News Briefs

The Simpsons Are Back!

On Friday October 7, Twentieth Century Fox announced that it renewed The Simpsons for its twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth seasons.

According to CNN, The Simpsons, known as television’s longest-running scripted show, has been on the air since the 1980s. It began its origins as an animated segment on the “Tracey Ullman Show“ and graduated to an individual series in 1989. The renowned Time magazine named The Simpsons the best show of the 20th century. The show, created by Matt Groening, has gone on to win 27 Emmys in its 22 years on the air.

The unforgettable Simpson characters have been household names (and maybe members of your household) for many years. The show has simultaneously been an active participant and observant of American culture and life. It has also been the precursor to the current animated sensation Family Guy and countless “cartoons“ that have followed in its footsteps. To hear that The Simpsons was coming to its final season would have been a sad piece of news to receive. Yet all good things must eventually come to an end.

Fortunately, this is not the case. Loyal fans, let us rejoice!

- Kerri Byam

Image Source: http://assets.huluim.com/shows/key_art_the_simpsons.jpg
Article Source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/07/showbiz/simpsons-renewed/

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A New Target Audience: The Canine Consumer

When you turn on the television, you probably see advertisements for sugary cereals that are geared towards children or the latest medicines that are geared towards older adults. However, there is a new consumer that is now being taken into account.

In Switzerland, Nestle, a popular pet food company, recently launched the first television commercial that uses dogs as the target audience. The commercial utilizes a high-frequency tone to capture the animal’s interest, since a dog’s hearing is more acute than that of a human. It is proven that dogs can perceive frequencies that go beyond the reach of the human ear.

In the United States, experts in pet behavior completed research concerning what engages dogs’ attention. Nestle used this information to make a commercial for one of its products—Beneful dog food.

The commercial was shown on Austrian television a few weeks ago. It uses noises that appeal to dogs. These include a tone akin to a dog whistle, a “squeak” similar to the sound of a dog’s toy, and a high-pitched “ping.”

Nestle states that this commercial was produced after a highly successful campaign in Germany that introduced “sniffable” posters to draw in dogs’ interest.

Check out the commercial below:



- Kerry Gertner

Image Source: http://www.nestle.com/Common/NestleImages/PublishingImages/Media/News-Features/2011-September/headline_ad_for_dogs.jpg
Article Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44737296/ns/business-us_business/#.TosRa34cuX8
Video Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTF3Gc22va4&feature=related

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Leaning Tower of London

The impressive Big Ben that keeps all of London on time has been slowly tilting to the side for many years, but the tilt has only now become visible to the naked eye. Engineers have concluded that decades of work done around the base of the structure, such as a sewer system built in the 1860s and an underground parking lot built for the Members of Parliament in the 1970s, have all had a detrimental effect on Big Ben’s foundation. The top of the tower is 1ft 5in away from the vertical and will continue to keep tilting by 0.04in every year.

It is estimated that in another 4,000 years, Big Ben will reach the same dramatic slope as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. If the architectural integrity is not restored in the years to come, the tower will eventually topple over and come crashing down on the MPs’ offices. However, the tilting tower has already caused cracks in the walls of the House of Commons and homes of other elected officials who live within the immediate area.

As we stand on the precipice of global political change, one of the world’s most well recognized structures has begun to lose its footing, literally “sinking” if you will. Even more ironic is the impending sense of doom it presents for the government officials whose offices rest along its marked trajectory should it ultimately fall. Times are changing, we can feel it, and maybe so can the largest clock in the world.

Do you feel the rush?

- Mira

Article Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8815238/Bong-Big-Ben-becoming-leaning-tower-of-London-say-engineers.html
Image Source: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/09/article-0-0C622596000005DC-189_233x423.jpg

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Are You For Real?

One of memory’s big jobs is to keep straight what actually happened versus what we imagined: whether we said something out loud or to ourselves, whether we locked the door behind us or just thought about locking the door. That ability, a new study found, is linked to the presence of a small fold in the front of the brain, which some people have and others don’t—a finding that could help researchers better understand not only healthy memory, but also disorders like schizophrenia in which the line between the real and the imagined is blurred.

The researchers looked at MRI brain scans of a large group of healthy adults. In particular, they were looking for the paracingulate sulcus or PCS, a fold near the front of the brain. There’s a lot of variability in the PCS: some people have quite distinctive folds, others have barely any. It’s in a part of the brain known to be important in keeping track of reality, which is why the researchers chose to study it. Of the 53 people selected for the study, some had this fold on both sides of their brain, some had it on one side, and some had no fold.

The participants saw some full well-known word pairs (“Jekyll and Hyde”) and some half pairs (“Jekyll and ?”). If they only saw half of a pair, they were asked to imagine the other half (“Hyde”). After each pair or half pair, either the participant or the experimenter said the whole pair aloud.

Once they’d seen all the pairs, the participants were asked two questions about each phrase: Did you see both words of the pair, or just one? And who said the phrase aloud, you or the experimenter? People who didn’t have the fold on either side of their brains did worse on both questions—remembering if something was real or imagined, and remembering who’d done something—than people whose brains had the fold. But they felt as confident in their answers, meaning they didn’t realize they’d been mixing up internal and external events.

Well, I guess there is a fine line between reality and un-reality after all, or shall we say a fine “fold.”

- Ocean Vuong

Image Source: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/files/2011/10/pcs.jpg
Article Source: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com