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GLOBAL NEWS The brain registers subliminal messages, but we are often unable to recall them consciously. To investigate, the team recruited 34 experienced practitioners of Zen meditation and randomly assigned them to either a meditation group or a control group. The meditation group was asked to meditate for 20 minutes in a session led by a professional Zen master. The control group was asked merely to relax for 20 minutes. The volunteers were then asked 20 questions, each with three or four correct answers—for instance, "Name one of the four seasons". Just before the subjects saw the question on a computer screen, one potential answer—such as "Spring"—flashed up for a subliminal 16 milliseconds. The meditation group gave 6.8 answers, on average, that matched the subliminal words, whereas the control group gave just 4.9. Strick thinks that the explanation lies in the difference between what the brain is paying attention to and what we are conscious of. Meditators are potentially accessing more of what the brain has paid attention to than non-meditators, she says. (Source: New Scientist, 7 June 2012) themselves into precisely designed shapes, including letters and emoticons. The research was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Wyss Institute. (Source: ScienceDaily, 30 May 2012, http://tinyurl.com/7xdyole) these were based on international studies and did not directly link the errors with the causes of death. {Editor's Note: Deaths and injuries from adverse drug reactions, surgical mistakes, or catching a new disease or infection, etc., are not included in that study. The true picture is much worse. ] (Source: The Independent, 13 July 2012, http://tinyurl.com/7ydzzsc) UK HOSPITAL ERRORS KILL 1,000 PATIENTS A MONTH most 12,000 patients are dying needlessly in National Health Service (NHS) hospitals every year because of basic errors by medica staff, according to the largest and most detailed study into hospita deaths ever performed in the United Kingdom. The researchers, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropica Medicine, and colleagues found tha something went wrong with the care of 13 per cent of the patients who died in hospitals. An error caused death in 5.2 per cent of these— equivalent to 11,859 preventable deaths in NHS hospitals. The study was based on analysis of 1,000 deaths at 10 NHS trusts during 2009. Previous estimates suggested that up to 40,000 deaths a year are caused by errors in care, but SIXTH SENSE TECHNOLOGY COMING TO THE BATTLEFIELD cientists in the USA are beginning to build technologies that would give every soldier the technological equivalent of the "sixth sense”. This new military technology alled Sentinel (SystEm for Notification of Threats Inspired by Neurally Enabled Learning) is being touted as the world's first "cognitive- neural" binocular threat-warning arintaes as system. These devices exploit what neuroscientists call the P300, a wave of brain activity that signifies an unconscious recognition of a visual object. The P300 can be thought of as the biological basis of the sixth sense. (Source: BBC.com, 5 July 2012, http://tinyurl.com/dxag76a) ™( CITY CITY )=( COMPUTER \weib CENTRAL EAST \ CURSOR Ley + ey = - ic a "See, somerville NANODEVICES BUILT USING DNA BUILDING BLOCKS Dee is best known as a keeper of genetic information. But in an emerging field of science known as DNA nanotechnology, it is being explored for use as a material with which to build tiny programmable structures for diverse applications. Researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University have developed a method for building complex nanostructures out of short synthetic strands of DNA. Called single-stranded tiles (SSTs), these interlocking DNA "building blocks", akin to Lego, can be programmed to assemble NEXUS ¢ 9 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2012 www.nexusmagazine.com