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Magic Revealed: Cups Trick Found to Be More Effective Than Thought
Neuroscientist Stephen Macknik and colleagues have determined that the famous illusion in which balls seemingly jump from cup to cup manipulates our minds more with distraction than with social cues
By Charles Q. Choi and Inside Science News Service
This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. http://www.insidescience.org/
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Neuroscientists are studying classic "magic" tricks, like the classic "cups and balls" illusion. Image: Flickr/Wahlander
(ISNS) -- Scientists analyzing how magicians Penn & Teller perform one of the oldest known illusions now reveal that some aspects of the magic trick are even more effective at manipulating audiences than the magicians predicted.
These findings not only shed light on basic processes such as cognition, but could help advance the art of magic, researchers suggested.
In recent years, neuroscientists have increasingly been analyzing magicians' performances to gain insights on the human mind.
"We realized that magicians were among the best people at manipulating attention and awareness, far better than scientists," said cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Macknik, director of the laboratory of behavioral neurobiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. "So we've been poaching their techniques, bringing them back to the labs to increase our rate of discovery."
The latest magic trick Macknik and his colleagues investigated is the classic cups and balls illusion. Examples ascribed to ancient Roman conjurers date back to 3 B.C., and some claim it goes back further to ancient Egypt.
The illusion nowadays commonly involves three upside-down cups and three balls, Magicians can make the balls seemingly jump from cup to cup, disappear from one cup and appear in another, turn into other items and so on. (The modern swindler's version is the shell game.)
To learn more about this illusion, the researchers enlisted the aid of the famous duo Penn & Teller. Seven volunteers watched 10-12-second-long video clips of Teller performing the illusion in front of a NOVA scienceNOW TV crew at the duo's theater in Las Vegas.
The balls in the illusion are typically brightly colored, while the cups are usually opaque. Penn & Teller practice a version with three opaque and then three transparent cups.
"It's a great act, and the trick still works even with transparent cups, because they're just that good — people still can't follow all the movements and see how the trick is done," Macknik said.
"I've seen them do this trick for more than 20 years," said vision scientist Flip Phillips at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "The best part of the whole routine is that, despite the fact that they are telling you what they are doing — they're showing you what they're doing — you're still amazed because you just can't fight the deception."
Teller devised this variation while fiddling with an empty water glass and wadded-up paper napkins for balls at a Midwestern diner. He turned the glass upside down and put a paper ball on top, then tilted the glass so that the ball fell into his other hand. The falling ball was so compelling that it drew his own attention away from his other hand, which was deftly and secretly loading a second ball under the glass. Teller found that the sleight happened so quickly he himself did not realize he had loaded the cup. He surmised he missed it because the falling ball captured his attention.
In the experiments, the volunteers reported when they saw balls get removed from, or placed under, cups by pressing buttons. The researchers also used cameras pointed at the eyes of the volunteers to track their gazes.
The researchers found that while the falling ball did draw audience attention, other aspects of the trick were actually stronger at making the illusion work. For instance, audiences were fooled more often when the magician attempted to drop a ball that was stuck to a cup.
"A lot of times the intuitions we have about the way things work aren't the way things work," said Phillips, who did not take part in this research. "This isn't to put down Teller — Teller's intuition is good. There is research we did on a famous sleight of hand known as the French drop where Teller's intuition on how to sell the trick is perfectly correct."
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Re: Science News
Hundreds Reported Injured in Blast from Meteor Strike over Russia [video]
By John Matson | February 15, 2013
A meteor fireball lit up the morning sky over Chelyabinsk in central Russia, producing a shock wave that shattered windows and injured an estimated 500 1,000 people.** Although much of the parent object likely burned up in the atmosphere, Russian authorities say that several meteorite fragments have already been recovered, according to the Interfax news agency.
A preliminary analysis posted to the Web site of the Russian Academy of Sciences estimates that ...
More on: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...AT_BS_20130215
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About the Author: John Matson is an associate editor at Scientific American focusing on space, physics and mathematics. Follow on Twitter @jmtsn.
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Baby may be cured of HIV
Only viral traces remain after prompt treatment of newborn, suggesting no working virus is left in the girl’s body
By Nathan Seppa
Web edition: March 4, 2013
An infant born with HIV has cleared her body of the virus with the help of three medications started shortly after birth, scientists reported March 3 at the Conference on Retroviral and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.
On its face, the case looks like the first time an infant has ever wiped out the pathogen as well as the first time a person has been cured with drugs. The virus was thwarted in the girl, now 2 1/2 years old, with the help of more drugs than a newborn usually gets.
But some researchers caution that it remains unclear whether the virus had taken hold and infected the child or whether the child merely carried the virus from her mother.
More on: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gene...e_cured_of_HIV
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Commercial Space Race Intensifies as Antares Rocket Creeps Up on Falcon 9
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket currently is NASA's cargo hauler to the International Space Station, but Orbital Sciences is set for an April test flight of its Antares rocket
By Devin Powell and Nature magazine
The Falcon 9 rocket, which made its fifth successful flight on 1 March, has stolen the spotlight in the commercial space race. Built by SpaceX, a young company based in Hawthorne, California, the rocket has become NASA’s choice for hauling cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). But it may soon have competition from a rocket that has kept a low profile (see ‘Battle of the rockets’).
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Melting Arctic Ice Will Make Way for More Ships--and More Species Invasions
A new study shows immense increases in shipping are likely over the North Pole and Arctic Ocean in the coming years, alerting scientists who study invasive species
By Lisa Palmer
The rare ships that have ventured through the harsh, icebound Arctic Ocean require reinforced hulls and ice-breaking bows that allow them to plow through dense ice as much as two meters deep, and face hazardous conditions in remote locations for long periods of time. Arctic sea ice now is melting so rapidly each summer due to global warming, however, that ships without ice-breaking hulls will be able to cross previously inaccessible parts of the Arctic Ocean by 2050. And light-weight ships equipped to cut through one meter of ice will be able to travel over the North Pole regularly in late summer, according to a new study published March 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Plus.
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Re: Science News
Atacama Large Millimeter Array
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...%28logo%29.jpg
Organisation Multi-national
Location Llano de Chajnantor Observatory
Atacama Desert, Chile
Coordinates 23°01′9.42″S 67°45′11.44″W
Altitude 5,058.7 m (16597 ft)
Telescope style at least 50 identical 12 m reflectors connected by fiber-optic cables
Website Official ALMA site
The Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA, Spanish and Portuguese word for "soul") is an array of radio telescopes in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. Since a high and dry site is crucial to millimeter wavelength operations, the array is being constructed on the Chajnantor plateau at 5000 metres altitude. Consisting of 66 12-meter and 7-meter diameter radio telescopes observing at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths, ALMA is expected to provide insight on star birth during the early universe and detailed imaging of local star and planet formation.
ALMA is an international partnership between Europe, the United States, Canada, East Asia and the Republic of Chile. Costing more than a billion US dollars, it is the most expensive ground-based telescope currently under construction. ALMA began scientific observations in the second half of 2011 and the first images were released to the press on 3 October 2011. The project is scheduled to be fully operational by March 2013.
March 13th will mark the inauguration of the ALMA Telescope in northern Chile. And EarthSky will be covering the event live and on site.
EarthSky was recently selected to attend the inauguration of the world’s most powerful telescope as part of a small group of journalists and media representatives. Stay updated through Facebook and on our website.
Inauguration link: http://www.almaobservatory.org/inauguration/
Learn about ALMA in: http://earthsky.org/space/worlds-big...alma-telescope
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Re: Science News
Astronomer Locates Previously Unseen Neighbor to the Sun
By John Matson | March 11, 2013 |
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When NASA launched the WISE satellite in 2009, astronomers hoped it would be able to spot loads of cool, dim objects known as brown dwarfs. Bigger than a planet, a brown dwarf is not quite a star, either—it is too small to sustain the nuclear fusion reactions that turn hydrogen to helium. But it may burn to some degree, using a heavy isotope of hydrogen called deuterium as fusion fuel.
Because brown dwarfs are so dim, it is entirely possible that some of them lie very close to the sun—as close as any known star—and have yet to be discovered. But more than three years after WISE (short for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer) launched, the map of the sun’s immediate vicinity has remained largely unchanged. Until now.
About the Author: John Matson is an associate editor at Scientific American focusing on space, physics and mathematics. Follow on Twitter @jmtsn.
More on: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...CPHYS_20130314
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Deus ex Cicada: Are Predatory Bird Populations Influenced by Cicadas’ Odd Life Cycles?
Bird population crashes seem to correlate with the strange 13-year and 17-year cycles of periodical cicadas. Some researchers suggest that the dissonant insects actually orchestrate the behavior of their predators
By Charles Q. Choi
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As the first day of spring approaches a scientific mystery will soon return with a roar— the 2013 return of the east coast b rood of cicadas, or Brood II. Now a team of scientists hint they may have a solution as to why this brood and its fellows bizarrely emerge only after lulls more than a decade long—to control their surroundings in ways that may lead to crashes in numbers of predatory birds.
Periodical cicadas are the longest-lived insects known. After childhoods spent underground living off the juices of tree roots, broods of red-eyed adults surface in precise cycles— 13 years long in the southeastern U.S. and 17 years long in the northeastern part of the country.
More on: http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...dd-life-cycles
