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At least 39 people have called 9-1-1 since Saturday morning complaining of exposure to carbon monoxide.

The power outages that continue to leave thousands without electricity have made life harder for those who rely on at-home healthcare - as well as for the people who provide it.

New Hampshire Public Radio's Health Reporter Elaine Grant spoke with Julie Reynolds.

Reynolds directs the Rochester district visiting nurse association.

Patients are taking on the health care industry, via social networking. In what’s being called Health 2.0, people with chronic illnesses use the Web to list their symptoms, test experimental drugs, report side effects, and voluntarily share their medical information online.

The movement is more widespread than you’d think. A survey done in January of 2008 found that about six out of ten American adults have searched the Internet for health information, and about a third of those people went to social, interactive sites like patient blogs and message boards.

To find out more about this, we turn to Catherine Arnst, who covers medical news for Business Week. Catherine's article, "Can Patients Cure Health Care?” about how patients are using the Internet, is in the Dec. 15 issue of the magazine.

(Illustration by Nick Dewar)

Spoiler alert! You know all those times you watched a magician saw his beautiful assistant in half, then put her back together again?! Well, turns out – she wasn't sawed in half at all! It was just a trick. The magician was actually manipulating our attention and expoliting our tendency to get distracted while he pulled a fast one on us.

I know, I know. I can hardly believe it myself. But it turns out that neuroscientists can learn a lot about how our brains work by studying the way magicians trick us. The basic trick of the magician: use some sort of gimmick to mask the real action while making something appear to change or dematerialize. It turns out that magicians not only use "visual illusions," but also something called "cognitive illusions." For example, the video below originated from two Harvard researchers. The goal is for viewers to count how many times a team of basketball players pass a ball around:

It’s an example of "covert blindness" called "inattentional blindness". But there's another kind of "covert blindness" called "change blindness." Here's a video example, a "color changing card trick":

Magicians rely on misdirection – get the audience to focus their eyes somewhere else while the magician tricks them with slight of hand. But studies show that it doesn't matter where the audience is looking – you can still trick the eye, even if it stays focused on the action. How? Two investigators measured the eye movements of observers while scientist/magician made a cigarette "disappear" by dropping it below a table. The results were clear: it made no difference where they were looking.

Some scientists even hope that investigating the techniques of magic could lead to new diagnostics and treatments for patients suffering from attention deficit disorders, Alzheimer's disease, or brain trauma.

These studies also reveal a lot about the power of expectation in the human brain. More specifically, our desire to apply causation to actions unrelated to one another. A magician may pour water on a ball, then the ball disappears. We assume it's because of the water, but of course it's not.

John Rennie is here to demystify the process for us – he's the editor-in-chief of Scientific American magazine, where you can find the article "Magic and the Brain" in the December issue.

(Photo by Andres Pinto Sánchez)