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profile.gif David Ng is Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia - this is a just a fancier way of calling himself a science teacher.

profile.gifBenjamin Cohen is an Asst. Professor of Science, Tech., and Society at the University of Virginia. He studies the place of S & T in environmental history, policy, and ethics. He also writes other stuff.

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"The world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it." A.S. Byatt

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« Things I really don't get: AIDS denialists (plus a bit about Oprah) | Main | Everything Old is New Again: Lead Poisoning »

Pokemon again. Medical in nature this time.

Category: Nature, as in parts, bits, molecular and stuff
Posted on: April 4, 2007 12:17 PM, by David Ng

I've talk about Pokemon before (in the context of biodiversity), but here's an interesting bit about how it sideline hundreds of kids, who happened to have watched an episode where the aggressive animation manage to mess with heads.

Here's how it panned out:

pokemonevents.gif

Anyway, the short version is that the animation in that particular episode led to somthing called "Photosensitive Epilepsy." The long version (i.e. a pdf of the first page of the scientific publication) can be found today at the SCQ.

If you're really dying to see the offending scene, you can actually check it out here.

Comments

Sorry to burst ye bubble, but some American cartoons/shows are way ahead of you on this thing about cheap-ass Japanese cartoons causing seizures. In an episode of Simpsons, at the turn of this decade, they were in a hotel room watching "Fighting Seizure robots" which caused their pupils to dilate and gave them seizures, rolling around on the floor.

Posted by: Aerik | April 4, 2007 2:17 PM

Actually if you read the whole abstract only a "miniscule fraction" of the kids were diagnosed with photosensitive epilepsy.. the rest likely had our old pal, mass hysteria promoted by fit-inducing media reports.

Posted by: Andy | April 4, 2007 3:56 PM

Yes, which plays again to the "mass media" point brought up in the previous post. Crazy media...

Posted by: David Ng | April 4, 2007 4:43 PM

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