The Diana Conspiracy – an alternative viewpoint
When you put it like this you see the Diana conspiracy claims in a different light. From the awesome Mitchell and Webb look.
Mind Hacks – Experiencing slow motion during extreme danger
Mind hacks reports on the sensation of experiencing slow motion during times of extreme danger:
NPR has a fantastic short radio segment on whether we really do experience time more slowly when our life is in danger.
The piece riffs on a 2007 study called ‘Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event?’ led by neuroscientist David Eagleman who discusses the project on the show.
The experimenters wanted a way to find a way to test whether we suddenly start experiencing time in greater detail when in mortal danger, or whether it just seems that way when we look back on it.
Of course, genuinely putting people in life-threatening situations is a little unethical, so the team used something called SCAD diving, where people are dropped – free fall – into a net.
Full article at Mind Hacks
Neuromarketing – using visual cues to influence your purchasing
Turquoise branding have a short article on the mechanics of Neuro-marketing. It is apparently the science of making you buy things and claims that it works on creating imagery that taps in to your subconscious and increasing the likelihood of a purchase. These new theories have been emerging recently and this months cover of New Scientist has embodied this technology to see if the results hold up.
Full article and examples via Turquoise
Drug firms hiding negative research are unfit to experiment on people
“This week the drug company AstraZeneca paid out £125m to settle a class action. More than 17,500 patients claim the company withheld information showing that schizophrenia drug quetiapine (tradename Seroquel) can cause diabetes. So why do companies pay out money before cases get to court?
An interesting feature of litigation is that various documents enter the public domain. This is how we know about the tobacco industry’s evil plans to target children, the fake academic journal that Elsevier created for Merck’s marketing department, and so on.
One of the most revealing documents ever to come out of a drug company emerged from an earlier quetiapine case: an email from John Tumas, publications manager at AstraZeneca. In it, he helpfully admits that they do everything I say drug companies do.
“Please allow me to join the fray,” Tumas begins, in response to a colleague. “There has been a precedent set regarding ‘cherry picking’ of data.” Cherry picking is where you report only flattering data, and ignore or bury data you don’t like. The ears of lawyers prick up at any use of the word “bury” in relation to drug company data, as it implies something deliberate, and luckily John uses this word himself. The precedent, he explains, is “the recent … presentations of cognitive function data from trial 15 (one of the buried trials)”.
In trial 15, commissioned by AstraZeneca, patients with schizophrenia who were in remission were randomly assigned to receive either AstraZeneca’s quetiapine, or a cheap, old-fashioned drug called haloperidol. After a year, the patients on Seroquel were doing worse: they had more relapses and worse ratings on various symptom scales. These negative findings were left unpublished: to use Tumas’s word, they were “buried”.
But in among all these important negative findings, on a few measures of “cognitive functioning” – an attention task, a verbal memory test – Seroquel did better. This finding alone was published in a research paper in 2002. AstraZeneca kept quiet about the fact that patients on Seroquel had worse outcomes for schizophrenia. The research paper went on to become a highly influential piece of work, cited by more than 100 academic research papers. Many researchers can only dream of publishing such a well cited piece of work.
Trial 15 also found that patients on Seroquel gained, on average, 5kg in weight over a year. This put them at increased risk of diabetes, which is what AstraZeneca is now paying to settle on (and in any case, a 5kg weight gain is a serious side-effect in itself).”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @nettmac)
New Spider-Man Device Could Let Humans Walk on Walls
“A new high-tech suction device could allow humans to walk on walls like Spider-Man or create adhesive devices that could be turned on and off with the flick of a switch.
The contraption, inspired by a beetle that can hold on to a leaf with a force 100 times its weight, uses the surface tension of water to make an adhesive bond, but it does so with a creative twist. It could be used to create sticky shoes or gloves, researchers said today.
The device consists of a flat top plate riddled with tiny holes, each just a few hundred microns (a millionth of a meter) wide. A bottom plate holds water. In between is a porous layer. A 9-volt battery powers an electric field that forces water to squeeze through the tiny holes in the top layer.
The surface tension of the exposed droplets makes the device grip another surface — much the way two pieces of wet glass stick together. Turn the electricity off, and the bond breaks.
“In our everyday experience, these forces are relatively weak,” explained Paul Steen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University. “But if you make a lot of them and can control them, like the beetle does, you can get strong adhesion forces.”"
Read more at Live Science (Thanks Katherine)
Skull electrodes give memory a boost
“Finding it difficult to revise for an exam? Help could be on its way in the form of the first non-invasive way of stimulating the brain that can boost visual memory.
The technique uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which weak electrical currents are applied to the scalp using electrodes. The method can temporarily increase or decrease activity in a specific brain region and has already been shown to boost verbal and motor skills in volunteers.
Richard Chi, a PhD student at the Centre for the Mind, University of Sydney, and colleagues wanted to follow up on previous research showing that lesions in the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL), an area near the temple, can lead to improvements in visual memory and perceptual skills similar to the abilities exhibited by some people with autism. Chi’s team wondered if inhibiting that area using tDCS might likewise improve memory.
To investigate, his team showed 36 volunteers a dozen “study” slides covered with shapes that varied in their number, arrangement, colour and size (see “Brain games”). The volunteers were then shown five “test” slides – two with patterns that appeared in the study slides, two with completely new patterns and one whose pattern looked similar to that on a study slide. Participants were asked to identify which of the test slides they had already seen, first performing the task without any brain stimulation.
Subjects then repeated the experiment 12 times, with one group receiving so-called anodal tDCS (which boosts activity) on their right ATL and cathodal tDCS (which inhibits activity) on their left. A second group received the opposite stimulation and a third group received a placebo treatment, which did not stimulate either side of the brain.
Those in the first group more than doubled their scores after receiving tDCS, experiencing a 110 per cent improvement in visual memory. Participants in the second and third groups showed no overall improvement in performance.”
Read more at New Scientist (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Amusing Mirror Prank
“Replace the mirror in a bathroom with a window pane, place a set of identical twins in identical rooms opposite each other and proceed to prank everyone who walks in. Theyve all become a vampires!”
Via Break (Thanks Katherine)
Man scrawls world’s biggest message with GPS ‘pen’
“One man drove 12,238 miles across 30 states to scrawl a message that can only be viewed using Google Earth. His big shoutout: “Read Ayn Rand.”
Nick Newcomen did a road trip over 30 days that covered stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. First, he identified on a map the route he would need to drive to spell out the message. He put a GPS device in his car to trace the route he would follow. Then, he hit the road.
“The main reason I did it is because I am an Ayn Rand fan,” he says. “In my opinion if more people would read her books and take her ideas seriously, the country and world would be a better place — freer, more prosperous and we would have a more optimistic view of the future.”
Newcomen, unlike previous GPS artists, actually travelled the lines he traced on the map. He used a GPS logger (Qstarz BT-Q1000X) to “ink” the message. Starting his trip in Marshall, Texas, he turned on the device when he wanted to write a letter and turned off the device between letters. The recorded GPS data was loaded into Google Earth to produce the image above.
“The first word I wrote actually was the word ‘Rand’, then I went up North to do the word ‘Read’ and finished it with ‘Ayn,’” says Newcomen.
And for those who don’t know, Ayn Rand is a Russian-American writer whose books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are among the world’s best-selling novels.
Newcomen’s venture sounds pretty crazy, though he gets points for ambition.
What message would you write using a GPS?”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx and @UKgnome)
New gel could speed wound healing
“For three years, Connie McPherson had debilitating leg ulcers that were so painful she sometimes couldn’t sleep. Despite repeated surgery, antibiotics, steroids and other treatments, nothing helped. Then last year, she took part in a trial for a new gel aimed at chronic wounds. “It was the answer to my prayers,” said McPherson, 58, a real estate agent in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Within weeks, McPherson said the ulcer treated was completely healed. “I tried everything possible and this is the only thing that worked.”
The gel used to treat McPherson was developed by a team led by David Becker, a professor of cell and developmental biology at University College London. The gel, named Nexagon, works by interrupting how cells communicate and prevents the production of a protein that blocks healing. That allows cells to move faster to the wound to begin healing it. Though it has only been tested on about 100 people so far, experts say if it proves successful, the gel could have a major impact on treating chronic wounds, like leg or diabetes ulcers, and even common scrapes or injuries from accidents.
In most chronic wounds, Becker said there is an abnormal amount of a protein involved in inflammation. To reduce its amount, Becker and colleagues made Nexagon from bits of DNA that can block the protein’s production. “As that protein is turned off, cells move in to close the wound,” Becker said. The gel is clear and has the consistency of toothpaste.”
Read more at MSNBC (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Huge Solar Storm Triggers Unusual Auroras
“Auroras create green curtains of light August 4 over the Rupert River in Waskaganish (see map), a Cree Nation community in Quebec, Canada.
Last week’s northern lights—which lasted a few days—were products of a large burst of plasma, or charged gas, from the sun known as a coronal mass ejection. A NASA orbiter called the Solar Dynamics Observatory saw last Sunday’s eruption, which was aimed directly at Earth and sparked predictions of a shimmering sky show.
Now it seems aurora fans may be in for another treat: A solar flare spotted Saturday by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory was even more powerful than the previous eruption. Although this time the bulk of the plasma burst isn’t aimed right at Earth, scientists say it could still trigger another round of colorful auroras.”
See more photos at National Geographic (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
