Part of the “Research Team” presenting in Dalian, China taking a tour of the lovely surrounds!

Here is what I am reading today:

“The biggest and brightest full moon of the year graces the sky early Sunday as our celestial neighbor swings closer to Earth than usual.

While the moon will appear 14 percent larger normal, skywatchers won’t be able to notice the difference with the naked eye. Still, astronomers say it’s worth looking up and appreciating the cosmos.”

“Researchers have found elevated antibodies to gluten proteins of wheat in children with autism in comparison to those without autism. The results also indicated an association between the elevated antibodies and the presence of gastrointestinal symptoms in the affected children.”

“This is one of the findings of Anthony Little from the University of Stirling and Benedict Jones from the University of Glasgow that will be published in the British Journal of Psychology today, Friday 21 June 2013.

The study investigated whether considering partners for long-term or short-term relationships would affect men’s preference for different women’s faces.”

“In a paper published June 7, in Science, Salk researcher Dennis O’Leary and his colleagues have shown that genes alone do not determine how the cerebral cortex grows into separate functional areas. Instead, they show that input from the thalamus, the main switching station in the brain for sensory information, is crucially required.”

“People can plan strategic movements to several different targets at the same time, even when they see far fewer targets than are actually present, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

““Darkness increases freedom from constraints, which in turn promotes creativity,” report  Anna Steidle of the University of Stuttgart and Lioba Werth of the University of Hohenheim. A dimly lit environment, they explain in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, “elicits a feeling of freedom, self-determination, and reduced inhibition,” all of which encourage innovative thinking.”

“Early neuroimaging studies using Cyberball suggested that social rejection activated the pain matrix, as identified in studies of physical pain. However, these early studies were characterized by small sample sizes. Our statistical multi-level kernel density analysis (MKDA) of Cyberball neuroimaging studies with 244 participants fails to support the claim that social rejection operates on the same pain matrix as nociceptive stimuli, questioning whether social pain is more figurative or literal.”