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Funding Opportunity 2012 NIH Director’s Early Independence Awards
Letters of Intent due by December 30, 2011 Announcing a funding opportunity for the NIH Director's Early Independence Awards: For junior investigators wishing to “skip the post-doc” and immediately begin independent research Eligible candidates must be within one year of receipt of terminal research degree or completion of clinical residency Only up to two applications per institution (as defined by unique DUNS number) permitted All areas of research relevant to the mission of NIH welcome Budgets may be up to $250,000 in direct costs per year for up to five years The deadline for submitting Early Independence Award applications is January 30, 2012 with Letters of Intent due by December 30, 2…
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False Confessions May Lead to More Errors in Evidence, a Study Shows
A man with a low IQ confesses to a gruesome crime. Confession in hand, the police send his blood to a lab to confirm that his blood type matches the semen found at the scene. It does not. The forensic examiner testifies later that one blood type can change to another with disintegration. This is untrue. The newspaper reports the story, including the time the man says the murder took place. Two witnesses tell the police they saw the woman alive after that. The police send them home, saying they “must have seen a ghost.” After 16 years in prison, the falsely convicted man is exonerated by DNA evidence. How could this happen?
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Solved: How Optical Illusion Turns Circles Into Hexagons
LiveScience: When you stare at a colorful image and then turn to look at a neutral background, a "ghost image" appears in contrasting colors. Now, new research finds that a similar illusion occurs with shapes, turning circles into hexagons and vice versa. Though similar, the two visual phenomena have different causes. While the color optical illusion, occurs because of tired-out light-sensing cells in the eye, the shape afterimage illusion arises from the visual parts of the brain, said study researcher Hiroyuki Ito, of Kyushu University in Japan. Read the full story: LiveScience
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The Science of Success
The Atlantic: In 2004, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, a professor of child and family studies at Leiden University, started carrying a video camera into homes of families whose 1-to-3-year-olds indulged heavily in the oppositional, aggressive, uncooperative, and aggravating behavior that psychologists call “externalizing”: whining, screaming, whacking, throwing tantrums and objects, and willfully refusing reasonable requests. Staple behaviors in toddlers, perhaps. But research has shown that toddlers with especially high rates of these behaviors are likely to become stressed, confused children who fail academically and socially in school, and become antisocial and unusually aggressive adults.
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Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?
The New York Times: Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote “It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion.” More recently, the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard declared , “We certainly don’t have free will. Not in the sense we think.” And in June, the neuroscientist Sam Harris claimed , “You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will.
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The Brain Acts Fast To Reappraise Angry Faces
If you tell yourself that someone who’s being mean is just having a bad day—it’s not about you—you may actually be able to stave off bad feelings, according to a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Having someone angry at you isn’t pleasant. A strategy commonly suggested in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is to find another way to look at the angry person. For example, you might tell yourself that they’ve probably just lost their dog or gotten a cancer diagnosis and are taking it out on you. Stanford researchers Jens Blechert, Gal Sheppes, Carolina Di Tella, Hants Williams, and James J.