For Second Opinion, Consult a Computer?

SAN FRANCISCO — The man on stage had his audience of 600 mesmerized. Over the course of 45 minutes, the tension grew. Finally, the moment of truth arrived, and the room was silent with anticipation.

At last he spoke. “Lymphoma with secondary hemophagocytic syndrome,” he said. The crowd erupted in applause.

Professionals in every field revere their superstars, and in medicine the best diagnosticians are held in particularly high esteem. Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal, 39, a self-effacing associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is considered one of the most skillful clinical diagnosticians in practice today.

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Just how special is Dr. Dhaliwal’s talent? More to the point, what can he do that a computer cannot? Will a computer ever successfully stand in for a skill that is based not simply on a vast fund of knowledge but also on more intangible factors like intuition?

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When working on a difficult case in front of an audience, Dr. Dhaliwal puts his entire thought process on display, with the goal of “elevating the stature of thinking,” he said. He believes this is becoming more important because physicians are being assessed on whether they gave the right medicine to a patient, or remembered to order a certain test.

Without such emphasis, physicians and training programs might forget the importance of having smart, thoughtful doctors. “Because in medicine,” Dr. Dhaliwal said, “thinking is our most important procedure.”

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She’s Got Some Big Ideas

A nice profile of one of my favorite blogger's
Uvealblues

SHE is the mastermind of the one of the faster growing literary empires on the Internet, yet she is virtually unknown. She is the champion of old-fashioned ideas, yet she is only 28 years old. She is a fierce defender of books, yet she insists she will never write one herself.

At precisely 9:30 on a chilly Saturday morning, Maria Popova slips out of her apartment in Brooklyn, scurries down a few stairs and enters a small basement gym. A former recreational bodybuilder from Bulgaria, Ms. Popova is the unlikely founder of the exploding online emporium of ideas known asBrain Pickings.

Her exhaustively assembled grab bag of scientific curiosities, forgotten photographs, snippets of old love letters and mash notes to creativity — imagine the high-mindedness of a TED talk mixed with the pop sensibility of P. T. Barnum — spans a blog (500,000 visitors a month), a newsletter (150,000 subscribers) and a Twitter feed(263,000 followers). 

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Taking a Stand for Office Ergonomics

THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.

But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down.

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Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.

The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. 

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This Eye Hospital On A Plane Takes Flight To Keep Sight Alive

Blindness is a huge--but usually totally treatable--problem in the developing world, but many local health services don’t have the resources to combat it. The solution? Just fly in a high-tech eye hospital.
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The Flying Eye Hospital is the world’s only plane-meets-eye hospital, converted from a DC-10 aircraft. Quite literally a hospital with wings, the plane has visited more than 77 countries and conducted 279 training and service programs in 154 cities since 1982.

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We look right below the eyes to judge faces

 — In the first crucial moment of determining another person’s identity, gender, and emotional state, we often glance just below the eyes

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At least for the three important tasks investigated—identity, emotion, and gender—below the eyes is the optimal place to look, say the scientists, because it allows one to read information from as many features of the face as possible.

“What the visual system is adept at doing is taking all those pieces of information from your face and combining them in a statistical manner to make a judgment about whatever task you’re doing,” says Eckstein.

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Dealing with Doctors Who Only Take Cash

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As to why doctors decide to switch to a concierge practice, the answer is almost always frustration.

“About four years ago, one insurance company was driving me crazy saying I had to fax documents to show I had done a visit,” said Stanford Owen, an internal medical doctor in Gulfport, Miss. “At 2 a.m., I woke up and said, ‘This is it.’ ”

Dr. Owen stopped accepting all insurance and now charges his 1,000 patients $38 a month.

“When I decided to abandon insurance, I didn’t want to lose my patient base and make it unaffordable,” he said. “I have everything from waitresses and shrimpers to international businessmen. It’s a concierge model, but it’s also the personal doctor model.”

Dr. Owen, who once had three nurses and 10 examining rooms, said it was now just him and a receptionist. He has become obsessed with keeping overhead low, but he said that, for the first time since the 1990s, his income was going up.

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The biggest concern for a doctor is running afoul of insurance regulations that prevent doctors from billing twice for the same service — for the care, which is submitted to the insurance company, and for the concierge fee, if the fee doesn’t cover something extra. Some insurance companies also bar doctors from offering concierge services.

David Hilgers, chairman of the law firm Brown McCarroll, said the risk to a doctor with a practice dependent on Medicare reimbursements was particularly acute.

“Medicare will not allow you to charge a patient in addition to what the government pays,” Mr. Hilgers said. “There is a risk of losing your practice and your license and being penalized by the federal government for doing so.”

Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

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Sommer was baffled by this development but didn’t immediately grasp its significance. (It was nearly a decade before the word “immortal” was first used to describe the species.) But several biologists in Genoa, fascinated by Sommer’s finding, continued to study the species, and in 1996 they published a paper called “Reversing the Life Cycle.” The scientists described how the species — at any stage of its development — could transform itself back to a polyp, the organism’s earliest stage of life, “thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality.” This finding appeared to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.

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“There’s a shocking amount of genetic similarity between jellyfish and human beings,” said Kevin J. Peterson, a molecular paleobiologist who contributed to that study, when I visited him at his Dartmouth office. From a genetic perspective, apart from the fact that we have two genome duplications, “we look like a damn jellyfish.”

This may have implications for medicine, particularly the fields of cancer research and longevity.

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Hydrozoans, he suggests, may have made a devil’s bargain. In exchange for simplicity — no head or tail, no vision, eating out of its own anus — they gained immortality. These peculiar, simple species may represent an opportunity to learn how to fight cancer, old age and death.

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How Nicholas Kristof Uses His Pulpit To Engage People With Empathy

How Nicholas Kristof Uses His Pulpit To Engage People With Empathy
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One advantage of social media is brevity. The other night, gunmen tried to assassinate one of my heroes, a Congolese doctor and anti-rape campaigner named Denis Mukwege. If I had tried to write a column about the attack, most readers would have immediately tuned out. But they let me inflict tweets on them even if they’re not hugely interested in the topic, because I can’t entirely put them to sleep in 140 characters. So Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ enable me to toss out little updates and tidbits that don’t merit a column--or would bore people if they did--but that are part of the mosaic of modern life

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How can activist writers best combat “compassion fatigue” in their writing?

My concern with this issue led me to the research in social psychology and neurology about how we can connect with our readers. A scholar named Paul Slovic has in particular done fascinating research in this field. To me, the lessons of this research are two-fold. First, tell an engaging individual story to suck people in. Second, show that it’s not hopeless, but that progress is possible. That was our strategy in Half the Sky.

Time Magazine Inventions of the Year

Best Inventions of the Year 2012

Indoor clouds!!!

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Starvation hormone markedly extends mouse life span, researchers report

DALLAS – Oct. 16, 2012 – A study by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers finds that a starvation hormone markedly extends life span in mice without the need for calorie restriction.
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FGF21 seems to provide its health benefits by increasing insulin sensitivity and blocking the growth hormone/insulin-like growth factor-1 signaling pathway.  When too abundant, growth hormone can contribute to insulin resistance, cancer, and other diseases, the researchers said.
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Self-Taught Teen Prodigy From Sierra Leone Wows MIT Engineers [VIDEO]

he latest installment of the THNKR’s Prodigies YouTube series highlights Sierra Leone teen Kelvin Doe, who is visiting the U.S. as a guest of MIT.

The 15-year-old is a self-taught engineer, who has never taken an engineering or electronics class. Combining scrap metal, baking soda and acid, he created a battery to power his family’s home. He also broadcasts news and music as DJ Focus on the radio, using an RF transmitter he created.

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Sierra Leone Holds A Vote, Not A War, On Diamonds

Sierra Leone's "blood diamonds" helped fuel atrocities in the impoverished West African nation in the 1990s. The war has now been over for a decade, and the country's most valuable resource is no longer known as the product of a conflict. But it remains a contentious issue.

As Sierra Leoneans go to the polls Saturday, the country's diamonds are at the heart of political parties' manifestos. Opposition parties accuse the government of mortgaging lucrative diamond fields for a "pittance," while President Ernest Bai Koroma boasts of his "ambitious" efforts to transform the industry.

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Stalking Big Fut in Sierra Leone

After flying from New York City to Dakar to Banjul to Freetown, riding a bus to a dock, taking a boat across a bay to a 4X4 truck that travels up and down roads that transition from broken pavement to muddy earth, I stand at the front of a classroom -- one that is empty of children. Today, 30 adults sit in row after row of benches, some bending forward with heads propped on elbows as if they have been waiting a long time. And they have.
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Each has come forward with one goal in mind -- to help protect their community. The danger outside these doors sounds almost comical to a Westerner's ears: Big Fut. Except this is no myth. Not in Sierra Leone or the other 79 countries where lymphatic filariasis -- or Big Fut, as it is known in Krio -- is endemic.
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These are community health volunteers, and they are heroes in my eyes.

Best, Worst Breakfasts for Your Health

Fast-food breakfast sandwiches could be “a time bomb in a bun”—and eating even one fat-laden morning meal has immediate adverse effects on your arteries, according to a new study presented at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress meeting in Toronto.
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Another study linked having whole-grain cereal for breakfast with reduced levels of cortisol, a stress hormone linked to both weight gain and a tendency to accumulate belly fat. A large waistline is the leading warning sign of metabolic syndrome, which quintuple risks for type 2 diabetes and triple it for heart attack.
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Big brain lets larva ‘see’ without seeing

The very simple eyes of a fruit fly larva can see just enough light to allow the animal’s relatively large brain to assemble that input into images.

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Same Doctor Visit, Double the Cost

Reno in the news again for healthcare...

My friend and gym buddy, David Hubbard, shares his story...

Uvealblues

Insurers Say Rates Can Surge After Hospitals Buy Private Physician Practices; Medicare Spending Rises, Too

After David Hubbard underwent a routine echocardiogram at his cardiologist's office last year, he was surprised to learn that the heart scan cost his insurer $1,605. That was more than four times the $373 it paid when the 61-year-old optometrist from Reno, Nev., had the same procedure at the same office just six months earlier.

"Nothing had changed, it was the same equipment, the same room," said Dr. Hubbard, who has a high-deductible health plan and had to pay about $1,000 of the larger bill out of his own pocket. "I was very upset."

But something had changed: his cardiologist's practice had been bought by Renown Health, a local hospital system. Dr. Hubbard was caught up in a structural shift that is sweeping through health care in the U.S.—hospitals are increasingly acquiring private physician practices.

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Eyes may explain why bird plumage ‘pops’

MONASH U. (AUS) —Varying ability to see UV light may account for birds’ wild diversity of color, such as the brilliant blue plumage that male fairy-wrens use to stand out from their surroundings.
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The Best Times to Buy Clothing

The best day of the week to buy clothing online

Read more: http://business.time.com/2012/10/26/the-best-times-to-buy-clothing/#ixzz2AqULueIl

Mesmerized

I am still in a state of disbelief that I had the privilege of seeing Thibault Cauvin in concert here in Reno last night...
Sad that only 20 people came...after he had two sold out shows in New York City at the Carnegie City Music Hall....well I am sure he will be sold out in San Francisco tonight...
Thank you, Larry Aynesmith, head of the Sierra Guitar Society,  for bringing him to Reno and for a night I will never forget...
Uvealblues

Brain map predicts people’s ‘visual world’

U. PENNSYLVANIA (US) — Scientists have created a map of vision in the brain based upon an individual’s brain structure, even for people who cannot see
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Nearly 100 years after a British neurologist first mapped the blind spots caused by missile wounds to the brains of soldiers, Perelman School of Medicine researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have perfected his map using modern-day technology.

Their result can, among other things, guide efforts to restore vision using a neural prosthesis that stimulates the surface of the brain. The study appears in the latest issue of Current Biology.

How to Raise High-Achieving Kids

Here’s a novel recipe for raising successful kids: see that they’re born overseas, but bring them to America before they hit their teens.

That, at least, is the implication of a new study by sociologists at Johns Hopkins University who tracked 10,795 adolescents into young adulthood.

Basically, the sociologists found that the immigrant teens beat the pants off native born children in academic achievement and, as adults, psychological well-being. American born children of immigrants also seemed to enjoy an advantage. The researchers adjusted for socioeconomic background and school conditions, so they were comparing apples to apples.

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Body’s ‘pre-feelings’ may detect the future

NORTHWESTERN (US) — Your body may anticipate what’s going to happen—even before your brain has an inkling of what’s to come, researchers report.

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You Are What You Eat..

Humans run on a fuel called food.  Yet economists and other social scientists rarely study what people eat.  We provide simple evidence consistent with the existence of a link between the consumption of fruit and vegetables and high well-being.  In cross-sectional data, happiness and mental health rise in an approximately dose-response way with the number of daily portions of fruit and vegetables.
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One major note: the researchers caution that reverse causality may be an issue. That is, rather than fruit and vegetables causing well-being, it may be that well-adjusted people prefer eating a lot of fruit and vegetables. The authors recommend additional “randomized trials to explore the consequences for mental health of different levels of fruit-and-vegetable consumption.”
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The Island Where People Forget To Die

This is a good article that touches not only upon diet, but also lifestyle, community etc...
(I can see myself spending my days playing guitar and hanging out with friends and family in Ikaria :)
Uvealblues

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Ikaria, an island of 99 square miles and home to almost 10,000 Greek nationals, lies about 30 miles off the western coast of Turkey. Its jagged ridge of scrub-covered mountains rises steeply out of the Aegean Sea. Before the Christian era, the island was home to thick oak forests and productive vineyards. Its reputation as a health destination dates back 25 centuries, when Greeks traveled to the island to soak in the hot springs near Therma. In the 17th century, Joseph Georgirenes, the bishop of Ikaria, described its residents as proud people who slept on the ground. “The most commendable thing on this island,” he wrote, “is their air and water, both so healthful that people are very long-lived, it being an ordinary thing to see persons in it of 100 years of age.”
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This Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the Ikaria Study, which includes a survey of the diet of 673 Ikarians. She found that her subjects consumed about six times as many beans a day as Americans, ate fish twice a week and meat five times a month, drank on average two to three cups of coffee a day and took in about a quarter as much refined sugar — the elderly did not like soda. She also discovered they were consuming high levels of olive oil along with two to four glasses of wine a day.

Presenting the Work of A Master Craftsman...

Anders Eliasson is a fantastic luthier, renown for his flamenco and classical guitars.
He is based out of a small town in Spain: Huelva. He builds each of his guitars by hand and is quite well respected for his artistry....I feel very fortunate to have learned about his work...

Below is  the link about a very special guitar...(at least to me)
Uveal blues

Building guitar number 100   Link

Here is a video of Anders playing some Fandangos on this Flamenco Blanca:

Test Your DNA for Diseases — No Doctor Required

Test Your DNA for Diseases — No Doctor Required

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/23/drugstore-genomes-whos-pushing-the-sequencing-industry/#ixzz2AECzoJAC

Ray “Smartphone for the Blind” Features Tactile & Audio Interface

Qualcomm has partnered with Project RAY, a group devoted to improving the lives of blind and visually challenged people through technology, to create a smartphone specifically for those that can’t see. There’s a variety of apps developed for smartphones that take advantage of technology originally developed for sighted folks to help those that are blind.
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Blues!

A Berry So Shiny, It's Irresistible (And Inedible)

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Steiner measured that intensity. It's the result of how unusually reflective the berry's skin is. Most surfaces reflect just a small percentage of the light that hits them. However, this berry reflects 30 percent of the light.

In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Steiner says its reflectivity is more intense than any living thing. "We find that it is more intense than, for example, the morpho butterfly, which is usually cited for being one of the most brilliantly colored animals.

True Blue Stands Out in an Earthy Crowd

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Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency. They’re exploring the physics and chemistry of blueness in nature, the evolution of blue ornaments and blue come-ons, and the sheer brazenness of being blue when most earthly life forms opt for earthy raiments of beige, ruddy or taupe.

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As a raft of surveys has shown, blue love is a global affair. Ask people their favorite color, and in most parts of the world roughly half will say blue, a figure three to four times the support accorded common second-place finishers like purple or green. Just one in six Americans is blue-eyed, but nearly one in two consider blue the prettiest eye color, which could be why some 50 percent of tinted contact lenses sold are the kind that make your brown eyes blue.

Swishing soda in your mouth can boost self-control (seriously)

A spoonful of sugar makes the willpower go up, according to a series of studies that have suggested fueling the brain with sweets can strengthen self-control. Now, new research finds that sugar's potential may be greater than expected: You don't even need to swallow to get the benefits of sweetness.

Simply swishing a glucose-laden drink in the mouth and spitting it out boosted self-control and willpower for tasks from squeezing a handgrip to completing impossible brain teasers, the new study found.

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Via Barking Up the Wrong Tree

In Africa, 15M cell phones map malaria

Phone calls and text messages from 15 million mobile phones may help track the spread of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, new research shows

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Edward Nahim: Sierra Leone’s Only Psychiatrist

Sierra Leone is trying to heal its wounds in the aftermath of one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars—but there’s only one psychiatrist around to treat the nation’s trauma.

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Get Up. Get Out. Don’t Sit.

Just as we were all settling in front of the television to watch the baseball playoffs, two new studies about the perils of sitting have spoiled our viewing pleasure.

The research, published in separate medical journals this month, adds to a growing scientific consensus that the more time someone spends sitting, especially in front of the television, the shorter and less robust his or her life may be.(..)

and the findings were sobering: Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.

By comparison, smoking a single cigarette reduces life expectancy by about 11 minutes, the authors said.

Looking more broadly, they concluded that an adult who spends an average of six hours a day watching TV over the course of a lifetime can expect to live 4.8 years fewer than a person who does not watch TV.

Those results hold true, the authors point out, even for people who exercise regularly. 

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Can you really predict what will make you happy?

Here’s what most people think will make them happy, in order of importance:

Via The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain:

A survey of more than 2,015 people conducted by the British research company Ipsos MORI revealed that people believe the following five factors are most likely to enhance happiness (they are listed in order of importance).

1) More time with family
2) Earning double what I do now
3) Better health
4) More time with friends
5) More traveling

Are they right?

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Florida's Giant Eyeball Mystery

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Looking for a Google

Can the spirit of enterprise be taught?

WORLD-BEATING companies that began in garages—think of Amazon, Apple or Google—are revered in the West. Developing countries can boast one or two examples of their own: India’s Tata and South Korea’s Samsung began life as small trading companies; Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group, an agri-business firm, started as a seed shop. But these are exceptions. Of the millions of small enterprises in poor countries, hardly any grow big and strong. The World Bank’s new World Development Report* looks at what can be done to help start-ups in poor countries become the next Google

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The question is what can be done to improve matters. Obviously, good infrastructure and a welcoming investment climate matter. Governments have tried providing cheap loans or grants to pay the wages of an extra employee. This had no effect. Nor did giving special grants to female business owners, as happened in Ghana. But free management training did help. The trouble is that most enterprises see no point in it: asked whether lack of management expertise was a problem, only 3% of Brazilian small firms said yes.

Learning from abroad, though, makes a big difference. In 1979 Desh, a Bangladeshi garments firm, sent 130 of its staff for an eight-month course at a South Korean textile plant. At the time, Bangladesh had no textile exports and no modern industry. When the trainees got back, almost all of them set up their own firms. Today Bangladesh has 3.6m textile workers, 80% of them women, generating $13 billion of exports a year. Mr Yunus should be proud.

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Lacking Teachers and Textbooks, India’s Schools Turn to Khan Academy to Survive

CHENNAI — In a country where teachers are in short supply and decent textbooks are hard to find, Indian schools are pinning their hopes on a free online tutorial service based in the United States.

A few Indian schools are already using Khan Academy, which offers lessons on numerous subjects through online videos, to cement math and science fundamentals, cut student absenteeism, boost test scores and in some cases, to simply survive. But these one-time school initiatives could gain traction from an effort to dub 450 of the 3,400 English-language Khan Academy videos in at least three Indian languages, as well as other efforts to make them more accessible to Indian students.

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Drunk With Power

This is a great article on arguably, one of the most colorful writers in the wine world. I get his daily emails just for his writing and do occasionally succumb to buying some of his unusual wine selections...
Uvealblues

Jon Rimmerman sells $30 million worth of wine a year over e-mail. How? Well, let him tell you a little story about a young syrah he once swilled outside Walla Walla

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He realized he had the seeds of his own start-up in that wine letter. He’d already switched to e-mail, picking up several hundred new subscribers who often asked where to buy the wines. It was a no-brainer to start selling them. All he needed now, Rimmerman decided, was a clear sense of mission — a brand identity, in other words, centered on making the world a better place instead of just making a buck. Rimmerman claims that he made two lists — things he liked about the wine business, and things he did not — and decided that his company’s goal would be to transform the industry until his “don’t like” column was empty.
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Lara Logan 2012 BGA Speech on Afghanistan

This App Identifies Dollar Bills for the Blind

A new mobile app helps the visually impaired count dollar bills with the help of a smartphone camera.

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Women Entrepreneurs Drive Growth in Africa

KAMPALA, UGANDA — Far too often, in the view of Africa’s budding female entrepreneurs, their continent is characterized as the recipient of aid that enables residents just to struggle by, and as a place that mistreats and marginalizes its women.
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It was into this world, and against it, says Bethlehem Tilahun, that her shoe company SoleRebels was born.

“I kept hearing over and over the phrase ‘poverty alleviation,”’ said Ms. Tilahun, now a footwear mogul whose company grossed $2 million in sales this past year. “The media, preoccupied with a singular narrative about ‘Africa’ that missed the story of Africa — part of a larger spectrum of endless entities that have monopolized Africa’s image, our brand.”

With SoleRebels, she said proudly, “We’ve inverted the whole paradigm.”

Ms. Tilahun, 33, is one of a cresting wave of African entrepreneurs who are harnessing Africa’s businesses and brands as the continent enjoys its greatest economic success in generations. The International Monetary Fund now forecasts, admittedly in a recession-plagued world, that Africa will have the fastest-growing economy of any continent over the next five years.

Many of the new entrepreneurs of Africa are women.

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Her ‘Crime’ Was Loving Schools

Twice the Taliban threw warning letters into the home of Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old Pakistan girl who is one of the world’s most persuasive advocates for girls’ education. They told her to stop her advocacy — or else.

She refused to back down, stepped up her campaign and even started a fund to help impoverished Pakistani girls get an education. So, on Tuesday, masked gunmen approached her school bus and asked for her by name. Then they shot her in the head and neck.

“Let this be a lesson,” a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said afterward. He added that if she survives, the Taliban would again try to kill her.

Surgeons have removed a bullet from Malala, and she remains unconscious in critical condition in a hospital in Peshawar. A close family friend, Fazal Moula Zahid, told me that doctors are hopeful that there has been no brain damage and that she will ultimately return to school.

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These events coincide with the first international Day of the Girl on Thursday, and they remind us that the global struggle for gender equality is the paramount moral struggle of this century, equivalent to the campaigns against slavery in the 19th century and against totalitarianism in the 20th century.

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The Ames Illusion

“Big” me. “Little” me. Watch these two versions of me–which are really the same size–explain why I appear petite in one place on screen and large in another. The reason, in short, is that I have been trapped in a clever visual illusion, one invented 78 years ago by American opthalmologist Adelbert Ames Jr. In the HBO movie “Temple Grandin,” the main character (Grandin) recreates the same illusion for a class assignment. Watch the scene here. The video below deconstructs the trick that Ames and Grandin play on our eyes.

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Diss Information: Is There a Way to Stop Popular Falsehoods from Morphing into "Facts"?

False information is pervasive and difficult to eradicate, but scientists are developing new strategies such as "de-biasing," a method that focuses on facts, to help spread the truth.
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"You have to be careful when you correct misinformation that you don't inadvertently strengthen it," says Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth and one of the paper's authors. "If the issues go to the heart of people's deeply held world views, they become more entrenched in their opinions if you try to update their thinking."

Psychologists call this reaction belief perseverance: maintaining your original opinions in the face of overwhelming data that contradicts your beliefs. Everyone does it, but we are especially vulnerable when invalidated beliefs form a key part of how we narrate our lives

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Half of the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong

Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date.  But at what rate do former facts disappear? Arbesman applies the concept of half-life, the time required for half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate, to the dissolution of facts. For example, the half-life of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 is just over 29 years. Applying the concept of half-life to facts, Arbesman cites research that looked into the decay in the truth of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis. “The half-life of truth was 45 years,” reported the researchers.
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Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each by each is how the scientific process is supposed work, i.e., experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. How many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disheartening study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over ten years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.
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Via Simolenonsense

Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon who claims to have visited the afterlife

Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he's long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife.

But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven.

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High Stress Can Make Insulin Cells Regress

THE INVESTIGATORS

Chutima Talchai and Dr. Domenico Accili, Columbia University.

For years, researchers have investigated how the body loses the ability to produce enough insulin, a hallmark of diabetes. Now an intriguing theory is emerging, and it suggests a potential treatment that few scientists had considered.

The hormone insulin helps shuttle glucose, or blood sugar, from the bloodstream into individual cells to be used as energy. But the body can become resistant to insulin, and the beta cells of the pancreas, which produce the hormone, must work harder to compensate. Eventually, the thinking goes, they lose the ability to keep up. “We used to say that the beta cells poop out,” said Alan Saltiel, director of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. In reality, he added, this shorthand meant “we have no idea what’s going on.”

Some evidence suggested that large numbers of these cells died through a process of programmed cell death called apoptosis. But that was at best a partial explanation. Now, researchers at Columbia University have put forth a surprising alternative.

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