefer the wine more.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095032932100...

https://www.sciencealert.com/psychologists-find-cheap-wine-tastes-b...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 25, 2021 at 2:08pm

Cheap Wine Really Does Taste Better if You Increase The Price Tag

In 2002, one of the most prestigious restaurants in New York City served four Wall Street workers its most expensive bottle of wine: a US$2,000 Mouton Rothschild from 1989.

After it was decanted, the host of the group, a self-reported wine connoisseur, twirled his glass, took a sip and began praising the wine for its purity. Blissfully ignorant, the group had accidentally been given the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu, a Pinot noir valued at just US$18.

This story might sound like a flight of fancy, but growing research on the psychology and neuroscience of wine-tasting suggests mistakes like this are made all the time, although true wine experts often know better.

One of the first studies to explicitly manipulate the price of wine in a realistic tasting session has found a cheap glass becomes far more pleasant when participants are told it has a higher price. 

The experiment was conducted during a public event at the University of Basel in Switzerland. To entertain visitors, the psychology department kindly contributed a wine tasting session.

The event drew 140 participants throughout the day and consisted of a 15-minute session of wine tasting. For each tasting, participants were given their own table and told not to communicate with others also involved in the event - that way their views of the wine wouldn't be influenced.

Six small glasses of wine were then placed on each table, and visitors were told to taste each and every glass in a specific sequence fully randomized for every individual. After each sip, participants were instructed to clear their palates with a swish of water and rate the wine for pleasantness and intensity.

Half the glasses held three different wines without any price information. The remaining glasses contained three different wines of low, medium, and high price with the retail tag clear to see.

In each case, one, two or none of these price-tagged wines had been labeled deceptively. If they were mislabeled, the retail price displayed was either four times higher, or four times lower than the real cost.

When the price of the wine was hidden, researchers found no difference in pleasantness ratings, no matter the actual price.

On the other hand, when the price of wine was mislabeled and deceptively up-priced, pleasantness ratings also increased. For instance, when a low-cost wine was tagged to appear higher in price and exceeded that of the mid-priced wine, participants tended to enjoy the low-cost one more.

"Thus, in wine may lay the truth, but its subjective experience may also lie in the price," the authors conclude. 

Beyond sheer enjoyment, this study is the first to assess the perceived intensity of blind tastings in a real world setting, and it suggests that most wine drinkers are able to determine something different about more expensive wine - they just don't enjoy that difference as much.

part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 25, 2021 at 1:57pm

Earth is the only planet known to maintain life. Find out the origins of our home planet and some of the key ingredients that help make this blue speck in space a unique global ecosystem.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 25, 2021 at 1:46pm

Neuroscientists Detect Confused 'Zombie' Cells in The Human Brain After Death

You'd think once a human is dead, the body would be done doing things; without blood circulation and air, the inner systems would be fast depleted. But due to a weird quirk of biology there are such things as the living dead - living cells, at least, within a done and dusted body.

Some cells within human brains actually increase their activity after we die. These 'zombie' cells ramp up their gene expression and valiantly continue trying to do their vital tasks, as if someone forgot to tell them they're now redundant.

Neurologists recently  watched as these cells stubbornly sprouted new tentacles and busied themselves with chores for hours after death.

Most studies assume that everything in the brain stops when the heart stops beating, but this is not so.

While most gene activity remained stable for the 24 hours,  neuronal cells and their gene activity rapidly depleted. Most remarkably though, glial cells increased gene expression and processes after death. 

While surprising at first, this actually makes a lot of sense, given glial cells, such as waste-eating microglia and astrocytes, are called into action when things go wrong. And dying is about as 'wrong' as living things can go.

That glial cells enlarge after death isn't too surprising given that they are inflammatory and their job is to clean things up after brain injuries like oxygen deprivation or stroke. The scientists then demonstrated the RNA expressed by genes doesn't itself change within 24 hours post death, so any changes in its amount must indeed be due to the continuation of biological processes.

After 24 hours, however, these cells also succumbed and were no longer distinguishable from the degrading tissue that surrounded them.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-85801-6

https://www.sciencealert.com/confused-zombie-cells-spring-to-action...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 25, 2021 at 1:24pm

https://releases.jhu.edu/2021/03/22/cells-can-walk-a-microscopic-ti....

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 25, 2021 at 1:24pm

Cells can walk a microscopic tightrope, researchers discover

By offering cells a microscopic “tightrope,” Johns Hopkins University and Virginia Tech scientists have discovered a new and surprising form of cellular movement.

Normally when cells crawling in an organism come in contact with another one another, they reverse and move randomly away from the other cell. But when nanofiber “tightropes” coated with proteins were suspended in a three-dimensional medium for cells to explore, cells either walked past each other to avoid a collision or formed a train moving together along the length of the nanofiber.

The option of walking the line made the typically erratically moving cells much more systemic and predictable, the team found. This new understanding of cellular movement helps explain why some drugs work differently in tests within petri dishes than they do in humans or animals.

The findings just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“A cocktail of mechanical engineering, cell biology, physics, and computational modeling reveals cell behaviors not known before

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 25, 2021 at 12:47pm

Corona waste kills animals throughout the entire world

Biologists started a quest to determine how often and where interactions between corona waste and animals occur. They collected observations from Brazil to Malaysia and from social media to local newspapers and international news websites.

A fox in the United Kingdom, birds in Canada, hedgehogs, seagulls, crabs, and bats - it transpired that all sorts of animals, everywhere, become entangled in face masks.

They found reports about apes chewing on face masks, and about a penguin with a face mask in its stomach. Pets too, especially dogs, were found to swallow face masks. Animals become weakened due to becoming entangled or starve due to the plastic in their stomach. The diversity of animals influenced by corona waste is considerable. "Vertebrates and invertebrates on land, in freshwater, and in seawater become entangled or trapped in corona waste.

 animals use the waste as nest material. For example, coots in Dutch canals use face masks and gloves as nest material. And the packaging from paper handkerchiefs is found in nests too. As such, we even see the symptoms of COVID-19 in animal structures.

https://www.covidlitter.com/

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/nbc-cwk032421.php

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 25, 2021 at 11:20am

All meat that has been smoked, salted, cured, dried or canned is considered processed.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 25, 2021 at 6:44am

Why you can't compare Covid-19 vaccines

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Vaccine side effects are actually a good thing

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 24, 2021 at 10:39am

Ten years later, here’s what Fukushima’s damaged reactors look like today

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