Hangzhou, China – - Neologic Animation Inc., an educational software company in the People’s Republic of China, released the results of its 7 year research and development study into effective early childhood education methods.

Led by Dr. Jisheng Wang, the Company’s head Psychologist, the team of renowned, published psychologists and early childhood education experts released a report outlining the “Eight Areas of Intelligence” of human beings.

“By incorporating these eight basic areas of intelligence into all of ‘Naniya World’s’ games, children will learn not only at a conscious, but also unconscious level,” said Chief Psychologist Dr. Wang.  “Language, Mathematics, Logic, Music, Space, Body-Sport, Interpersonal Relations, Self-Cognitive and finally Nature-Observing Intelligence are all carefully and meticulously incorporated into the Company’s game development model.”

The team has studied several thousand cases and has concluded that non-cognitive factors directly influence a child’s learning performance.  They have concluded that these areas of intelligence development play a large role in a child’s overall development and performance.  The team has meticulously arrived at a series of 108 learning capacity tests that can systematically analyze current educational status, learning capacity, and most importantly can recommend suitable learning methods.  Studying the results of the tests combined with advanced network techniques ultimately came about and created the website “Naniya World”, which is geared towards students from, grades one through six.

The site’s many exciting methods of study, including interactive flash games, animations, videos and other content to explain subject knowledge and content.  One of the major intentions of the website is to foster independent and creative thought.  This is done by incorporating art, music, sports and other such modules instead of forcing students to take in knowledge passively and mechanically.  Children can simultaneously absorb cultural knowledge while also improving their comprehensive learning capacity.

For more details about the study, please refer to the R&D Results Fact Sheet.

 About Neologic Animation Inc. (the “Company”)

The Company is an educational software development and marketing company; currently developing a website to be marketed as “Naniya World” for primary school students in China.  The website’s goal is to educate children how to develop and hone their creative skills through interactive educational games that incorporate Adobe Flash. The games incorporate a curriculum that has been developed by some of China’s top professors and child psychology experts. It sets itself apart from other after school programs in China because it deviates from the traditional methods of Chinese education.  The Company’s mission is to inspire every child in China to become the best student they can possibly be by showing them that learning is fun.

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Pixar Studios announced that the animation industry is working on two different movies that will be released in 2013 and 2014.

At the last Disney film convention, D23, held on August 20, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation chief John Lasseter disclosed the two films in active development whose titles remain unknown. Dinosaurs will be the main idea of one of the movies they are working on. Directed by Bob Peterson this movie confirms the rumors that sprang up two years ago.

In 2009, Greg Dykstra, a character sculptor at Pixar was showing his model for a young version of Carl during an Up featurette. In the interview with him, the public could see some dinosaurs’ pictures in the wall behind him. After that image the question loomed up:  Would be dinosaurs the main starring of the next Pixar film?

At the D23, Disney didn’t reveal much information about the plot. “What if that life-changing asteroid missed Earth? The hilarious tale depicts a world where dinosaurs never went extinct,” said Pixar. The movie, currently being referred to as the Untitled Pixar Movie About Dinosaurs, will arrive on November 27, 2013.

The other untitled production directed by Pete Docter, director of Monsters Inc and Up, will be about how the brain works. Described by Docter, it is a comic look at how ideas come together and the inner workings of our brains. The audience will have to wait until May 2014 for more details.

In the meantime and just few months before those two releases, Brave and Monster University movies will keep entertaining the spectators. Brave, from which a new scene was shown at the D23 featuring the suitors trying to win heroine Merida’s hand in marriage, will be on theaters August 17, 2012. Directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, this movie was titled at its origin as The Bear and the Bow.

This film is the first Pixar movie directed by a woman and starring a woman. It is also based on a tale. In addition, according to the media outlet Variety, princess Merida will most likely join the Disney Princesses after this movie.

Two days after that premiere, Mike and Sulley will return for Monster University, the sequel to Monsters Inc, on August 19, 2013. The plot is about how they met at the University where they couldn’t stand each other and how that relationship changed until they became best friends.

Monsters University, brings back Billy Crystal who voices Mike, 10 years after the original was released. At a Q&A for a Hero Complex screening of City Slickers where Crystal recently participated he spoke briefly about the movie and he stated that the script was “really funny.”

Discussing Sulley, Crystal said, “John Goodman is a genius and he’s great and we’re really funny together. It’s college pranks with monsters. And I wear a retainer. Mike has a retainer.”

Planes, a spinoff of the “Cars” franchise, is another upcoming produced by DisneyToon Studios that will also hit on Spring 2013. For those who cannot wait until that date Wreck-It Ralph is the movie to go see. Voiced by John C. Reilly, this film is about an arcade game character named Wreck-It Ralph. The film will be opening in November 2012.

Image Courtesy of  http://www.flickr.com/photos/harshlight/

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A study published in the journal Current Biology examined how certain parts of the brain respond to fear.  The study, published in December, specifically investigated one woman, known as S.M., because she is one of very few people known to have damage to the amygdala on both sides of her brain.  The amygdala is a portion of the brain thought to play a role in processing fear and other emotions.

S.M. suffers from a rare condition, Urbach-Wiethe disease, which caused calcium deposits to form and cause lesions on the amygdala.  The researchers exposed S.M. to fear-inducing stimuli and used questionnaires to assess whether she experienced the symptoms of fear over a three-year period.  They also asked her to rate the level of different emotions at random times for a three-month period.  S.M. reported little-to-no symptoms of fear on the questionnaires and also rated herself as fearless most often during the emotional experience sampling. However, she did experience other emotions, such as joy, happiness and sadness normally, the researchers said.

S.M.’s lack of fear has created some risky situations for her.  She was held at knifepoint in a park at one point.  Her fearlessness may have contributed to that incident.  She was in the park by herself when, what she described as, a “drugged out” man called her over to a bench.  She went.  While he held her at knifepoint, she calmly responded that if he was going to kill her, he would have to go through her angels.  The man let her go.  She walked, not ran, home.  S.M. has also been held at gunpoint and was also almost killed in a domestic incident.

“It’s very striking that she has only a rational response, not a physiological one,” said Dr. Jon Shaw, professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami School of Medicine. “The body is not prepared for a physiological response because the amygdala has been taken out of the loop.”

Although it certainly appears that the amygdale is critical to fear response, some experts caution against drawing too many conclusions from one study.  This study’s findings, however, may be very significant in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  “[This] puts us in a position to design treatments to target that structure to treat conditions marked by pathological fear reactions,” said Daniel Tranel, one of the study authors and professor of neurology and psychology at the University of Iowa. “Probably the most well-known such condition is PTSD.”

S.M.’s case also underscores that fear is essential to human’s survival. The researchers believe that because she could not detect threats to her safety and avoid them, she wound up in numerous life-threatening situations. “Indeed, it appears that without the amygdala, the evolutionary value of fear is lost,” the authors wrote.

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