- ‘Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’ Rings In Victory For ABC With 30% Audience Increase, 22.2M Tune In To Ball Drop Deadline
- ‘Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’ 2024 Special Delivers 22.2 Million Total Viewers, Up 30% From Previous Year Variety
- New Year’s Eve live stream 2024: How to watch the NYC ball drop, Times Square performances free Fast Company
- Wait, Does Ryan Seacrest Get Paid to Host ‘Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’? Good Housekeeping
- Cardi B and LL Cool J Added to ‘Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve’ Performance Lineup PEOPLE
Tag Archives: tune
Ndume Defends Rendition Of Tinubu’s Campaign Tune In Senate | Politics Today – Channels Television
- Ndume Defends Rendition Of Tinubu’s Campaign Tune In Senate | Politics Today Channels Television
- UPDATED: Tinubu presented “empty” boxes of 2024 budget to National Assembly — Lawmaker Premium Times
- N/Assembly passes N27.5trn budget for second reading 2 days after Tinubu’s presentation Daily Trust
- ‘Not a big deal’ – Ndume defends rendition of Tinubu’s campaign tune in NASS Vanguard
- Lawmakers singing Tinubu’s campaign song not a big deal -Ndume Punch Newspapers
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Box Office: ‘Hunger Games’ Prequel and ‘Napoleon’ Rule Thanksgiving as ‘Wish’ Sings Out of Tune – Hollywood Reporter
- Box Office: ‘Hunger Games’ Prequel and ‘Napoleon’ Rule Thanksgiving as ‘Wish’ Sings Out of Tune Hollywood Reporter
- Thanksgiving Box Office: ‘Hunger Games’ Pulls Ahead of Disney’s ‘Wish,’ ‘Napoleon’ Outpacing Projections Variety
- ‘Napoleon’ Rides To $21M Global Through Thursday; Now Looking To Conquer $70M+ WW Bow – International Box Office Deadline
- Hollywood Struggles Over Holiday With Disney And Apple Duds The Daily Wire
- Thanksgiving Box Office Battle Heats Up: Disney’s ‘Wish’ Struggling Against ‘Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ Variety
- View Full Coverage on Google News
2023 NFL Draft: Best fits for mid-round QB prospects, including Stetson Bennett, Max Duggan, Clayton Tune – CBS Sports
- 2023 NFL Draft: Best fits for mid-round QB prospects, including Stetson Bennett, Max Duggan, Clayton Tune CBS Sports
- NFL draft might see four quarterbacks taken with first four picks The Washington Post
- Big Ten Quarterbacks 2023: The Dregs. Let’s see what Northwestern, Indiana, and Rutgers have (or rather don’t… Off Tackle Empire
- 2023 NFL Draft: Don’t Expect Fantasy Success From Rookie Quarterbacks Sports Illustrated
- How Many QBs Will Be Drafted In Round 1 of 2023 NFL Draft? The Draft Network
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Fox’s Rachel Campos Duffy Cringes Over Report About ‘Woke’ Grease Prequel Featuring ‘White Supremacy’ Tune: ‘They Ruined It!’ – Mediaite
- Fox’s Rachel Campos Duffy Cringes Over Report About ‘Woke’ Grease Prequel Featuring ‘White Supremacy’ Tune: ‘They Ruined It!’ Mediaite
- ‘Grease’ Easter Eggs Hidden in ‘Rise of the Pink Ladies’ Parade Magazine
- New woke ‘Grease’ prequel to feature song about White supremacy with lyrics about race and sexuality Fox News
- Interview: GREASE: RISE OF THE PINK LADIES Stars Talk Upcoming Musical Numbers, Working With Jackie Hoffman & More Broadway World
- Cast of ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ talk spinoff series PIX11 News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Biden signs marriage equality act to tune of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘True Colors’
WASHINGTON, Dec 13 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law on Tuesday at a jubilant celebration that featured U.S. singer Cyndi Lauper performing “True Colors” in front of thousands of supporters on the White House lawn.
The new law provides federal recognition to same-sex marriages, a measure born out of concern that the Supreme Court could reverse its legal support of such relationships.
Cheers erupted from the crowd as Biden signed the bill.
“Marriage is a simple proposition. Who do you love? And will you be loyal to that person you love? It’s not more complicated than that. The law recognizes that everyone should have the right to answer those questions for themselves,” Biden said. “Today’s a good day.”
The event featured performances by pop icons Lauper and British singer Sam Smith.
[1/8] U.S. President Joe Biden celebrates with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, Rep. Jerry Nadler, first lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris after signing the “Respect for Marriage Act,” a landmark bill protecting same-sex marriage, on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, U.S., December 13, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
“Well, this time, love wins,” Lauper said before starting to sing.
Made famous by her 1983 song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Lauper, 69, said the act offered peace of mind to families like hers and Americans nationwide.
“We can rest easy tonight because our families are validated and because now we’re allowed to love who we love, which sounds odd to say, but Americans can now love who we love,” Lauper, an activist on LGBT issues who has been married to actor David Thornton since 1991, told reporters at a briefing prior to the performance.
Addressing the crowd before the signing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the bill promoted equality.
“Everyone deserves to bask in the magical blessing of building a union with the person you love,” she said.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose daughter and her wife are expecting a child, called it “a day of jubilation.”
Reporting by Steve Holland, Andrea Shalal, Katharine Jackson; Editing by Howard Goller and Josie Kao
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Potential Way to Tune the Brain Into Learning Mode
Summary: Study reveals how the element of surprise helps facilitate learning and memory retrieval.
Source: University of Manchester
A study by University of Manchester neuroscientists into the effect of surprise on our memory has inadvertently discovered a method which might help us to perform better in exams.
In the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, 26 people were shown pictures of objects that were either natural, such as fruit, trees and flowers, or man-made, such as a computer mouse and telephone.
In the study, the scientists trained the participants to expect man-made or natural objects using cues such as a triangle or a square. The whole experiment was then repeated with another 24 people having a functional MRI scan to reveal which regions of the brain were used to learn and retrieve the information.
When an expected event—such as a triangle preceding a man-made object—followed a similar but unexpected event—a triangle preceding a natural object—the participants’ memory was boosted.
The second study in the MRI scanner gave exactly the same behavioral results, and showed activation in the brain’s hippocampus—the memory center, midbrain regions—which release dopamine, and occipital cortex—the vision center. In contrast, a sequence of two unexpected similar events also triggered visual areas in the brain, but did not enhance memory performance.
Lead author Dr. Darya Frank, a cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Manchester, said, “We already know that if expectation is violated before or during learning, it triggers an adaptive mechanism resulting in better memory for unexpected events. This experiment shows how the mechanism is also affected when we are trying to retrieve information.”
The hippocampus encodes—or creates—memories, but also retrieves memories. With only a finite amount of resource to allocate to either, the two mechanisms are in conflict. So when something unexpected happens, our brain focuses on the outside environment so it can learn something new, something it did not initially expect.
Scientists already know that surprise turns on the brain’s learning mode, add link however, the current study is the first to investigate how the brain uses the mechanism when we are trying to retrieve information.
Dr. Frank added, “Though our study did not assess the impact of these findings on exam revision and performance, it is logical to see its implications.
“So when the goal is to retrieve information—encountering surprising events like revising in a café or other unfamiliar surroundings would engage an encoding mechanism that may enhance memory for a future exam.
“But the reverse is also true: when trying to remember something already learned during the exam itself, a familiar and expected environment could be helpful, and support retrieving information from memory.”
About this learning and memory research news
Author: Press Office
Source: University of Manchester
Contact: Press Office – University of Manchester
Image: The image is in the public domain
See also
Original Research: Closed access.
“Experiencing Surprise: The Temporal Dynamics of Its Impact on Memory” by Darya Frank et al. Journal of Neuroscience
Abstract
Experiencing Surprise: The Temporal Dynamics of Its Impact on Memory
To efficiently process information, the brain shifts between encoding and retrieval states, prioritizing bottom-up or top-down processing accordingly. Expectation violation before or during learning has been shown to trigger an adaptive encoding mechanism, resulting in better memory for unexpected events.
Using fMRI, we explored (1) whether this encoding mechanism is also triggered during retrieval, and if so, (2) what the temporal dynamics of its mnemonic consequences are. Male and female participants studied object images, then, with new objects, they learned a contingency between a cue and a semantic category. Rule-abiding (expected) and violating (unexpected) targets and similar foils were used at test.
We found interactions between previous and current similar events’ expectation, such that when an expected event followed a similar but unexpected event, its performance was boosted, underpinned by activation in the hippocampus, midbrain, and occipital cortex. In contrast, a sequence of two unexpected similar events also triggered occipital engagement; however, this did not enhance memory performance.
Taken together, our findings suggest that when the goal is to retrieve, encountering surprising events engages an encoding mechanism, supported by bottom-up processing, that may enhance memory for future related events.
New Study Reveals The Reason Teens Seem to Tune Out Their Mom’s Voice
“Are you even listening to me?”
It’s a question that discouraged parents often throw at their distracted teenagers, and the truthful answer is probably, “No.”
It’s hard to really blame them. New research on adolescent brains suggests the reaction we have to certain voices naturally shifts with time, making our mother’s voice feel less valuable.
When scanning the brains of children, those 12 years and under showed an explosive neural response to their mother’s voice, activating reward centers and emotion-processing centers in the brain.
Yet sometime around a kid’s 13th birthday, a change occurs.
The mother’s voice no longer generates the same neurological reaction. Instead, a teenager’s brain, regardless of their sex, appears more responsive to all voices in general, whether new or remembered.
The changes are so apparent that researchers were able to guess a child’s age simply based on how their brain responded to their mother’s voice.
“Just as an infant knows to tune into her mother’s voice, an adolescent knows to tune into novel voices,” explains psychiatrist Daniel Abrams from Stanford University.
“As a teen, you don’t know you’re doing this. You’re just being you: You’ve got your friends and new companions and you want to spend time with them. Your mind is increasingly sensitive to and attracted to these unfamiliar voices.”
Researchers suspect this is a sign of the teenage brain developing social skills. In other words, a teenager doesn’t intentionally close off their family; their brain is just maturing in a healthy way.
Numerous lines of evidence have shown that for young children, a mother’s voice plays an important role in their health and development, impacting their stress levels, their social bonding, their feeding skills, and their processing of speech.
So it makes sense that a child’s brain would be especially in tune with the voice of their parent.
However, there comes a point when listening to people other than your mother is more advantageous.
“When teens appear to be rebelling by not listening to their parents, it is because they are wired to pay more attention to voices outside their home,” says neuroscientist Vinod Menon, also from Stanford University.
The findings build on fMRI results published by the same team of researchers in 2016, which found children under the age of 12 show brain circuits selectively engaged by a mother’s voice.
When extending the study to 22 teenagers, between 13 and 16.5 years of age, however, a mother’s voice didn’t have quite the same impact.
Instead, all voices heard by teenagers activated neural circuits associated with auditory processing, picking out salient information and forming social memories.
When presented with a recording of their mother’s voice saying three nonsense words, as opposed to a stranger’s voice saying the same thing, the participants’ brain scans actually showed less activation in reward centers of the brain.
The same was true of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that helps determine which social information is most valuable.
Researchers are hoping to look into how these brain circuits differ among those with neurological conditions.
Among younger children, for instance, researchers at Stanford have found those with autism do not show as strong a response to their mother’s voice. Knowing more about the underlying neurobiological mechanisms could help us understand how social development occurs.
The findings of the current study are the first to suggest that as we get older, our hearing is focused less on our mother and more on the voices of a whole variety of people.
The idea is supported by other behavioral and neural studies, which also suggest reward centers in the adolescent brain are marked by heightened sensitivity to novelty in general.
These changes could be key parts of healthy social development, allowing teenagers to better understand the perspective and intentions of others.
“A child becomes independent at some point, and that has to be precipitated by an underlying biological signal,” says Menon.
“That’s what we’ve uncovered: This is a signal that helps teens engage with the world and form connections which allow them to be socially adept outside their families.”
The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Brains shift in adolescence to tune out parents’ voices
A new study shows that around age 13 the brain’s vocal preferences shift, tuning mom out in favor of unfamiliar voices. Photo by sweetlouise/Pixabay
Mom’s voice may be music to a young child’s brain, but the teen brain prefers to change the station, a new study finds.
Past research using brain imaging has revealed how important a mother’s voice is to younger children: The sound stimulates not only hearing-related parts of the brain, but also circuits involved in emotions and “reward” — in a way strange voices simply do not.
The new study, published Thursday in the Journal of Neuroscience, shows that things start to change around the age of 13. At that point, the brain’s vocal preferences shift, tuning mom out in favor of unfamiliar voices.
That may ring true to anyone who has ever raised a teenager.
But the findings offer an actual “brain basis” for kids’ behavior changes, said lead researcher Daniel Abrams.
“Most parents can tell you how their teenagers begin to focus their attention on peers and new social partners,” said Abrams, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, in California.
“What’s new here is this understanding of what’s happening in the brain,” he said.
So, if it seems like your teenager is tuning you out, that may well be the case. But, Abrams said, “it’s not personal. This is a natural part of development.”
The findings build on a 2016 study by the Stanford team showing that unlike strangers’ voices, the sound of mom’s voice “lights up” reward centers in a younger child’s brain. That makes sense, Abrams said, as parents are the center of a child’s world — their primary source of learning, which includes social and emotional development.
But at a certain point, he said, kids need to expand their social world, getting ready for independence and eventually starting their own family in many cases.
Enter the new study, which included 46 kids, aged 7 to 16, who underwent functional MRI scans. It allowed the researchers to view their brain activity while they listened to recordings of either their own mother’s voice or unfamiliar female voices.
It turned out that teenagers were clearly distinct from younger kids. Their brain reward centers lit up more in response to the unknown voices versus mom’s — as did a brain region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which places value on social information.
So do those brain changes happen first, or does the brain adapt in response to kids’ growing social circles as they get older?
It’s likely the brain is “programmed” to make the evolution, said Moriah Thomason, an associate professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, in New York City.
“Adolescence is a time when we prepare to leave the nest and become adults,” said Thomason, who was not involved in the research. “If there weren’t some amount of biological programming, that would be maladaptive.”
Like Abrams, she said the findings offer an understanding of the brain basis for an aspect of teen behavior that’s well known to parents.
“This might help parents contextualize it,” Thomason said. “This is a natural part of maturation.”
Abrams agreed that changes in the brain’s voice preferences likely come first. That would be in line with evidence of broader shifts in the teenage brain’s reward system, where it becomes more responsive to things like novelty and risk-taking.
The study also found that in various other ways, teenagers’ brains became more responsive to all voices, including mom’s, compared with younger kids. Brain areas involved in filtering information and creating “social” memories, for example, became more active the older a teenager was.
Thomason speculated that might all reflect the need to develop more sophisticated ways of understanding and interpreting verbal communication as people move from childhood to adulthood.
To Abrams, the study also underscores the broader importance of voice to human beings. Just think about any time you’ve become emotional from hearing the voice of a loved one you haven’t spoken to in a while, he said.
It’s different from a text message, Abrams pointed out.
“Voices are among the most important social signals we have,” he said. “They connect us, and help us feel we’re part of a community. And I would argue that hearing a loved one’s voice is one of the most rewarding experiences we have in our daily lives.”
More information
The Child Mind Institute has advice on communicating with your teenager.
Copyright © 2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Premarket stocks trading: Wall Street is starting to tune out Ukraine
The S&P 500 was up 1.2% Friday. The Dow, which rose nearly 275 points, or 0.8%, also had its best week since November 2020, gaining 5.5%. The Nasdaq, which climbed 2.1% Friday, soared 8% this week. That’s its biggest weekly gain since November 2020 as well.
The International Energy Agency also warned this week of the biggest oil supply crisis in decades. Analysts are worried that war in Ukraine could result in global food shortages. The West continues to announce new sanctions targeting Russia.
Energy, metals and currency markets have responded to these seismic events with wild swings. Nickel prices have dropped sharply following a trading halt in London that lasted a week.
But stocks are charting their own path, suggesting that investors may be starting to tune out the war in Ukraine.
“In the end, most asset classes seemed to throw their hands up and go with whatever suited their narrative,” said Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at OANDA.
The “perpetually bullish gnomes of the equity market” pushed stocks higher on Thursday after positive US manufacturing and labor market data, he added.
Yet there may be some logic behind the stock moves.
Enter the Fed: The US central bank struck a more hawkish tone at its meeting this week than many investors expected. The median forecast from policymakers is now for seven rate hikes this year, and three more in 2023.
Still, stocks surged. Analysts at UBS don’t see that as inconsistent. They gave three reasons:
Fed Chair Jerome Powell convinced investors that the US economy is strong enough to withstand higher rates. Economic data has continued to strengthen, he said, and the labor market is very tight.
The bond market suggests that weaker growth is ahead. But a recession, if it comes, could still be years away.
Stocks often rally when the Fed starts hiking interest rates. Since 1983, the S&P 500 has returned an average of 5.3% in the six months following the first Fed rate rise of a cycle, according to UBS.
“We advise investors to prepare for higher rates while remaining engaged with equity markets. We prefer a hedging strategy and selective equity exposure over exiting risk assets,” the bank’s analysts wrote.
Energy stocks provide a hedge against risks from the war in Ukraine, they said. Financial stocks also tend to rise when interest rates move higher.
Russia creeps closer to averting default
There are signs that Russia may avoid default … for now.
Some of the creditors who had been waiting on $117 million in Russian interest payments since Wednesday have now received the funds, according to Reuters, which cited anonymous sources.
Moscow attempted to make the payment earlier this week, but bondholders did not immediately receive the money due to “technical difficulties related to international sanctions,” S&P Global said in a statement on Thursday.
JPMorgan has processed the payments, and passed them to Citigroup, the payment agent responsible for distributing the money to investors, the Financial Times reported.
If all investors don’t get their money before a 30-day grace period expires, that would be considered a default. Russia hasn’t missed an international debt payment since the Bolshevik revolution.
But it’s not out of the woods, yet.
“We think that debt service payments on Russia’s Eurobonds due in the next few weeks may face similar technical difficulties,” said S&P. “At this point, we consider that Russia’s debt is highly vulnerable to nonpayment.”
S&P has slashed its rating on Russian sovereign debt to CC from CCC-, which is just two notches above default.
Up next: Russia has to make debt payments totaling $168 million on March 21 and March 28, but creditors agreed to accept euros, pounds, francs or rubles as payment when they bought those bonds.
The next big tests come on March 31, when Russia has a payment of $447 million, and April 4, when it has to cough up more than $2.1 billion on two securities. Those payments can only be made in dollars.
Read more: Defaults are murky territory in global economics. My CNN Business colleague Allison Morrow has a great breakdown here.
The end of cheap mortgages
Mortgage rates have climbed above 4% for the first time since May 2019, a sign that the era of super cheap home loans may have ended.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 4.16% in the week ending March 17, up from 3.85% the week before, reports my CNN Business colleague Anna Bahney.
Fed action: Rates climbed as the Federal Reserve moved to curb soaring inflation. On Wednesday, the central bank announced it would raise interest rates for the first time since 2018.
Mortgage rates are not directly tied to the federal funds rate. Rather, they track the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds, which are influenced by factors including investors’ reactions to the Fed’s moves and inflation.
“The Federal Reserve raising short-term rates and signaling further increases means mortgage rates should continue to rise over the course of the year,” said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist.
Rising inflation and the uncertainty in Ukraine are also impacting rates.
“Inflation is unlikely to slow down any time soon,” said George Ratiu, Realtor.com’s manager of economic research. “Investors are reacting to the deepening war in Ukraine and expecting renewed supply chain disruptions to add additional pressures on consumer prices.”
All these factors will continue to push mortgage rates higher in the months ahead, he said. That means one of the main drivers of home sales over the past two years — super low mortgage rates — is drying up.
“The days of sub-3% interest rates are firmly behind us, and we have yet to solve the market fundamentals of supply and demand,” said Ratiu.
Up next
US existing home sales data will be published at 10:00 a.m. ET.
Coming next week: Earnings from Nike, General Mills and Darden Restaurants.