Null and Noteworthy: Busting biomarkers; going after GABA; reproducibility illusion

Going round in circles: shape effects in the Ebbinghaus illusion.

The Ebbinghaus illusion has traditionally been considered as either a sensory or a cognitive illusion, or some combination of these two. Cognitive contrast explanations take support from the way the illusion varies with the degree of shape similarity between the test and inducing elements; we show, however, that contour interaction explanations may account for this result too. We therefore test...

Noteworthy New Titles

Long-term reproducibility of GABA magnetic resonance spectroscopy

Recent findings suggest that cortical gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA) levels may provide a surrogate marker for a number of psychiatric and neurological conditions, as well as behavioural traits. However, the natural variability of GABA levels in the human brain over long periods of time (>8 days) has not yet been studied. The purpose of this work was to investigate the long-term variability of ...

Busting myths about guidelines.

Noteworthy professional news.

When a 359-g baby girl was born at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in 1994, the parents wondered whether other infants that small had survived in other hospitals. Their question led to an attempt to collect reports of survivors with birth weights of less than 400 g from the medical literature and lay media and the Tiniest Babies Registry was born. To date, the registry has collecte...