Westerners and Easterners see the world differently, American view wrong:
Chinese and American people see the world differently – literally. While Americans focus on the central objects of photographs, Chinese individuals pay more attention to the image as a whole, according to psychologists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, US.
“There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and East Asian people have contrasting world-views,” explains Richard Nisbett, who carried out the study. “Americans break things down analytically, focusing on putting objects into categories and working out what rules they should obey,” he says.
By contrast, East Asians have a more holistic philosophy, looking at objects in relation to the whole. “Figuratively, Americans see things in black and white, while East Asians see more shades of grey,” says Nisbett. “We wanted to devise an experiment to see if that translated to a literal difference in what they actually see.”
Researchers conclude that Eastern people have more nuanced, gray world views while Americans are black and white loving sots. The Europeans tended to see the world in more of the mauve area. All the results suggest what everyone has always suspected: Americans are neither Eastern nor actually European, being instead derived from a race of militant aliens.
Frankly, I was very surprised and interested to hear this result. I had never heard the idea. It must have only been discussed in obscure sources like the News.
A Family Reunion for Tuberculosis Bugs:
In an effort to reunite the MTBC with its extended family, M.-Cristina Gutierrez of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and colleagues analyzed tuberculosis bacteria from patients in eastern Africa. Based on the DNA sequences of seven genes, they divided the bacteria into eight groups that were significantly different from each other and from the MTBC strains. The newly characterized groups and the MTBC together comprise a single species, which the authors named Mycobacterium prototuberculosis.
Although the MTBC strains appear to be extraordinarily genetically stable today, the DNA comparison indicates that they once traded genes with their African relatives. So the whole family must have lived in the same place at some point.
Most of the members of the Tuberculosis family that attended the reunion concluded that the prototuberculosis part of the clan were really just a bunch of inbred yokels and in the future would not be invited to family gatherings.
Article comments