There's a Ghost Behind You or at least feels like it.

Ever feel like there’s a ghost in the room? Researchers studying a dozen patients with neurological conditions say they’ve figured out where that "feeling of a presence" phenomenon comes from. And now they’ve built a robot that recreates that very same feeling, just by sending mixed-up sensory and motor signals to the brain. The work was published in Current Biology this week. 

A team led by Olaf Blanke of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne worked with 12 patients who had conditions such as epilepsy, stroke, migraine, and tumors. As a result of the underlying damage, the patients sometimes perceived invisible "presences" for seconds, minutes even. Using brain imaging, the team traced these misperceptions to damage in any one of three regions: the temporoparietal, insular, and frontoparietal cortex. Different brain lesions have their associated sensory and motor deficits. And that spooky feeling results when the brain fails to properly integrate different signals received from the limbs, Nature explains. These signals, often generated by touch, give us information about where we are in space and time. 

So how is it that healthy people also experience the "feeling of a presence?" The team suspect it's caused by confusion over the source and identity of sensorimotor signals: People misattribute their own signals or bodily movements as something "other," resulting in the ghostly sensation. "You are convinced that there is something, but you don't see anything, you don't hear anything,” Blanke tells New Scientist. 

To test this, the team built a “master-slave” robot system (above) that allowed them to apply physically impossible sensorimotor conflicts. For example, the robot made the healthy recruits feel as though they were reaching out in front of them and touching their own backs. That’s because the blindfolded recruits were using their hands and fingers to maneuver the arm of a master robot in front of them, while another robot behind them would poke them using a similar movement at the same time. 

But when there was a half-second delay in the poke, the participants felt that there was someone (or something) standing behind them. "Thirty percent of the healthy participants spontaneously reported the feeling of having somebody behind them, touching them," Blanke says in a news release. To resolve the spatiotemporal conflict in their head, the recruits generated the illusion that the touch was not caused by themselves, but by the "other." You can watch the participants using the robots here and here.

Some participants even started to feel as though their bodies were drifting backward in space, toward the mysterious other. And when the researchers told some recruits that up to four people may have been in the room with them, the participants who experienced a delayed touch said they definitely felt there were people in the room—sometimes mulitple people, even though they were actually alone with the robots.

The robot-induced "presence" was so disconcerting for two of the participants, they wanted to stop the experiment. The findings may also help explain schizophrenic hallucinations as well as "the third man" phenomenon experienced by mountaineers.

Study: You Really Can Predict ‘the Marrying Type’

Attractive, agreeable, and clean people are more likely to get married. Surprise?

Sometimes, after meeting a friend’s significant other, someone will observe that the man or woman in question is “the marrying type.” Others around will nod wisely and pensively sip their drinks. (I imagine this sort of thing happens in a dimly lit bar, where the friends have convened to imbibe and pass judgment.) What exactly identifies this person as the marrying type is unclear—maybe it’s a certain sparkle in their eye, or maybe they have helpfully tattooed a dotted outline on their left ring finger where a wedding ring might go.

But science is not satisfied with these clues. Science wants answers. What personal traits make someone the marrying type? A new study published in Social Science Research looks at how attractiveness, personality, and grooming influence the likelihood that someone will get married, or cohabitate in a relationship.

Of those three traits, the only statistically significant interaction was that men with an above average attractive personality were more likely to get married. Taking each of the factors individually, no other significant trends emerged. But those three factors in aggregate (what the researchers called “the personal traits index”) were linked to likelihood of marriage. Someone who scored more highly on the index overall was more likely to walk down the aisle. (The personal traits index did not have a significant relationship with non-marital cohabitation, however.) “Increasing the value of the personal traits index by one standard deviation is associated with a 13.7 percent greater hazard of entering into marriage for men and a 13.2 percent greater hazard of entering into marriage for women,” the study reads. “Though certainly not definitive, these results suggest that individuals may be able to trade-off different personal traits to enhance their competitiveness in generating offers and finding a suitable mate. The results also suggest they may be able to compensate for a deficiency in one desirable trait by enhancing the presence of another. For example, a person lacking in physical attractiveness may choose to invest more in grooming in order to become a more attractive partner.”

This is the “whole is more than the sum of its parts” theory of marriageability, and indeed that Aristotle quote is the epigraph for the study. Perhaps the marrying type does just have a special something—a combination of hotness, agreeability, and, I guess, regular bathing, that gives them a glowing aura that just screams “Marry me.”

Michael T. French, a sociology professor at the University of Miami, and his team looked at longitudinal data of more than 9,000 adolescents as they became young adults—starting in 1994 when participants were in high school and middle school and ending in 2009 when they were aged 24 to 34. Interviewers were asked to rate the participants’ looks, personality, and grooming on a scale of one to five, five being the most attractive. So this study doesn’t get into the nuances of personality, and how one person’s “sarcastic and abrasive” might be another’s “charming and adorable,” but instead just looks at whether someone’s personality is generally “attractive.”

Via The Atlantic

Dark Chocolate Is Good For You - And Now We Finally Know Why!

Dark chocolate is one of the most delicious substances known to man, and it has the added benefit of being fairly good for you in moderation. A study led by Diederik Esser from Wageningen University in the Netherlands has shown that ingesting dark chocolate can actually improve vascular health. The results were published in The FASEB Journal.

Before we go any further, it needs to be made quite clear that studies referring to the benefit of dark chocolate are not talking about your average Hershey’s bar. Typical candy bars have a low cocoa percentage and much larger amounts of sugar and fat, which negate any incurred health benefit, if not actually making it worse. The chocolates with the highest cocoa mass content are typically more bitter than sweet.

The forty-four study participants were all middle-aged men who were overweight. Each day for two weeks, they were given 70 grams of chocolate. Though the percentages of cocoa were the same, one chocolate had a higher amount of flavanol, while the other was made regularly.

After the study’s completion, participants were found to have an increased flexibility in their arteries, which is likely staving off atherosclerosis and improving blood flow. The increased level of flavanol did not have any benefit in this study; it just added an extra bitter taste to the chocolate, which made the participants not want to eat it.

The research team hopes that a pill could eventually be produced that targets the best parts about dark chocolate, with more consistent outcomes and less confusion about how much to ingest for the maximum benefit.

Critics of the study argue that these conclusions cannot be asserted with only 44  participants. Additionally, at the onset of the experiment, the participants were instructed to avoid certain calorically-dense foods that would have caused additional weight gain. This opens the possibility that the change in diet may have impacted heart health more than the chocolate.

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/dark-chocolate-good-you-and-now-we-finally-know-why#pdy3zCMoFpEi7W3G.99

Quit Smoking, Drinking or Keep on Diet track w/Tetris

For those trying to quit smoking, drinking or successfully master a diet, the block-stacking classic Tetris could be a key to success, according to a study released by Plymouth University in the United Kingdom.

The study tests Elaborated Intrusion Theory, suggesting that imagery is central to our cravings, so giving the brain a visual task will alleviate the compulsion.

Subjects experiencing cravings were asked to play Tetris for three minutes. They either had the chance to play, or were presented with a three-minute long loading screen — artificially created by the testers. Those who did get to play reported a 24 percent drop in cravings.

The study was lead by PhD student Jessica Skorka-Brown, with professors Jackie Andrade and John May. The study abstract notes it is the first time lab tests had been done on "naturally occurring cravings", instead of those stimulated by the researchers.

"Episodes of craving normally only last a few minutes, during which time an individual is visualizing what they want and the reward it will bring. Often those feelings result in the person giving in and consuming the very thing they are trying to resist. But by playing Tetris, just in short bursts, you are preventing your brain creating those enticing images and without them the craving fades," said Andrade in Medicalxpress.

So if sticking to your diet or dumping smoking are proving difficult, considering loading a game of Tetris, or even another visual puzzler, to get your brain back on track.

Via Mashables

Use of acetaminophen during pregnancy linked to ADHD in children, UCLA researchers say

Acetaminophen, found in over-the-counter products such as Excedrin and Tylenol, provides many people with relief from headaches and sore muscles. When used appropriately, it is considered mostly harmless. Over recent decades, the drug, which has been marketed since the 1950s, has become the medication most commonly used by pregnant women for fevers and pain.

Now, a long-term study by UCLA, in collaboration with the University of Aarhus in Denmark, has raised concerns about the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy.

In a report in the current online edition of JAMA Pediatrics, researchers from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health show that taking acetaminophen during pregnancy is associated with a higher risk in children of attention-deficity/hyperactivity disorder and hyperkinetic disorder. The data raises the question of whether the drug should be considered safe for use by pregnant women.

ADHD, one of the most common neurobehavioral disorders worldwide, is characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, increased impulsivity, and motivational and emotional dysregulation. Hyperkinetic disorder is a particularly severe form of ADHD.

"The causes of ADHD and hyperkinetic disorder are not well understood, but both environmental and genetic factors clearly contribute," said Dr. Beate Ritz, professor and chair of the department of epidemiology at the Fielding School and one of the senior authors of the paper. "We know there has been a rapid increase in childhood neurodevelopmental disorders, including ADHD, over the past decades, and it's likely that the rise is not solely attributable to better diagnoses or parental awareness. It's likely there are environmental components as well."

"That gave us the motivation to search for environmental causes that are avoidable," said the University of Aarhus' Dr. Jørn Olsen, another senior author and former chair of the UCLA Fielding School's epidemiology department. "Part of the neuropathology may already be present at birth, making exposures during pregnancy and/or infancy of particular interest. Because acetaminophen is the most commonly used medication for pain and fever during pregnancy, it was something we thought we should look at."

The UCLA researchers used the Danish National Birth Cohort, a nationwide study of pregnancies and children, to examine pregnancy complications and diseases in offspring as a function of factors operating in early life. The cohort focuses especially on the side effects of medications and infections.

The researchers studied 64,322 children and mothers who were enrolled in the Danish cohort from 1996 to 2002. Acetaminophen use during pregnancy was determined using computer-assisted telephone interviews that were conducted up to three times during pregnancy and again six months after childbirth.

The researchers next followed up with parents when their children reached the age of 7. They first asked parents about any behavioral problems in their children using the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire, a standard behavioral screening questionnaire used by scientists. It assesses five domains, including emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity, peer relationship and social behavior in children and adolescents between the ages of 4 and 16.

In addition, they obtained diagnoses of hyperkinetic disorder among the cohort's children (at an average age of 11) from the Danish National Hospital Registry or the Danish Psychiatric Central Registry. Last, they identified if ADHD medications, mainly Ritalin, were redeemed for the children using the Danish pharmaceutical prescription database.

More than half of all the mothers reported using acetaminophen while pregnant. The researchers found that children whose mothers used acetaminophen during pregnancy were at a 13 percent to 37 percent higher risk of later receiving a hospital diagnosis of hyperkinetic disorder, being treated with ADHD medications or having ADHD-like behaviors at age 7. The longer acetaminophen was taken — that is, into the second and third trimesters — the stronger the associations. The risks for hyperkinetic disorder/ADHD in children were elevated 50 percent or more when the mothers had used the common painkiller for more than 20 weeks in pregnancy.

"It's known from animal data that acetaminophen is a hormone disruptor, and abnormal hormonal exposures in pregnancy may influence fetal brain development," Ritz said.

Acetaminophen can cross the placental barrier, Ritz noted, and it is plausible that acetaminophen may interrupt fetal brain development by interfering with maternal hormones or through neurotoxicity, such as the induction of oxidative stress, which can cause the death of neurons.

"We need further research to verify these findings, but if these results reflect causal associations, then acetaminophen should no longer be considered a 'safe' drug for use in pregnancy," Olsen said.

Other authors of the study included Zeyan Liew (first author) and Pei-Chen Lee of UCLA, and Cristina Rebordosa of the University of Arizona. Funding was provided by the Danish Medical Research Council (09-069178).

The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, founded in 1961, is dedicated to enhancing the public's health by conducting innovative research, training future leaders and health professionals from diverse backgrounds, translating research into policy and practice, and serving our local communities and the communities of the nation and the world. The school has 650 students from more than 35 nations engaged in carrying out the vision of building healthy futures in greater Los Angeles, California, the nation and the world.

Via UCLA

Wal-Mart: Rolling Back Prices, Raising Crime Rates

Communities across the United States experienced an unprecedented decline in crime in the 1990s. But for counties where Wal-Mart built stores, the decline wasn't nearly as dramatic.

"The crime decline was stunted in counties where Wal-Mart expanded in the 1990s," says Scott Wolfe, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and lead author of a new study. "If the corporation built a new store, there were 17 additional property crimes and 2 additional violent crimes for every 10,000 persons in a county."

The study, titled "Rolling back prices and raising crime rates? The Wal-Mart effect on crime in the United States," released last month in the British Journal of Criminology, was co-authored with David Pyrooz, assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Sam Houston State University.

Wolfe says the commonly known "Wal-Mart effect" is the company's overwhelming influence on numerous economic and social factors in communities, including jobs, poverty rates and retail prices

The study was not intended to criticize Wal-Mart, he says. Instead, it attempted to answer the unexplored question of whether Wal-Mart could equate with either more or less crime.

"There have been dozens of studies on the 'Wal-Mart effect' showing the company impacts numerous outcomes closely related to crime. Our objective was to determine if the Wal-Mart effect extended to understanding crime rates during arguably one of the most pivotal historical periods in the study of crime," Wolfe says.

More here Via sciencedaily

Halloween Experiment

Did you live in Seattle, Washington, in 1976? If you were there on Halloween of that year, and a lady invited you into her house, you may have been the subject of an experiment. Over 300 children were experimented on, and they may never know!

When these children came up to one of 18 houses, they were invited inside by a nice lady. She had a bowl of candy for them in the front room, and she instructed them to take one piece — then she hastily went into another room to check on something. The children were left alone with the candy, the instructions, and sometimes, with a mirror.

Oh, except they weren't alone. Through a peephole in the wall, a researcher watched to see if the kids would take more than one piece of candy. The experiment was meant to determine if the children disobeyed the instructions by taking more than one piece of candy, and whether the mirror, and awareness of their crime as other people might see it, would change the kids' behavior. The nefarious behavior of the experimenters went unexcused. (Did they have to face a mirror while conducting their illicit surveillance? We'll never know.)

It turned out that children were more likely to be good when facing a mirror. But then, there were a lot of factors that made a difference when it came to candy-stealing. Older children were more likely to steal. Children who arrived in groups were about twice as likely to steal as children who arrived alone. To the surprise of the researchers, who thought girls were more socially impressionable, girls were less likely to steal than boys, and less likely to let a mirror affect their behavior. Children who came inside with their parents (what a different time that was) were disregarded entirely.

Via i09

What happens when ice meets lava?

The Syracuse University Lava Project is a collaboration between sculptor Bob Wysocki (Assistant Professor, Department of Art) and geologist Jeff Karson (Professor, Department of Earth Sciences) at Syracuse University. The goals of the project include scientific experiments, artistic creations, education, and outreach to the Syracuse University and City communities. Basaltic lava, similar to that found on the seafloor and erupted from volcanoes in Hawaii and Iceland, is melted and poured to produce natural-scale lava flows. The project supports a wide variety of scientific experiments engaging faculty and students at SU and volcanologists from other institutions. The natural beauty and particular properties of the lava are the basis for sculpture projects. In addition, lava pours are staged at the SU Comstock Art Building for classes, student groups, and the public. The SU Lava Project brings the spectacle and excitement of a volcanic eruption to Central New York.
 

What is the science behind the selfie?

The selfie has arguably become the greatest photographic trend of our time. Why are we so interested in taking and sharing selfies and how does observing an image of yourself differ from observing a picture of someone else, asks University College London neuroscientist James Kilner.

In everyday social situations we spend a lot of our time looking at and interpreting other people's faces and facial expressions. Indeed, reading and responding correctly to other people's facial expressions is essential for successful social interactions.

Through our lifetimes we become experts at recognising and interpreting other people's faces and facial expressions. In contrast, we have very little experience of looking at our own faces.

Our perception of our own facial expression comes from our sense of feeling our faces move. This lack of visual knowledge about our own faces means we have a very inaccurate representation of what our own faces look like at any given time. For example, it has been demonstrated that when people are shown an image of themselves and asked to match it they are unable to accurately produce the same facial expression without being able to see themselves.

This lack of knowledge about what we look like has a profound effect on what we think we look like. When people are asked to pick a photograph which they think looks most like them - from a series of photographs in which an actual photograph has been digitally altered to produce more attractive and less attractive versions - people are very bad at selecting the original photograph.

Given that we have a poor representation of what we look like, this is perhaps unsurprising. What is surprising is that people systematically choose images that have been digitally altered to make the person appear more attractive.

In other words, we have an image of ourselves that tends to be younger and more attractive than we actually are.

This might in part explain our obsession with selfies. For the first time we are able to take and retake pictures of ourselves until we can produce an image that come closer to matching our perception of what we think we look like.

VIA BBC

Mapping Emotions On The Body

Close your eyes and imagine the last time you fell in love. Maybe you were walking next to your sweetheart in a park or staring into each other's eyes over a latte.

Where did you feel the love? Perhaps you got "butterflies in your stomach" or you're heart raced with excitement.

When a team of scientists in Finland asked people to map out where they felt different emotions on their bodies, it found that the results were surprisingly consistent, even across cultures.

People reported that happiness and love sparked activity across nearly the entire body, while depression had the opposite effect: It dampened feelings in the arms, legs and head. Danger and fear triggered strong sensations in the chest area, the volunteers said. And anger was one of the few emotions that activated the arms.

The scientists hope that these body emoticons may one day help psychologists diagnose or treat mood disorders.

"Our emotional system in the brain sends signals to the body so we can deal with our situation," says , a psychologist at Aalto University who lead the study.

"Say you see a snake and you feel fear," Nummenmaa says. "Your nervous system increases oxygen to your muscles and raises your heart rate so you can deal with the threat. It's an automated system. We don't have to think about it."

That idea has been known for centuries. But scientists still don't agree on whether these bodily changes are distinct for each emotion and whether this pattern serves as a way for the mind to consciously identify emotions.

More here VIA NPR

Brain function 'boosted for days after reading a Novel

Being pulled in the world of a gripping novel can trigger actual, measurable changes in the brain that linger for at least five days after reading, scientists have said.

The new research, carried out at Emory University in the US, found that reading a good book may cause heightened connectivity in the brain and neurological changes that persist in a similar way to muscle memory.

The changes were registered in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, as well as the the primary sensory motor region of the brain.

Neurons of this region have been associated with tricking the mind into thinking it is doing something it is not, a phenomenon known as grounded cognition - for example, just thinking about running, can activate the neurons associated with the physical act of running.

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” said neuroscientist Professor Gregory Berns, lead author of the study.

“We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

21 students took part in the study, with all participants reading the same book -  Pompeii, a 2003 thriller by Robert Harris, which was chosen for its page turning plot.

“The story follows a protagonist, who is outside the city of Pompeii and notices steam and strange things happening around the volcano,” said Prof Berns. “It depicts true events in a fictional and dramatic way. It was important to us that the book had a strong narrative line.”

Over 19 days the students read a portion of the book in the evening then had fMRI scans the following morning. Once the book was finished, their brains were scanned for five days after.

The neurological changes were found to have continued for all the five days after finishing, proving that the impact was not just an immediate reaction but has a lasting influence.

“Even though the participants were not actually reading the novel while they were in the scanner, they retained this heightened connectivity,” added Prof Berns. “We call that a ‘shadow activity,’ almost like a muscle memory".

VIA The Independent

Snowflakes are cooler then you

Snowflakes have captured the human imagination since long before we understood their origins. Even before the invention of the microscope, just holding a snowflake up to your eye could let you see an incredible level of detail — and, it seems, the details were always different. Snowflakes have become a symbol of uniqueness, of the sheer level of variety possible, even within a simple and restrictive framework. People see, or try to see, something about human nature in the birth of such delicate and varied structures.

How could a simple, natural process give rise to that kind of variety? It would seem that a simple process like ice formation would play out fairly predictably, but it turns out that while we may know the basics of how snowflakes form, the random factors that influence their specific pattern are virtually unknowable. From flecks of dust to a passing currents of hot or cold air, there are all sorts of unpredictable factors that give rise to a snowflake’s particular conformation. There are, however, some generalities.

More here Via Geek Answers