James Cavanaugh and Robert H. Wurtz
In this week's Journal, Cavanaugh and Wurtz dissect a curious phenomenon, "change blindness." We all, perhaps unknowingly, experience this effect hundreds of times each day. For example, when a new feature appears in our visual field, our attention shifts. During the eye movements (saccades) that redirect central vision, we are blind to changes in the visual scene. The authors hypothesized that a oordinated mechanism is responsible for saccadic movement and attentional shifts.
2. Testing Transepithelial Prion Protein Transport In Vitro
Ravi Shankar Mishra, Subhabrata Basu, Yaping Gu, Xiu Luo, Wen-Quan Zou, Richa Mishra, Ruliang Li, Shu G. Chen, Pierluigi Gambetti, Hisashi Fujioka, and Neena Singh
The discovery of the "mad cow" variant of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) as a foodborne illness not only created a worldwide scare but also focused attention on the mechanisms of transmission of the infective agent, the scrapie prion protein (PrPSc). Mishra et al. were surprised to find PrPSc associated with ferritin, a protein clearly abundant in muscle tissue associated with food.