Angelina’s Red Carpet Reversal

Angelina Jolie turned heads at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last Sunday, and it wasn’t just because she was her usual stunning self. It turns out Angie was wearing her Max Azria gown — a cornflower blue creation — backward!

Did a spurned stylist tell her to wear it the wrong way round? Or was the “Changeling” star too busy caring for her newborn twins that she didn’t realize her mistake?

(left to right) The front of Angelina’s Max Azria dress (Jason Merritt/Getty Images), the back (Steve Granitz/WireImage.com), and a model from Azria’s Spring 2009 collection (Scott Gries/Getty Images)

Neither, according to Jen Rade, who styles the starlet. Rade told Usmagazine.com that Jolie reversed the gown on purpose to make it “more blouson.” For those of you who do not parle Francais, “blouson” is the French word for blouse. The end result was a bit too bland for my taste, and rather reminiscent of another Max Azria dress she wore to the Critic’s Choice Awards just a few weeks earlier. Had she worn her gown the right way round, Angelina would have shown more skin but less of her distracting tattoos!

For some reason, the sexy actress has favored billowy blouson gowns with cinched waists this awards season. I just hope she takes a break from the trend come Oscars next month. She may be a mother of six, but she doesn’t need to look matronly.

To hear more about Angelina’s fashion choice, watch this report from E! News Daily. And to see more of Angelina’s red carpet looks, check out Yahoo! Movies’ Fashion Report Card, and click here for complete coverage of the 66th Annual Academy Awards.

http://oscars.movies.yahoo.com/blog/20-angelinas-red-carpet-reversal?nc

Brain’s blood surge doesn’t match activity

28 January 2009 by David Robson

CONTRARY to popular belief, a rush of blood to a certain brain region is not always linked to neural activity there, a finding that may guide future brain scan experiments.

Functional MRI scans measure blood flow in the brain. Neuroscientists interpret this as a sign that neurons are firing, usually as someone performs a task or experiences an emotion. This enables them to link the emotion to the brain region where there was blood flow.

Now, Aniruddha Das from Columbia University in New York and colleagues have shown that blood flow can occur without accompanying neural activity. Das used separate techniques to measure blood flow and neural activity in the visual cortex of two macaques trained to carry out a visual task.

Sitting in darkness except for a light that switched on at regular intervals, the monkeys were trained to look away if it was red, and fix their gaze on the light if it shone green. When the timing of the pauses between the light flashes changed, blood flow still increased when the macaque expected a flash, but there was no subsequent increase in electrical activity from firing neurons (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07664). Das suspects that the brain sent the rush of blood in anticipation of the neurons’ firing.

Christian Keysers from the BCN Neuroimaging Centre in Groningen, the Netherlands, does not believe the result is relevant to the design of previous fMRI experiments and so is unlikely to have an impact on their results. But Das says care needs to be taken in future to ensure that this misinterpretation does not lead to errors.