On the last day of every month SuperForester Julius presents a monthly recap of the most amazing happenings in the world of science, technology and computing. Julius is currently in his last year of High school and plans on enrolling the Applied Physics bachelor this September.
Enhance Your Brain Using Colors
If you once found yourself looking for a boost of creativity or a longer attention span don’t search further. A team of psychologists from the University of British Columbia discovered that looking at a specific color for a while can enhance your brain’s performance. Looking at red for example catalyzes your performance when carrying out tasks that require attention. And taking a gander at blue enhances your creativity.
But why does this happen? One of the team’s scientists, Juliet Zhu, explains: “Think about red, and what comes to mind: stop lights, stop signs, danger, ambulances. People want to avoid those things, and that’s why they do better on detail-oriented tasks. Blue is the color of the sky, the ocean, safety. When their environment is safe, people are more explorative.”
In the original study the scientists say that red evokes an avoiding motivation while blue causes an approaching one.
So the next time I’ve to make an exam I’ll grab some red paint and paint everything red, and if someone wants me to go creative, I’ll do the same with blue paint.
Bikers Illusion
As a kid you probably had your first encounter with the fascinating world of optical illusions. You know, MC Escher or a line that doesn’t look straight but is straight though. The List Universe compiled a nice list of the best ever.
But Escher died in the 70s of the last century, and the last time a new (real good) optical illusion was discovered must be a few years ago. Now there’s some good news for the illusion fanatics among us. A psychologist named Michael Masson was eating his lunch in the park when he watched a biker passing a fence. It seemed like the biker was riding a bumpy road, but when Masson inspected the road it seemed perfectly straight. Take a look at this animation if you’re not sure you fully understand it. The above two ‘lanes’ represent the view from nearby and the lanes at the bottom represent far away.
It seems that, from far away, a biker follows the line of the fence. But when observing from nearby the biker seems to do the opposite.
Masson shared his findings with a few colleagues and together they published a paper about it.
Bye, Bye Alzheimer
Alzheimer is a nasty disease, especially because it also heavily effects the people surrounding a patient. But thanks to a tremendous breakthrough at the University of California at the department of neurosciences this soon might be over. Lead by Mark Tuszynski a team of neuroscientists discovered that the protein BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) can cure the early effects Alzheimer has on a patient’s memory.
Injections of this ‘growth factor’ into mice, rat and monkey brains showed that the neural areas where Alzheimer begins got cured. But what does Alzheimer look like anyway?
On the left side there’s a normal brain, and on the right side there’s one undergoing Alzheimer’s. It looks a bit shrunken, but apparantly an injection of BDNF can slow down or even stop this process. In regard to his research Tuszynski claims to have seen less dead braincells and a neural-connection-density that was about 25% higher then before. In normal English this means that the brain works better.
The neuroscientists say that trials could start within two years(!)
That rounds it up for February’s Most Amazing Science. Of course, not everything could have been covered. But if you feel like I’ve missed out on something enormous feel free to share your scientific news of last month in the comments section. And if you feel the urge to share your thoughts about anything that got covered the comments section is opened too!
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