By Susan Milius CHARLESTON, S.C. — The greeneye fish views its stygian home through fluorescent lenses that turn one color into another, researchers propose, making glowing green images of hard-to-see violet objects. “Crazy” is what Yakir Gagnon of Duke University cheerfully called the fish-vision idea he and his colleagues presented January 4 at the annual meeting of Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Fluorescent materials known to science so far, he explained, respond to incoming light by glowing in a different color in all directions. Yet lenses on the bulging, upward-looking Chlorophthalmus fish appear to have materials that direct that fluorescent glow in the same direction and pattern as incoming light. Like many deep-sea fishes, greeneyes have only one kind of light-detecting pigment in the retina, the surface at the back of the eye that catches images. That pigment is optimized to pick up a particular wavelength of green light. Alone, the pigment doesn’t even detect blue-violet light. Yet greeneyes’ fluorescent, glowing lenses appear to translate blue-violet light into a more detectable green color. The Duke team has found that incoming blue-violet light (with a short wavelength of 410 nanometers) zaps lens substances into fluorescing a blue-green that’s just a twinkle away from the color the retinal pigment sees best. The lens glow peaks mostly at 485 nanometers, and the retinal pigment picks up light best at 488 nanometers. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 16240 - Posted: 01.12.2012

by Kai Kupferschmidt Those palm readers predicting your age from your lifeline are making it up. But now scientists say they have found a true lifeline in the cells of Zebra finches. The birds with the longest telomeres—the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes—live the longest, according to a new study. "It is the first time this has been shown for any species," says María Blasco, a telomere researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, who was not involved in the work. Telomeres are repetitive DNA sequences that, together with some proteins, sit at the ends of chromosomes to keep them from fraying. They have long been known to shorten with age, and when they reach a critical length, cells stop dividing. While abnormally short telomeres have been implicated in some diseases, studies investigating whether longer telomeres lead to a longer life have shown mixed results. Now biologist Pat Monaghan and her colleagues at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom have come up with the best evidence yet that telomere length correlates with life span. The scientists measured telomere length in red blood cells of 99 captive zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). The birds resemble long-lived animals in that there is little restoration of telomeres in body cells as they age. The first measurement was taken at 25 days; the researchers then followed the birds over their natural life span, ranging from less than a year to nearly 9 years, and measured telomeres again at various time points. They found a highly significant correlation between telomere length at 25 days and life span; birds with longer telomeres lived longer. Length measured at 1 year also predicted life span, but the relationship was weaker, whereas at later time points (after 3, 4, 6, and 7 years) there was no correlation, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16239 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By Alice Reid Well before sunup, Chuck Linderman launches his daily workout at the Alexandria boat house: 30 minutes pulling hard on a Concept 2 rowing machine, an equal stint lifting free weights and 30 minutes pedaling a stationary bike. He drives himself to sweaty, breathless exhaustion, for Linderman is training for the race of his life — a race against Parkinson’s disease. Linderman is one of a million Americans afflicted by this neurodegenerative disease that kills off the brain cells responsible for the body’s ability to move. His diagnosis came six years ago, when his wife noticed that his right arm was moving weirdly and that he was having trouble fastening the top button on his dress shirts. His doctor recommended seeing a neurologist. “It took the guy less than 15 minutes to make the diagnosis,” said Linderman, 64. Rowing already played a role in his life. For nearly a decade, he had been active in Alexandria Community Rowing’s masters program. So his response to Parkinson’s was immediate. Fight back with what he knew best: strenuous exercise. “What is the alternative? A descent into invalidism?” said Linderman, who retired two years ago from his job as director of a power company association. Exercise of any sort has long been known to be helpful for Parkinson’s. Before the development of effective drug therapy in the ’60s, patients often improved with any exercise, even the act of folding laundry, according to Michael Okun, national medical director of the Parkinson’s Foundation, which emphasizes exercise as an important tool to fight the disease. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16238 - Posted: 01.10.2012

Tomorrow, mBio—an online journal by the American Society for Microbiology—will publish new results that show that many autistic children harbor Sutterella bacteria in their digestive tract, contrary to non-autistic children. While this research provides a clear correlation, further study is needed to determine if this difference in digestive tract microorganisms is a cause or effect of autism and what role it plays in this developmental disorder. The underlying reason autism is often associated with gastrointestinal problems is an unknown, but new results to be published in the online journal mBio on January 10 reveal that the guts of autistic children differ from other children in at least one important way: many children with autism harbor a type of bacteria in their guts that non-autistic children do not. The study was conducted by Brent Williams and colleagues at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Earlier work has revealed that autistic individuals with gastrointestinal symptoms often exhibit inflammation and other abnormalities in their upper and lower intestinal tracts. However, scientists do not know what causes the inflammation or how the condition relates to the developmental disorders that characterize autism. The research results appearing in mBio® indicate the communities of microorganisms that reside in the gut of autistic children with gastrointestinal problems are different than the communities of non-autistic children. Whether or not these differences are a cause or effect of autism remains to be seen. “The relationship between different microorganisms and the host and the outcomes for disease and development is an exciting issue,” says Christine A. Biron, the Brintzenhoff Professor of Medical Science at Brown University and editor of the study. “This paper is important because it starts to advance the question of how the resident microbes interact with a disorder that is poorly understood.” SciTechDaily Copyright © 1998 - 2012.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16237 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By Scicurious The idea of using deep brain stimulation for treatment of major depressive disorder is one that’s been brewing for a while. Every so often I see another followup or report of a long-term study on deep brain stimulation. A followup came out recently in Nature News, documenting the long term success of a small clinical study. These studies are only going to get more press as deep brain stimulation treatment is investigated, and it’s worth asking now: is this the miracle that depressed patients have been looking for? Or is it only another therapy, with another low chance of success? Deep brain stimulation (DBS) involves the implantation of a small stimulating electrode into a specific area of the brain. It’s not always for depression, doctors use DBS for treatment of other disorders such as Parkinson’s and essential tremor as well. In all cases, a small electrode array of four individual electrodes gets implanted into the brain area of choice. A tiny insulated wire connects the array to an impulse generator, a battery powered device that will generate the stimulation. This is usually placed under the skin (usually near your collarbone), while the wire connecting the two runs under the skin as well, around your ear, and into the top of your head. Once implanted and turned on, the impulse generator will send either constant or intermittent stimulation to the electrodes at a specific frequency and strength, which will result in the depolarization of a local group of neurons near the electrode. The effects of the implant depends on where in your brain it is place. The devices can last for years (as long as you replace the generator batteries, anyway), and the implantation procedure is some pretty major surgery. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16236 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By Michelle Clement I like video games (I will rip up some Assassin’s Creed whenever I get a long weekend, do NOT get me started). My cat likes video games too, even though she doesn’t understand that she’s playing them. On a whim not too long ago, I downloaded a “games for cats” app on my iPad that simulates a dancing laser pointer or a skittering mouse, and my cat gets so into the game that she’ll push my iPad all the way across the floor in her excitement. Here’s a video of someone else’s kitten playing the same game: The phenomenon isn’t restricted to domesticated cats, either: Cats aren’t the only animals that are mentally stimulated by flashing and dancing lights, though. As it turns out, researchers at Wageningen University, in the course of their research on ethical livestock farming, noticed that pigs like to play with dancing lights as well. European regulations currently require that pig farmers provide mentally-stimulating activity for their pigs in order to reduce boredom, which leads to aggression and biting, and researchers at Wageningen University, in collaboration with the Utrecht School of the Arts, are currently developing a video game called “Pig Chase” for livestock pigs that is not unlike my cat’s iPad app. The key difference, however, is that this game would be an interspecies two-player game. [EDIT: I was contacted this afternoon by Nate at Hiccup, and he informed me that Game For Cats has also recently incorporated interspecies functionality. I didn't know that, so thanks for the update!] © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16235 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By Virginia Hughes Among the bloodletting boxes, ether inhalers, kangaroo-tendon sutures and other artifacts stored at the Indiana Medical History Museum in Indianapolis are hundreds of scuffed-up canning jars full of dingy yellow liquid and chunks of human brains. Until the late 1960s the museum was the pathology department of the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane. The bits of brain in the jars were collected during patient autopsies performed between 1896 and 1938. Most of the jars sat on a shelf until the summer of 2010, when Indiana University School of Medicine pathologist George Sandusky began popping off the lids. Frustrated by a dearth of postmortem brain donations from people with mental illness, Sandusky—who is on the board of directors at the museum—seized the chance to search this neglected collection for genes that contribute to mental disorders. Sandusky is not alone. Several research groups are now seeking ways to mine genetic and other information hidden in old, often forgotten tissue archives—a handful of which can be found in the U.S., along with many more in Europe. Several technical hurdles stand in the way, but if these can be overcome, the archives would offer several advantages. Beyond supplying tissues that can be hard to acquire at a time when autopsies are on the decline, the vintage brains are untainted by modern psychiatric drugs and are often paired with detailed clinical notes that help researchers make more accurate post hoc diagnoses. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16234 - Posted: 01.10.2012

Heidi Ledford Protective caps known as telomeres that help to preserve the integrity of chromosomes can also predict lifespan in young zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), researchers have found. Telomeres are stretches of repetitive DNA sequence that are found at the ends of chromosomes, where they help to maintain cell viability by preventing the fraying of DNA and the fusion of one chromosome to another. The relationship between normal ageing and telomere decline has long been suspected — and even asserted by some companies that measure customers’ telomere length — but the link remains unproven in humans (see 'Spit test offers guide to health'). Most studies of longevity and telomere length have relied on only one or two measurements from an individual during their lifespan. But population ecologist Pat Monaghan of the University of Glasgow, UK, and her colleagues found that measuring telomere length periodically over the course of a zebra finch’s life revealed a tight association between length and lifespan — particularly when those measurements were taken when the birds were only 25 days old. The results are reported online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. “This study is important,” says María Blasco, a telomere researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid. “It’s the first time that normal differences in telomere length have been shown to be predictive of longevity.” Blasco was not involved in the current study, but serves as chief scientific adviser for Madrid-based company Life Length, which advertises telomere length measurements as a service for determining an individual’s "biological age". © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16233 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By SARAH WHEATON At a crowded vigil on Sunday night in Tucson, Representative Gabrielle Giffords held her husband’s hand as she stepped up to the lectern to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It had been one year since a shooting at a Tucson supermarket killed six people, injured 12 others and left her with a severe brain injury. Ms. Giffords’s appearance was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd that applauded her remarkable progress toward recovery. The man next to her, fighting tears, offered his own remarks. “For the past year, we’ve had new realities to live with,” said her husband, the astronaut Mark E. Kelly. “The reality and pain of letting go of the past.” Captain Kelly was speaking of the survivors of the shooting. But his words echoed the sentiments of many brain injury survivors and their spouses as they grapple with interpersonal challenges that take much longer than a year to overcome. Until recently, there had been little evidence-based research on how to rebuild marriages after such a tragedy. Indeed, doctors frequently warn uninjured spouses that the marriage may well be over, that the personality changes that can result from brain injury may do irreparable harm to the relationship. Captain Kelly and Ms. Giffords largely have kept private their own experiences in this regard, and they declined to be interviewed for this article. Still, therapists are beginning to understand the obstacles that couples like them face, and what they are learning may lead to new counseling techniques to help restore the social links that give lives meaning. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Stress
Link ID: 16232 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News Nicotine patches may improve the memory of elderly people experiencing the earliest symptoms of dementia, researchers suspect. The patches appear to give a cognitive boost to people with mild memory impairment. The findings, published in the journal Neurology, come from a small study of 67 people over a period of six months. Experts say the results are not conclusive, merely hinting of a benefit and do not mean people should smoke. The health risks of smoking massively outweigh any potential nicotine benefits. And nicotine is known to be addictive. Longer and larger studies are now needed to fully assess nicotine's effect on memory and whether it might point the way to new treatments for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, they say. There are some 820,000 people in the UK living with dementia. Although some drugs are already available that can lessen some of the symptoms of the disease, there is no cure for this progressive disorder. Memory and cognition are some of the first functions that begin to fail in a person with dementia. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 16231 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY The nicotine gum and patches that millions of smokers use to help kick their habit have no lasting benefit and may backfire in some cases, according to the most rigorous long-term study to date of so-called nicotine replacement therapy. The study, published Monday in the journal Tobacco Control, included nearly 800 people trying to quit smoking over a period of several years, and is likely to inflame a long-running debate about the value of nicotine alternatives. In medical studies, the products have proved effective, making it easier for people to quit, at least in the short term. Those earlier, more encouraging findings were the basis for federal guidelines that recommended the products for smoking cessation. But in surveys, smokers who have used the over-the-counter products, either as part of a program or on their own, have reported little benefit. The new study followed one group of smokers to see whether nicotine replacement affected their odds of kicking the habit over time. It did not, even if they also received counseling with the nicotine replacement. The market for nicotine replacement products has taken off in recent years, rising to more than $800 million annually in 2007 from $129 million in 1991. The products were approved for over-the-counter sale in 1997, and many state Medicaid programs cover at least one of them. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16230 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By Lauren F. Friedman More than 100 years ago Ivan Pavlov famously observed that a dog salivated not only when fed but also on hearing a stimulus it associated with food. Since then, scientists have discovered many other seemingly autonomous processes that can be trained with sensory stimuli—including, most recently, our immune system. Researchers have long been able to train an animal’s immune system to respond to a nonpathogen stimulus. Pavlov’s students even did so in the early 20th century, but the famous dogs overshadowed their work. Then, in the 1970s, researchers trained rats and mice to associate a taste, such as sugar water, with an immunosuppressive drug. They found that after repeated conditioning, ingest­-ing the sugar water alone could tamp down the animals’ immune response. In 2002 a small study showed that the effect could be replicated in humans—at least on a onetime basis. By then, this training had already been used to prolong the survival of rats with heart transplants and slow the progression of lupus, arthritis and other autoimmune disorders in lab animals. But could human immune systems be trained to mimic a drug again and again? “If it can be done only once, that’s a very nice phenom­enon for understanding the relation between the brain and the immune system,” says Manfred Schedlowski, a medical psychologist at the University of Duisberg-Essen in Germany and a co-author of the 2002 paper. “But that’s clinically useless.” Last year Schedlowski published a study in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity that aimed to find out whether the trained immunosuppressive response in humans could be sustained. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 16229 - Posted: 01.09.2012

Posted by Sarah Kliff Wired flags a new study that proves many mothers across the country right: For your own sake, you should call home more often. The research comes from Evolution and Human Behavior. It finds that a phone call to mom provides significant stress relief while instant message conversations won’t quell the nerves. The conversations happened after research subjects took a stressful test. As subjects spoke (or typed) with their mothers, the researchers measured changes in levels of cortisol (generally linked to stress) and oxytocin (a hormone linked to pleasure). When subjects talked on the phone, cortisol levels dropped and oxytocin went up. But IMing with Mom looked the same as having no contact at all: The study author tells Wired, “the results suggest that mom’s voice — its tones and intonations and rhythms, known formally as prosodics — trigger soothing effects, rather than what she specifically says.” To summarize in non-chart form: Call your mother! © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Stress; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16228 - Posted: 01.09.2012

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS Though Shani Gofman had been teased for being fat since the fourth grade, she had learned to deal with it. She was a B student and in the drama club at school. She had good friends and a boyfriend she had met through Facebook. She even showed off her curves in spandex leggings and snug shirts. When her pediatrician, Dr. Senya Vayner, first mentioned weight-loss surgery, Ms. Gofman was 17, still living with her parents in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, her bedroom decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars because she was afraid of the dark. There was no question, at 5-foot-1 and more than 250 pounds, she was overweight. But she resisted, saying she could diet. “I’ll lose weight,” Ms. Gofman assured her doctor. Dr. Vayner said, prophetically, “It’s not your fault, but you’re not going to be able to do it.” Along with the obesity epidemic in America has come an explosion in weight-loss surgery, with about 220,000 operations a year — a sevenfold leap in a decade, according to industry figures — costing more than $6 billion a year. And the newest frontier is young patients like Ms. Gofman, who allowed The New York Times to follow her for a year as she had the operation and then embarked on a quest to lose weight, navigating challenges to her morale, her self-image and her relationships with family members and friends. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16227 - Posted: 01.09.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams Sit a dog in front of a television screen, and it may not always look intently at what it sees. But show a person on that screen who looks directly at the dog and says "hello," and the canine will pay attention. In fact, a new study shows that a dog will go so far as to follow the gaze of the human on screen when he or she looks to one side or the other—something not even chimps can do. Researchers already knew that dogs were attuned to human communication signals. In addition to their obvious facility at learning commands, dogs, like young children, can signal where a human puts an object if the human feigns ignorance, even if it's been moved, and they follow the direction of our finger when we point at things, a task chimps fail at. But are dogs capable of following more subtle cues, such as our shifting gaze? To find out, cognitive scientist Ernő Téglás of the Central European University in Budapest adapted a technique that had previously been used only on children. In one example of the test, a child watches a woman on a video screen who has toys on either side of her. The woman then either looks straight toward the camera and says "hello" in a high-pitched voice known to engage children or looks downward and says "hello" in a more dull, low-pitched voice. Then the person looks to the toy on one side or the other for 5 seconds. Whether a child also looks at the toy on the same side is recorded. To modify this experiment for dogs, Téglás substituted empty plastic pots for the children's toys and had a stranger on the screen say "hi, dog!" in one of the two intonations while looking at the camera or downward. As each dog watches the video, a specially programmed camera below the television screen follows, and records, the dog's eye movements. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16226 - Posted: 01.07.2012

Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times Dylan Catania is almost 2. He likes pasta with red sauce, playing catch or wrestling with his dad, sitting on slick leather chairs at Starbucks to greet strangers and holding his breath underwater. He does not like baby food, sitting in his car seat or taking naps. When he is really, really happy, Dylan likes to sit on the ground, crack a smile exposing his fledgling teeth and spin like a top. The faint scar on his right temple is invisible under a cap of downy brown hair. He was born with half of his brain enlarged and malformed, a disorder known as hemimegalencephaly that occurs in fewer than two dozen births a year. When he was nearly 3 months old, neurosurgeons at UCLA severed the right hemisphere of Dylan's brain from the left in a seven-hour hour operation, radical surgery to stop him from suffering as many as a hundred seizures each day. Neurologists who see him now, scooting across the floor propelled by his right hand, recognize the telltale "hemi scoot." His family and friends see a determined boy who has grown not only stronger but also more trusting, empathetic and brave. He can say more than two dozen words. He does not cry for his mother at the preschool near his family's home in the Beverly Glen neighborhood of Los Angeles, but if another child wails, he joins in solidarity. He favors classical music and anything Elmo, waving his right hand to the beat, but has been known to watch in awe as his sister and cousins groove along to their Wii. He has yet to make peace with his left side, slightly paralyzed by the surgery, but if his parents ask nicely, he will kiss his left hand, known as "lefty." © 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Laterality; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16225 - Posted: 01.07.2012

By Gary Stix High-school and college teachers always entreat their charges to forgo the cramming. Studying bit by bit over the course of a semester is the way to go. A study published online in Nature Neuroscience on December 25 not only appears to demonstrate the biological underpinnings of this pedagogical truism. It actually goes one step further to suggest a means of optimizing training intervals, an insight that could, in theory, translate into strategies for committing to memory the molecular structure of maitotoxin or a Chinese ideogram. The study is not about to spur a round of venture financing for the next start-up to launch a new generation of brain-training games. At the moment, it is still just a proof of principle in Aplysia californica, the sea slugs that are star animals in the laboratories of neuroscientists. Eric Kandel, the avuncular regular on the Charlie Rose Brain Series, actually rode the back of Aplysia to a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his research on the biochemical processes underlying memory. In this new study, Kandel's former student, John H. Byrne, who heads the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, has brought a new twist to the original learning method developed in Kandel's lab—a technique that consisted of shocking slug tails at regular intervals and then seeing whether the animals overreacted later when receiving another zap, a sign that they remembered their tormentors all too well. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16224 - Posted: 01.07.2012

By Katherine Harmon Stephen Hawking turns 70 on Sunday, beating the odds of a daunting diagnosis by nearly half a century. The famous theoretical physicist has helped to bring his ideas about black holes and quantum gravity to a broad public audience. For much of his time in the public eye, though, he has been confined to a wheelchair by a form of the motor-neuron disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). And since 1985 he has had to speak through his trademark computer system—which he operates with his cheek—and have around-the-clock care. But his disease seems hardly to have slowed him down. Hawking spent 30 years as a full professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge. And he is currently the director of research at the school's Center for Theoretical Cosmology. But like his mind, Hawking's illness seems to be singular. Most patients with ALS—also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, for the famous baseball player who succumbed to the disease—are diagnosed after the age of 50 and die within five years of their diagnosis. Hawking's condition was first diagnosed when he was 21, and he was not expected to see his 25th birthday. Why has Hawking lived so long with this malady when so many other people die so soon after diagnosis? We spoke with Leo McCluskey, an associate professor of neurology and medical director of the ALS Center at the University of Pennsylvania, to find out more about the disease and why it has spared Hawking and his amazing brain. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 16223 - Posted: 01.07.2012

by Chelsea Whyte When it comes to selecting mates, hawkfish keep their options open. The flamboyantly coloured reef dwellers start life as females but can transform into males after maturing. Many marine animals do this, but these fickle fish have a rare trick up their fins: they can change back when the situation suits. Tatsuru Kadota and colleagues from Hiroshima University in Higashi-Hiroshima, Japan, have observed reverse sex changes in wild hawkfish for the first time in the subtropical reefs around Kuchino-Erabu Island in southern Japan. Hawkfish live in harems, with one dominant male mating with several females. Kadota's team studied 29 hawkfish and found that when it comes to sex change, the size of the harem matters. If a male hawkfish took on many females, one of the two largest females would change sex and take over half of the harem, mating as a male. Conversely, if that new male hawkfish lost a few females to other harems and was challenged by a larger male, it reverted to mating as a female, instead of wasting precious energy fighting a losing battle. "The ability to undergo bidirectional sex change maximises an individual's reproductive value," Kadota says. "Because of our frame of reference, we think of gender being fated one way or another," says fish ecologist Scott Heppell of Oregon State University in Corvallis. "These animals are a lot more flexible than some species." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: ADHD; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16222 - Posted: 01.07.2012

Caitlin Stier, video intern Turn your coffee table into a fish tank with this design, created by John Leung, based on an illusion known as the moiré effect. The interference points in the pattern built into the table trick your eye into perceiving motion beneath the table. The moiré effect consists of two overlapping transparent patterns offset from one another. As the layers move new patterns form, like the folded layers of a nylon curtain moving in a breeze. The fish rug and glass coffee table serve as the layers in this design. The pieces work together to passively animate the carp. The static design only requires the observer to tilt his head to perceive the motion. Leung's goal in creating the piece named the magic carp-pet was to create an artificial fish tank that brings life to the room. He calls illusions a part of his "design DNA." In his work, he often seeks to convert flat illusions into 3D objects with the added dimension of experience. "Optical illusions have always fascinated me because they test the limit of the human visual perception," he says. "They pose the question: is what we are conceiving really the reality?" © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16221 - Posted: 01.07.2012