Scientists are figuring out how magicians fool our brains in research that also helps uncover how our mind actually works.
A great deal of what scientists now understand about how the human visual system works stems from research into our susceptibility to optical illusions, LiveScience said.
“It made sense to look at magicians to advance knowledge of human cognition, since magicians have been working on figuring out how certain principles of psychology work for hundreds of years,“ said researcher Gustav Kuhn at the University of Durham in England, a cognitive psychologist who has also performed magic the past couple decades.
“Magicians really have this ability to distort your perceptions, to get people to perceive things that never happened, just like a visual illusion,“ he added.
The researchers looked into a magic trick called the “vanishing ball,“ in which a ball apparently disappears in midair. It’s done by faking a throw while keeping the ball secretly palmed in the magician’s hand.
Kuhn videotaped himself performing two versions of the illusion. In the “pro-illusion“ version, on the fake throw, his gaze and head followed an imaginary ball moving upwards. In the “anti-illusion“ version, Kuhn’s eyes stayed on the hand concealing the ball.
Roughly two-thirds of volunteers watching the pro-illusion version on television had a vivid recollection of the ball leaving the top of the screen. “Often they claimed someone at the top of the screen caught the ball,“ Kuhn told LiveScience. In comparison, only a third of the people viewing the anti-illusion version experienced that illusion.
Kuhn and his colleagues measured the eye movements of volunteers during the experiment. Surprisingly, they found that when people believed they saw the ball vanish, most claimed they spent their entire time looking at the ball, yet most actually glanced at the magician’s face prior to following the ball to help them perceive the ball’s location.
“Even though people claimed they were looking at the ball, what you find is that they spend a lot of time looking at the face. While their eye movements weren’t fooled by where the ball was, their perception was. It reveals how important social cues are in influencing perception,“ Kuhn said.
“As we are looking at the world, we have this impression that what we see is the real world. What this tells us is the way we see the world is more strongly dominated by how we perceive it to be rather than what it actually is,“ Kuhn added. “Even though the ball never left the hand, the reason people saw it leave is because they expected the ball to leave the hand. It’s the beliefs about what should happen that override the actual visual input.“

David Hanson owner of Hanson Robotics in Dallas, Texas, works on a robot head made in the image of Albert Einstein in Dallas, Nov. 19. (AP File Photo)

George the robot is playing hide-and-seek with scientist Alan Schultz.
For a robot to actually find a place to hide, and then to hunt for its human playmate, is a new level of human interaction. The machine must take cues from people and behave accordingly, AP reported.
This is the beginning of a real robot revolution: giving robots some humanity.
“Robots in the human environment, to me that’s the final frontier,“ said Cynthia Breazeal, robotic life group director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The human environment is as complex as it gets; it pushes the envelope.“
“Robots have to understand people as people,“ Breazeal said. “Right now, the average robot understands people like a chair: It’s something to go around.“
The places we will first see these robots that can connect with humans in a more “thoughtful“ way are in the most human-oriented fields-those that require special care in dealing with the elderly, young and disabled.
As a machine, George is not a breakthrough. He’s an off-the-shelf robot reprogrammed at the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, which Schultz directs.
When they play hide and seek, George doesn’t hide very well, and it takes him longer to find Schultz than vice versa, but it’s the fact that he does either that makes him special.
“We have only scratched the surface,“ said Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab director who won the Defense Department’s Grand Challenge for a self-driving robot car through the desert last year. He predicted that 10 years from now robots will roam the health care system and that in our homes, multi-armed robots will be doing the cleaning. “There will be a lot of personalized devices,“ he says.
That’s a big switch. The latest commercial home robots--the vacuuming iRobot Roomba, and its floor-cleaning cousins--are designed to work best when people leave the room. But the promise of robots for scientists is represented by Rosie, the vacuuming robot of “The Jetsons“ cartoon series.
“If Rosie is going to be around and in your face, it would be good if the interaction is natural and easy,“ says Rod Brooks, director of MIT’s artificial intelligence lab.
So after spending decades tinkering with wiring, some roboticists started studying humans, and the new field of human-robot interaction was born. Unlike the rest of robotics, many of its leaders are women. It has social scientists, language specialists, medical doctors and even ethicists who wonder if putting robots into places like nursing homes is the right thing to do.
That’s a big change from 50 years ago, when the field of artificial intelligence was created at a forum at Dartmouth University. The experts focused on puzzles and chess and skipped over concepts such as perception, a sense of where you are, what’s around you and how to interact.

Crumb rubber suffers none of the problems of traditional water filtration systems and as a result can filter wastewater up to four times faster. (Google Photo)

Rubber tires, the kind that lie at the bottom of rivers and at the back of junkyards the world over, could be ideal water filters says an environmental engineer at Penn State university in the US.
Yuefeng Xie says his “crumb rubber“ suffers none of the problems of traditional water filtration systems and as a result can filter wastewater up to four times faster, NewScientist wrote.
Traditionally, water filtration systems are made of particles of sand or anthracite stacked in a column. The particles are arranged so that the larger ones--which leave larger gaps between them--are at the top of the column and the smaller particles and therefore smaller holes are at the bottom. As a result, contaminants get filtered out from top to bottom in order of decreasing size.
The problem, says Xie, is that these systems clog up very quickly--every couple days on average. Water is pushed through them backwards to clean them out, but this ruins the column’s careful stacking as the large particles naturally settle to the bottom. Every subsequent filtration only uses the top of the column which therefore clogs up even faster. “The filters are designed to last 20 years but after one backwash you get a filter you don’t want,“ says Xie.
Xie and his team believe that crumbs of rubber, 1 to 2 millimeters across, are an ideal solution because the crumbs are compressible. As a result, regardless of how the filter is stacked the crumbs at the bottom of the column are always smallest because they are squashed by the weight of the column.

US scientists say they’ve invented a class of “acrobatic plastics“ that can change shape as it reacts to heat, Playfuls.com reported.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers say they collaborated with scientists at the Helmholtz Institute in Teltow, Germany, to create “triple-shape materials“ that can assume three shapes, each shape depending on how much heat is applied.
The landmark achievement comes from the laboratories of MIT chemical engineer Robert Langer and Helmholtz polymer chemist Andreas Lendlein.
“Triple-shape materials can switch from shape A, then to shape B, and on to shape C,“ Lendlein explained. “Using two, rather than just one, shape-changes offers unique opportunities for applications such as ’intelligent’ stents, or ’smart’ fastener systems,“ he said.
The triple-shape-shifting might also have applications in industry. In factories, changeable plastic fasteners could be implanted in, or attached to, one part, then heated to extend an arm to another part, said Lendlein. With further heating, the fastener would change shape again to lock itself in place. In effect, it would be an automated form of self-assembly.

New clues that cosmic rays, high-energy particles that travel space and bombard the Earth, are generated by shock waves in supernova remnants were revealed by a new study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory.
Cosmic rays are composed of high-energy electrons, protons and ions. Scientists used the Chandra observatory to study the X-rays emitted by the electrons (the only one of the particles that emits X-rays) from cosmic rays emanating from Cassiopeia A, a 325-year-old supernova remnant, Space.com wrote.
Scientists have long theorized that the high-energy shock waves of exploded stars called supernovas, were among “the few places in the galaxy that have enough energy to accelerate these particles,“ said Michael Stage, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
They theorize that the particles, contained by magnetic fields on either side of the shock wave, bounce back and forth across the shock, eventually energizing the electrons to very high energies.
“The electrons pick up speed each time they bounce across the shock front, like they’re in a relativistic pinball machine,“ said Glenn Allen, a team member from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The magnetic fields are like the bumpers and the shock is like a flipper.“
One important key for this theory to work, Stage says, is that the acceleration of the particles should come close to the theoretical maximum rate. The images of X-ray radiation from Cassiopeia A allowed the scientists to map out the accelerations of the electrons and provided “direct evidence that [this maximum] is reached for electrons,“ Stage told SPACE.com.
Stage says that it is likely that protons and ions would be accelerated in the same way as the electrons.
By looking at the X-ray images, scientists also observed that the highest-energy electrons accelerated very quickly to their energies, whereas lower energy electrons took much longer to accelerate.
Acceleration of charged particles also occurs in shocks in the Earth’s magnetosphere and in jets produced by supermassive black holes.
“Explaining where cosmic rays come from helps us to understand other mysterious phenomena in the high-energy universe,“ Stage said.

The medical community traditionally has relied on potent drugs to relieve severe pain. But in a number of academic settings across the country, health-care practitioners are adding another therapeutic weapon to the mix--they’re helping patients harness the healing power of their own imaginations, HealthDay reported.
The use of guided imagery, or mental images, to evoke physical benefits is perhaps the oldest form of therapy known to man, explained David E. Bresler, a founder of the Academy for Guided Imagery in Malibu, Calif. In fact, imagery is woven into the fabric of many ancient cultures’ healing rituals, he said.
Today, academic researchers are studying guided imagery’s use as an adjunct to more traditional medical treatments.
“I think it’s just the beginning, really, even though it’s been around a long time,“ said Bresler, whose academy instructs clinicians, including pediatricians, in the use of imagery to evoke physiologic changes that promote healing. A traditionally trained Ph.D. neuroscientist, he first became intrigued with alternative methods of pain relief in the early 1970s as founder and director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Pain Control Unit.
While much of the ongoing research is preliminary, practitioners of guided imagery are encouraged by initial results among children and adults.
Nola Schmidt, associate professor of nursing at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Ind., recently completed a pilot study at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago examining guided imagery’s effect among children with pain due to sickle cell disease or stem cell transplants. Of the 17 participants, eight were randomly assigned to listen to guided-imagery tapes created especially for each child.
Most tapes were vague, allowing the children to insert different scenes each time they listened to a recording. “For example,“ Schmidt said, “a tape may start out: ’OK, we want you to relax and close your eyes, take a deep breath, feel the air go in, feel the air go out.’ “ The child is invited to imagine being in “one of your favorite places“ and to describe the sights, sounds and smells he or she encounters.
Children in the experimental and control groups also kept pain diaries. Their entries recorded when and where they felt pain, what they did to feel better and how much they hurt before and after those interventions.
On a 0-to-10 scale, children in the guided-imagery group had an average post-pain intervention score of 4.3, a point lower than children in the control group. While the difference was not statistically significant, Schmidt believes it is “clinically“ significant.