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Tl;dr: What’s the difference between a startup and a scale up business? Everything changes when you start getting successful and large with a scale up business. What worked and people enjoyed as a startup will not hold true once you scale up. Here are some of the changes you should expectAt a 10 person company you are a startup, at a 100 you are a scale up.Now, whilst startup is a term applied to pretty much any company (Uber still a startup?), scale up is a little more of an esoteric term. But the differentiation is worth adopting for our purposes since they denote two distinct phases of growth.I think the clearest ways to delineate between the two are as follows:How much you have figured outStartup: You and your (little) merry band of thieves are figuring your shizzle out. You probably haven’t figured out product market fit yet, you aren’t 100% sure on who exactly your clients are (You might migrate from enterprise to SME focus?), you aren’t sure on pricing… well, you aren’t really sure about anything. Most of the time, anyway.Scale up business: Something clearly is working to have the burn of a 100 person company! It should be exciting and terrifying. You have most likely (Um, think delivery companies are an exception!) validated your product, there is fit for customers and you are trying to get your unit economics to optimise. There are still a lot of things you haven’t figured out, but the future is a little more certain now.How much you have raisedIf you have gone through the whole VC funded startup route, then you’ve raised money. It will be different if you are a rock star and figured out how to boostrap (Congrats, dude!).Startup: You are angel, pre-seed, seed, and series-a (Real series-a). You’ve raised maybe $10m max (But that depends how capital intensive your business is)Scale up business: To me, scale up starts series-b (Again, real series-b). You’re raising in the tens of millions going forwardYour risk aversion and the threat of lossStartup: You literally have nothing to lose. You left Chucky Cheese to build your parking app and if it doesn’t work, you go back to flipping burgers for annoying kids. Your startup is worth nothing, you simply aren’t worried about losing it all. If you find you don’t quite have PMF, and a developer has an idea for instant public updates, then feck it, pivot (FYI, that was Jack Dorsay when we worked at Odeo, which later became Twitter. Read about startup pivots here.)Scale up business: You last raised at a $50m pre and you own 50%. That’s $25m on paper. That is life changing money for 99.9999999% of people. You can write a Medium ‘humble brag post’ and do the rounds at conferences and call yourself an angel investor. You DO NOT want to lose the glory that’s so close (but yet so far). In startup phase, you might pivot at the drop of the hat, now? Nope! Investors expect you to grow like a weed doing what you are already doing. They are fearful of the Golden Goose dying too, and frankly, they’ll fire you and bring in Bob Barker if they get a sense you aren’t cutting musterTime to scale is a distraction, thoughTime isn’t a great manner to separate the two as magic can happen. I interviewed a founder who scaled to $8m revenue in 30 days (see the video) from scratch! If you have an amazing team and so can raise a lot of money, you might enter a scale up period in a year or so. For many, it might take 4-5 years to reach that point, if not more.Now we understand some of the differences between a small and a large company, let’s get into how managing the two are different.You don’t want to have control anymore. You have to let go… but need to create systems and bureaucracy in a scale up businessI’ve scaled a startup to 200+ people in months from a hotel room. I’ve “scaled down” 100 people from 300 to 200 in a week twice. I’ve also bootstrapped and struggled all the way.When your mindset is scale, you remove yourself emotionally from the notion of control.You being controlling is now a futile exercise. Just let go. Focus on:Picking the right people to manage at the stage you are at (not where you will be in 2 years; this is key!)Getting them up to speed and inspiring themTracking their performanceInstigating process improvements and remembering you have the ‘full picture’Lighting a fire under peoples’ asses so they are never comfortableReplacing when you need to (always be recruiting so you have a pipeline. You won’t realise how important this is till you lose key people and think feck… Alex was right)As a founder in a room, building block by block you are too engaged (unless you have done this crazy shit before and know better). It’s your ‘baby.’ Feck that. At scale it’s not your baby, it’s an angsty teenager that kinda hates you.Now, when you were a startup, you hired people and they could have systems in place that kinda did the job. The focus was on shipping and not bureaucracy. If your branding on display adds wasn’t consistent, but it converted, eh, whatever if it converted. Maybe the engineers weren’t as anal about documentation and code review, but a little technical debt is a par for the course. Fine, it works, customers are sort of buying and churn is ok.When you get big, things get a little more boring so that they work at scale. Now there are branding guidelines. Now there are code reviews and extensive documentation since you might have APIs third party devs are using.The team will no longer be 100% shipping. They might be spending 50% of their time on implementing processes so that someone else can take over.You will eventually stop hiring each and every person and you won’t know their names, nor if they quit and don’t turn up to work anymore.You have quarterly performance reviews. The OKR and PPP sheet of mine isn’t enough anymore.You have to let go of the fact that some important things will be done “worse” than if you were doing them or directly managing them.Yes, this will not appeal to all staff you started with, but the people you need to start aren’t 100% going to be the ones you need to scale with. Some people will end up having lesser roles and perhaps leaving. They were a star, but they don’t have the chops anymore.You don’t have control over hiringI believe you should get in final interviews for as long as you possibly can. Clearly, with under 100 people, it’s a lot of work, but it’s still manageable. It’s so important to keep a handle of your company culture. My friend is a senior at Airbnb and he told me Chesky and co still interview every senior candidate before hiring them.Once you have over 100 people, you don’t have the time nor interest to hire everyone. And seriously, if you are in ecommerce, do you really give a toss about hiring some inbound minion in the warehouse? No, neither did I. Your time is frankly better placed at trying to land 800 pound senior hire gorillas that move the needle. You lead engineer, new VP of Sales, Finance etc. It is a balls to land senior people. Again, trust me on this one 😉If you have done a great job mind washing staff with culture, HR have sat in enough meetings with you to know what values you hire for, the questions you ask etc, then you have created a hiring process you like by osmosis that can continue to bear the flame for you. Maybe you wield control over final hiring decisions, but you put in enough effort that the final candidate you get is 95% likely someone you would hire, so the final interview is closing.Hiring is critical, but you need to vest control of it as soon as you reasonably can. And hiring is sooooo dull.Being part of any startup is a constant learning process. You should never stop learning and never think you know everything. Satya Nadella said:Don’t be a know-it-all; be a learn-it-allJason Lemkin tweeted this, and I quite like it.You have onboarding processesWhen you hire people in a startup, you interview them and make an offer on the spot. They start on Monday, or right now if you work at Rocket Internet. Maybe they use their own laptop, or you order one over the weekend (Haha, most of my friends don’t give computers to staff anymore to save money). They get an employment contract and you tell them they’ll get their ‘share offer’ soon… and you point at the only desk free and say ‘do stuff’.At a scale up business your HR team start thinking about pretty things. There are employment startup offer letters (see this example!). You have a mentor/buddy who shows you around.At Amazon, Bezos gets all execs to spend a week in customer care to understand customers.But onboarding new staff isn’t a one-time thing. You need to continually onboard people till they can onboard people as good as you would hope to.And for managers, you need to constantly remind them to spend time with new joiners and not just tell them about goals and culture when new people are hired, or remind them a few times. At a scale up business, staff need to hear about what matters most over and over, to live the company values every day, observe leaders living them. You need to make a conscious effort because it isn’t something that just happens naturally at lunch every day. You’re too big now.You have a hierarchyYou didn’t start a company to have a boss. At a startup, you’re everyone’s boss. Things are hectic but chilled in terms of corporate BS. Your 10 person startup runs on ideas/passion and transparency. You are all in one (smelly) room, turning your shoulder over to ask if something was shipped. You might start doing startup standup, but not too much more. It’s a flat hierarchy with you at the top and everyone below.Scale up? Hell no. You might start feeling like you are at IBM wearing a blue shirt. Sorry, but that’s the way it needs to be.A 100 person scaleup needs organization and structure with functional responsibilities. There are department heads and team leaders. You need to constantly think about cross-department-communication and flow of information. There is a chart somewhere with a hierarchy that is a few branches deep. Developers start getting titles like L2 senior quality control engineer, rather than The Dark Lord, which you might have let them call themselves before.My advice is to give proper title from the start and do away with all the stupid titles you will need to take away later. Some people mind. Go figure.Around 25 people, an ironic situation will arise; staff hate the new systems but will bitch on cigarette breaks about why things don’t work well. At 200, people will start vocally complaining at town halls (I experienced this at Lazada). Trust me, 99% of staff expect things to work but will not take the impetus to fix things themselves. It’s better to be more structured than not. It’s better to have a ‘stick up your ass’ than be ‘disorganised; people may not like you, but they will respect you. Staff are NOT your friends. If you feck up, they are out of a job.There is a reason you will start increasing the mean age and having ‘grey haired’ people about with corporate experience around 100 people, or far less if you are more product orientated.You might not like it, but do you want to build a big company and buy a small island, or not?Google hired Eric Schmidt as CEO. Zuck hired Sheryl as COO.These folk deal with metrics, targets, processes, systems etc, so your company can scale up, and you look like a pro (so the VCs don’t fire you).You hire for specialists, not generalistsAs a startup, stuff needs to get done. Someone bright with time is enough, to do good enough. Good enough is good enough. Done is better than perfect as the % gain from 0 to 1 is infinity.A scale up business is about optimising. You need to do everything really well. To do things really well means hiring experts.You don’t hire one person to run marketing at a scale up as you did when you started. Hell, one person at a startup who knows marketing is magical!Nope, at a big scale up business you might have 4 people just doing SEM, a few in affiliate, 20 in SEO, a channel management team etc (Depends on your business model). Do you know any of these people? Nope. You might chat every other day with the CMO and weekly with department heads, just in marketing!At startup you probably knew what keywords your SEM consultant was using, at scale up business there are so many campaigns, you don’t even know how the system works. And do you know what, you just do not care! You’re looking at your return by channels or aggregate CAC.That was just marketing, btw. You’re going to have teams for everything. And the management overhead for hiring a generalist to do something specialist will drive you insane. You’ll reach breaking point if you have hired badly and pay someone twice what you should have to just get some extra sleep (and then regret it).As a rule of thumb, you shouldn’t know about one topic more than one person in the company. You need to have specialists that make you feel dumb for everything else. The dumber you feel, the better you will sleep.Also, whilst you need to hire great people, you won’t really ever find perfect hires. There’s no one that has build the same startup twice. Yes, maybe someone built a food delivery company before, but that was a few years back and the market will have changed, the same market strategies don’t work quite as well and customers’ expectations will have changed (Maybe they want higher end restaurants which mean going operational and setting up a logistics fleet).The environment is less intimateThe environment at the early stage is intimate. You don’t know everyone’s name, you get to know everyone very well. That’s the beauty of a really early stage startup. You set the culture. You can have an only asshole rule if you want?At startup, everyone knows what is going on on a daily basis. But once you scale up, that just isn’t feasible. You can’t have one on one conversations with 100 people.You need to be like Jesus and attract 10 disciples who you will spend time with and then go on and spread the good word for you.Whilst you don’t need to interact with everyone, you can be the ‘man in the high tower’ and do nice things at scale so the staff think you care. I highly recommend making your startup fun and being a little weird. I used to do random things like organising donut eating competitions and being the master of ceremonies, giving a prize. I buy ping pong tables (managers hate them, staff love them). I create competitions to reward behaviors I want to develop (like working late, thinking for yourself etc).Just because you are running a scale up business does not mean you can’t interact with staff at scale though.Now, it does help to be an extrovert here. I was working in a startup and my buddy was technically my boss. I was organising things and he didn’t want to speak in front of 200 people. I personally enjoy it, so I did. Is that to say he didn’t benefit from a better work environment with better communication by proxy? Of course not. I think it’s best for the leader to lead, but if you suck, embrace your weaknesses and delegate. People will still know who the boss is.You want to make more rules (but you shouldn’t)If you haven’t heard of it already, you should check out the Netflix Culture Manifesto (Culture). This slide (#43) is the real challenge you face as your company grows:As you get bigger and have more staff about, the likelihood someone has habits that piss you off gets statistically larger!Oh god, I had this one COO who ate with his mouth open and made so much noise. It drove me nuts. I ALMOST banned eating at desks blaming mess or something from all the staff… I didn’t though as eating at desks means more work done, he he 😉Most companies add more and more rules as they grow. Staff hate them.Of course, there are rules you will have to implement at some point, and that’s around ‘hitting on staff’ and shite like that. But every time something breaks you’ll be tempted to add another rule and you need to fight it.Learn from the Netflix experience; they learned and implemented this for a reason. Push decision making down as far as you can and let your team learn from their mistakes. NOTE: This only works with smart staff. It doesn’t work in customer care agents and shizzle. They want to be told what to do. I learned this from actual feedback.Things continually stop working and fixes get harderWhatever was once working when you were a startup will stop working when you scale up. You didn’t have so many complications and edge cases.Systems will stop being adequate faster when you are scaling up. The constant change in your business will mean constant changes in your systems. What worked a month ago might not be good enough this month. This will surely put a strain on staff who have to keep adapting.When hiring people, it’s a good idea to set the expectation that they have to be ok with rapid change and the need to adapt to it. And whilst you need technical skills, you need to hire for culture too. It can take a long time to build a great culture (you actually enjoy) and only a few hires to destroy it. Not everyone you hire will have an appetite for change.Which leads to this inter-connected point:You need to remember you are a company, not a series of departmentsYou eventually need to start preempting failure in departments. Understand that each department is a fundamental growth unit. If one thing breaks, it can impact the whole organisation. There can be real implications of a department break down. Customer care might once not have been important, but if you notice you NPS steadily decreasing, you have an issue now. It may stem from product, but your underinvestment in CC and CS is now not capable to pick up the slack and mollify these pissed off customers.You have limited funds so you can’t do everything perfectly. It becomes a juggling game where you prioritise one hole to plug as another spring.At one scale up business I had a CEO screaming at me to do more marketing campaigns and get bigger discounts from merchants. I told the CEO to feck off as my merchants weren’t being paid on time and our processes needed to be fixed first. There were no processes nor communication between supply chain management, finance and buying. Buyers didn’t give the info to finance and wouldn’t share their contacts, SCM then didn’t give the PO/Invoice together so they wouldn’t pay suppliers. Buyers only found this out when they tried making an order. Shit show. We had department heads, but no one tasked with interdepartmental integration.Do not forget that people need to talk to each other outside their department! I’m telling you from experience they won’t. You also monetise people on their department targets- they have no incentive to stick their head out and try make changes with other deparments. My recommendation is to organise weekly meetings with department heads and get them to share openly. You’ll learn so much they didn’t share before, about things you simply had no idea was really an issue.Erik Fairbairn, Founder of POD Point says:“Each time your business doubles everything seems to break; your sales process, finance processes, management information flow, so every time your company doubles in size, you end up re-designing every process you have. The challenge lies in predicting this and updating your processes before they break, but when scaling really quickly, all your processes and procedures are under pressure all the time, so it is hard to spot which one is about to fail next.”Start to scale is a paradigm shiftIn ‘start’ you have to be engaged in everything as you have no people!When you have a lot of people you need to be a bit of a sociopath and think of everything as inanimate objects, akin to chess pieces.This is harsh, but if you have to fire 100 people, the decision needs to be thought of like sacrificing Pawns. Sure doing it sucks, but it’s just a business decision. You have to be ruthless (sorry, not sorry).With a scale up business everything is about processes. You don’t know peoples’ names (ideally you do, as they’ll love you for it) anymore. The people in customer care is the CS department and you think about KPIs and if the average person is doing enough calls and if you need new software? You wonder if feedback is getting to the buying team, or if supply chain management knows certain suppliers suck. You don’t think about individual cases, you think holistically.Then someone needs to build processes and run the department. Those people just report to you. They need to figure things out. You make it clear they are accountable for results and have the control to do whatever needs to be done. Let go (again, let go).Meetings might seem like a pain before, but now meetings are your job. You aren’t meant to be busy- your staff are. You are there to do meetings with them. That’s your job which must sound weird to you now.Finally, your problems are bigger now. They’re more detailed and inter-connected. You need people who know more than you do. Hire better than you. Interview people and think F me, I have so much to learn from this person and that is AWESOME. Don’t think they make you look bad. Your KPI is hiring to make you look great by being the dumbest, most senior person.Fundraising gets easier (or much harder)One thing I tell founders is ‘You only have one chance to tell a story!‘What do I mean by this?If you are a great salesperson, you can spin a reality distortion field by the strength of you will and personality and ‘con’ investors into backing you. They buy into your dream.Ok… you can maybe do this twice at angel and seed… but not at series-a. Forget it.You think angel and seed are hard, but you ain’t seen nothing yet if you don’t have metrics at series-a+.At series-a+ it is about your metrics. Yes, your sales bullshit STILL MATTERS, but, if you don’t have metrics now, you are fecked.I joke to founders ‘if you have kick-ass up and to the right metrics, you only need a five-slide deck. One cover, second team, third a graph, fourth a picture of a hotdog and the fifth where to wire the cash.’It’s kind of true. Wag got $300m for dog walking. Seriously!? They clearly had metrics (I’ve tried to get them, but I haven’t yet). Who wants to fund dog walking? But if you have metrics, eh?Slack got craaaazy money… why? Growth.In scale up land, it’s easy to raise money… if you are kicking ass. Investors love growth stage as you have significant traction and there is visibility about most things. Numbers have a tendency to give people comfort. Trust me, it’s way easier to raise $100m with a great company than $5m.But if you don’t have #s, you’re screwed. You can’t tell a story anymore. You’re desperately trying to close a bridge round, and no VC likes bridge rounds (unless they are on predatory terms).You have a board to report toIf, like many companies you have raised, you have a board. A board means reporting. This means creating board decks (could take a day to a week). In a scale up business your board is paying attention to you as they hope you are going to make their fund.Here is a template board deck for you. I made it for one of my venture built companies, so it is designed for early stage companies, though you can remove some of the accountability slides and augment it for a scale up business.As a startup, you may have had angels or a VC at seed which let you just get ship done. They know you are figuring things out so it’s less strategy and more grind. Yes, you need to say what you are doing (weekly/monthly email is fine).Scale up means perhaps a 3 hour call every month. I wrote about this in the board deck template above, so read that.What I will say is that the VCs are your boss now. If you piss them off they can and will fire you. They will not do their pro-rata and therefore 86 your raise. My VC mate told me about a company they took over and fired the CEO, bringing in a new one. He’s actually a nice VC, so there was a reason… but yeah, you can get fired. So keep informed and happy.I will also say… the board works for you, so get them to help you. Control board meetings. Give them tasks to do like help you find a VP eng, make client intros, whatever. Leverage them. They really do want you to succeed, and firing you is a tonne of work.You have product-market fit (or close to it), so you are focused on growthAs a startup, you are trying to figure out if the idea you mapped out with Johnny in Murphy’s bar when totally wasted is actually as awesome as you thought it was (Post hangover). You figure out who the customer is, where you find them, how much it costs to acquire them and how much they will pay you. You raise money to figure out ‘what works.’At a scale up business, you have (hopefully) figured this all out. It’s called having ‘product market fit.’ To me, PMF means you know your CAC and your LTV (Spend $x and you get $y back with a certain payback period) and you are happy with that. Your product and its features are what customers want. You are now figuring out how to do 100x of ‘what works.’Growth is hard. Yes, startup sucks as you have no resources, but scale up has its own challenges, just a hella lot more of them. At startup, you stressed about figuring out which CRM to use. At scale up you’re integrating a new CRM with marketing automation, customer care, and success and whoever needs the data like your business intelligence team.You think you can do all that yourself? Hell no! You need to hire a lot of specialists who have the knowledge you need to implement that really quickly! Where the hell do you find all these people now?At startup you might have been smart and identified kids 22-27 who are super bright and ‘figure shit out’, but this just doesn’t cut it in a scale up business. You have to pony up cash for salaries and do some wining and dining to close these experts you need.It’s probably going to take you a year to migrate your paradigms, processes and systems from startup phase to scale up. And yes, it’s going to be both painful and expensive.My advice to make it less painful is to hire better than you whenever you can. These people will know what to do and do a better job than you. Embrace that. Laugh how much easier your life is not, and don’t be threatened by them. Watch out for the ‘bozo explosion.’You spend a lot more money on marketingDarn, the amount of money my marketing teams have spent is insane. It’s not always spent perfectly. I’ve seen CACs in display channels in the hundreds of dollars. But that’s fine, well sort of! The marketing team needs to figure out what works and doesn’t work for your business model. You have to burn money in tests to figure that out. The team also likely needs to be trained up to get better.When you are trying to scale up, your hacky methods don’t work anymore. Marketing gets a lot less efficient. Scale up marketing is hard as things need to move the needle. There is a trade-off between efficiency and volume.You need to spend a lot of time reviewing metrics and looking at channels more holistically.I highly recommend making a really good dashboard for you to review with your management team each week. Start with something hacky, but improve it over time. Also, hire at least one person in BI (Business Intelligence) who does all this prep for you. If you don’t have data, you can manage.Conclusion on scale up businessThere we go, guys. Do me a favor. What are your biggest learnings scaling? Share them in the comments and let’s discuss.

It is a man-made bioweapon released from China.In 1999, Li-Meng Yan, the Chinese virologist (censored off various social media platforms) affiliated with the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, worked in Ft. Detrick to teach ebola how to infect human cells without killing them. Ebola couldn’t otherwise infect humans.She then worked undercover in the WHO reference laboratory at the University of Hong Kong. The information she received from her network in mainland China, alongside with her experience in virology, confirmed her suspicions that the novel coronavirus was made in a laboratory.Dr. Leo Poon, Yan’s supervisor at that time, asked her in Dec. 2019 to examine the odd cases in mainland China similar to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). She reported her findings and Poon just nodded and told her to continue working. In January, she had more to share with him. He warned her to “keep silent, and be careful. Don’t touch the red line. We will get in trouble and we’ll [disappear].”“A sense of right and wrong” emboldened her to shared her findings with U.S.- based, Hong Kong blogger Lu Deh, who suggested that she relocate somewhere else for her safety.She had discovered biological evidence that a template virus (ZC45/ZXC21) was engineered over six months to become SARS-CoV2. Wuhan virologists went beyond gain-of-function research to engineer the new bio-weapon, and even used data fabrications to cover up the origin of SARS-CoV2.Allegedly, the RaTG13 (RaBtCoV/4991) virus was obtained from bat feces in 2013. Since it is 96% similar to the SARS-CoV-2 sequence, published at GenBank, the CCP claims that both must be naturally occurring because they were supposedly taken from the same fecal sample. Note that the CCP destroyed all evidence of RaTG13 so that, "No independent verification of the RaTG13 sequence seems possible because,” according to Dr. Zhengli Shi. However, the process for sequencing DNA itself “leaves room for potential fraud” and “RNA viral genome can be fabricated on GenBank with careful execution”. There are 5 problems with this lie that SARS-CoV-2 is natural: 1) fecal samples are typically 70-90% bacterial, not 1.7%. 2) RaTG13 contains segments of DNA from foxes, flying foxes, and squirrels. 3) No live virus or intact genome has ever been isolated or recovered in nature for RaTG13. 4) The spike genes of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 evidence no natural evolution when compared to sequences of naturally-evolving coronaviruses. The RBM region of the S1/spike of the RaTG13 strain had be edited in order to retain the 96.2 percent sequence identity. 5) “All fabricated coronaviruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with ZC45 and ZXC21,” a process that served as a template for the creation of SARS-CoV-2.The way the sequence can be changed is that after the genomic sequence is created on a computer, segments of the genome can be synthesized based on the sequence. After amplifying each DNA segment through PCR, the researcher can send the PCR products for sequencing. These may contain sequencing samples from an alleged host that are mixed with genetic material from the host, which is ultimately (fraudulently) used to determine the sequence of the virus from these “raw sequencing reads” which are then published on GenBank. This laboratory concoction, fused with a host and amplified, can then be used as false evidence to declare the virus to be a “natural-occurring” version of the corresponding virus.She published her findings in a 26-page report co-written with three other scientists, citing “evidence left in the genome.” The template used to create the virus came from the Chinese military. Since then, she has been warning that SARS-CoV-2 is an “unrestricted bio-weapon” that was not only created in a Wuhan lab, but was also released intentionally by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).The CCP, not wanting this made public, demanded the suspension of her Twitter account and targeted her for “disappearance.” Yan managed to elude surveillance and board a plane out of China at the cost of no longer seeing her husband, friends, and other loved ones again, and then fled Hong Kong on 4/28/20 via a Cathay Pacific flight to America.Other whistleblowers who exposed the truth have not been so lucky. For example, journalist and lawyer Chen Qiushi and businessman Fang Bin have both been reported missing. (Chen captured videos of overflowing hospitals, funeral homes and isolation wards a day after arriving at Wuhan – the center of the pandemic. Chen was then put in “quarantine” by Feb. 6, with no subsequent news about him. Meanwhile, Bin posted a series of videos showing piles of dead bodies in a city hospital. The last video he posted showed men in protective suits knocking on his door).During a Tucker Carlson Tonight interview on Fox News, Yan described the virus as a “Frankenstein” strain genetically engineered and designed to target humans, and it was intentionally released. https://www.bitchute.com/video/IB3ijQuLkkUr/In 2005, Dr. Yang specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.It is highly contagious and transmits easily, often through respiratory routes in the form of aerosols. The most dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of supporting targeted release.All of the above criteria have been met bySARS-CoV-2: it has taken hundreds of thousands lives, led to numerous hospitalizations, and left many with sequela and various complications; it spreads easily by contact, droplets, and aerosols via respiratory routes and is capable of transmitting from human to human, the latter of which was initially covered up by the CCP government and the WHO and was first revealed by Dr. Li-Meng Yan on January 19th, 2020 on Lude Press; it is temperature-insensitive (unlike seasonal flu) and remains viable for a long period of time on many surfaces and at 4°C (e.g. the ice/water mixture).What's more, COVID-19 spreads asymptomatically, which "renders the control of SARS-CoV-2 extremely challenging."Since the genomic sequence was manipulated, the precise genomic sequence of the correct strain was likely not discovered by the companies manufacturing the COVID vaccines. What if the CCP is preparing to unleash even more lethal bio-weapons? If China’s scientific fraud and bio-weapon research is not halted, then what’s stopping the rogue communist regime from unleashing a new bio-weapon every six months to stealthily perpetuate outbreaks that can be engineered to subvert detection?Yan isn’t the only expert to prove the COVID-19 is manmade. Back in 2003, the CCP attempted to swindle the world into accepting a vaccine for its coronavirus version 1.0. Later on, Dr. Shi Zhengli inserted an HIV segment into a coronavirus from horseshoe bats, making it more infectious and lethal. Horseshoe bats carry SHC014-CoV virus which can be transmitted to humans by binding to ACE2 receptors and multiply in the cells of the respiratory system.From 2007 and 2017, Shi Zhengli and colleagues created at least eight new chimeric coronaviruses with a variety of RBMs.Meanwhile, in the USA, work on this bioweapon was also being done at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, at Harvard, at Ft. Detrick, at the US Army Research Institute of Infectious Disease, and at the Food and Drug Administration’s lab in Arkansas.In 2015, the US imposed a moratorium because there was no justification for working with coronaviruses since nothing good could result; only bad. Nevertheless, development of a biological weapon continued through 2015, combining the HSC-014 coronavirus with the stars coronavirus, then adding HIV and Mers for “gain of function” (genetically mutated to make it more harmful & dangerous).This research was Published: 09 November 2015A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence [by Vineet D Menachery, Boyd L Yount Jr, Kari Debbink, Sudhakar Agnihothram, Lisa E Gralinski, Jessica A Plante, Rachel L Graham, Trevor Scobey, Xing-Yi Ge, Eric F Donaldson, Scott H Randell, Antonio Lanzavecchia, Wayne A Marasco, Zhengli-Li Shi, Ralph S Baric. Nature Medicine volume 21, pages1508–1513 (2015)]Due to the moratorium in the USA, the coronavirus was delivered to China along with $3.7M from NIAID within NIH, approved by Fauchi. It appears that Fauchi deliberately broke the law in several ways. Prof. Ralph S. Baric (University of North Carolina) received major grants from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “Fauci was a big proponent of ‘gain of function’ research, and when this was prohibited at Baric’s lab because it was considered to be too dangerous, the research was shifted to China,” Mosher explained. In China, this work on a bioweapon was continued at the Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan.China supplied the Wuhan Bat Virus which was used in the American study.It was jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81290341, 31621061) to ZLS, China Mega-Project for Infectious Disease (2014ZX10004001-003) to ZLS, Scientific and technological basis special project (2013FY113500) to YZZ and ZLS from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDPB0301) to ZLS, the National Institutes of Health (NIAID R01AI110964), the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT program to PD and ZLS, CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program to JC, NRF-CRP grant (NRF-CRP10-2012-05) to LFW and WIV “One-Three-Five” Strategic Program (WIV-135-TP1) to JC and ZLS.Pandemic.news shows how France and the US provided the CCP with the financial and scientific resources needed to develop this bioweapon.Additional funding was provided by the CIA and USAID-EPT-PREDICT funding from EcoHealth Alliance, to Z.-L.S. USAID is a front for American bio-warfare research such as that done in Tbilisi, Georgia.Laboratory materials, samples and equipment used were obtained from the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.In 2017, at Georgetown, Fauchi is recorded warning that Trump will face a pandemic which hopefully, by killing millions of citizens and ruining the economy, would bring him down.In 2019, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) actually gave the Wuhan Institute of Virology $3.7 million more, as part of a grant entitled, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence (this link).Fauci is directly to blame for this global plandemic, which was hatched and unleashed with the help of American taxpayer dollars that Fauci redirected towards this nefarious research.Some skeptics still believe the virus was natural. However, a 1/24/20 study published in The Lancet found that three of the first four cases - including the first known case - didn't provide a documented link to the Wuhan wet market. In addition, the bats that carry the family of coronaviruses linked to the new strain aren't found within 100 miles of Wuhan — but they were being studied in both local laboratories!There is simply no way that COVID-19 was able to transfer from bats to humans without some kind of deliberate genetic tampering, contends Prof. Giuseppe Tritto, a renowned biotechnology expert and President of the World Academy of Biomedical Sciences and Technologies (WABT). In his book, China COVID 19: The Chimera That Changed The World, Tritto explains how Shi Zhengli isolated RaTG13 in 2013 from Yunnan horseshoe bats of the Rhinolophus affinis variety. This was genetically modified to become COVID-19.Norwegian and British vaccine scientists have published what seems to be unequivocal evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is man-made. Researchers in India, China, etc. are reaching the same conclusion because:The mutations that would normally be seen in the course of animal to human transmission have not occurred in SARS-CoV-2, indicating that it was fully “pre-adapted” for human infection.The COVID-19 has an affinity for human ACE2 receptors over any other. SARS-CoV-2 has insertions in its protein sequence that have never been detected in nature and contribute to its infectivity and pathogenicity. The SARS-CoV-2 has a receptor binding domain specifically designed for the human angiotensin converting enzyme-2 receptor (ACE2) found in human lungs, kidneys, intestines and blood vessels.The SARS-CoV-2 has a strange furin polybasic cleavage site that its closest genetic relative, RaTG-13, does not have. It is not found in any closely-related bat coronaviruses as well as other artificially inserted charged amino acids that enhance the virus’ ability to bind to and enter human cells by forming “salt bridges” between the virus and the cell surface. This cleavage site makes the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) substantially more infectious than other coronaviruses.The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing neurological, haematological and immunological pathogenicity, which cannot be explained by infectivity via the ACE2 receptor alone. There have been wide-ranging clinical observations such as a loss of taste and smell, sore throat, dry cough, headache and severe gastrointestinal pain with diarrhea.SARS-CoV-2 binding to the bitter/sweet receptors in the upper respiratory tract provides a perfect location for transmission by coughing. Oral and upper respiratory infection can lead to transmission to the lower respiratory tract, gastrointestinal effects and a cascade of inflammation-producing immunological responses. The wide-spread systemic release of the virus, due to its co-receptor enhancement, could explain the multiple clinical findings on the cardiovascular system, immunological T-cells, cells associated with neuropathological conditions and, finally, the severe hypoxia seen in advanced cases of the disease.A Swiss research team was able to create a synthetic clone of COVID-19 by inserting genetic fragments proving it to be an “obvious chimera” (a combination of at least two pre-existing viruses). Yuri Deigin says that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) is based on an ancestral bat strain of coronavirus known as RaTG13, but with a replaced receptor binding motif (RBM) in its spike protein.COVID-19 also contains an added stretch of four different amino acids that had to have been inserted into the virus, creating a furin cleavage site “that, as virologists have previously established, significantly expands the ‘repertoire’ of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate.” Virologists like Shi Zhengli have “done many similar things in the past,” including replacing the RBM in one type of virus with the RBM of another. They have also added new furin sites to coronaviruses, creating new artificial species-specific coronaviruses that borrow from other coronaviruses in their ability to do new things.Dr. Ronen Shemesh, an Israeli geneticist who is working on developing a treatment for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) claims, “There are many reasons to believe that the COVID-19 generating SARS-CoV-2 was generated in a lab, most probably by methods of genetic engineering. I believe that this is the only way an insertion like the furin protease cleavage site could have been introduced directly at the right place and become effective. I believe that the most important issue about the differences between all coronavirus types is the insertion of a furin protease cleavage site at the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. Such an insertion is very rare in evolution. The addition of four such amino acids alone in the course of only 20 years is very unlikely.”The odds of this insertion happening in precisely the right place of the cleavage site of the spike protein to make the virus more infectious are exceptionally low. Dr. Shemesh adds, “What makes it even more suspicious is that fact that this insertion not only occurred on the right place and in the right time, but also turned the cleavage site from a Serine protease cleavage site to a furin cleavage site. This protein cleaving protein is highly promiscuous. It’s found in many human tissues and cell types and is involved in many other virus types (and) activation and infection mechanisms (it is involved in HIV, Herpes, Ebola and Dengue virus mechanisms).”Professor Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering HIV as the cause of AIDS, claims that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.Chinese researchers are said to have used coronaviruses in their work to develop an AIDS vaccine; HIV DNA fragments were found in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. “With my colleague, bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, we carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus,” explains Luc Montagnier, interviewed by Dr Jean-François Lemoine. In order to insert an HIV sequence into this genome, molecular tools are needed, and that can only be done in a laboratory. The altered elements of this virus are eliminated as it spreads: “Nature does not accept any molecular tinkering, it will eliminate these unnatural changes and even if nothing is done, things will get better, but unfortunately after many deaths.” Indian researchers scanned the novel coronavirus genome and found unique cell identification and membrane binding proteins located in the HIV genome, suggesting the 2019-nCov is a laboratory-made chimera. Pressure from China and their allies forced the Indian researchers to withdraw their published findings.U.S. intelligence agencies received reports based on publicly available cellphone and satellite data suggesting there may have been a shutdown at the lab. NBC News citing cellphone activity data showed a complete shutdown of a high-security section of the lab for 2.5 weeks between Oct. 7 and Oct. 24. The report, obtained by the London-based NBC News Verification Unit. So, the release may not have been intentional."Would be interesting if someone analyzed commercial telemetry data at & near Wuhan lab from Oct-Dec 2019," Rubio tweeted. "If it shows dramatic drop off in activity compared to previous 18 months it would be a strong indication of an incident at lab & of when it happened.President Donald Trump announced that intelligence he has been shown gives him a “high degree of confidence” that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic originated at the WIV. British Cabinet Ministers had likewise announced similar findings roughly a month prior to this, backing Trump’s later claims.They had seen several pictures later removed from the WIV website: 1) depicted school staff members entering a cave to take swabs from bats carrying various coronaviruses. None of these staff members were wearing proper protective equipment in the photo, suggesting that they may have contracted the virus from these tainted bats. 2) Rick Switzer, a science and technology expert from the U.S. embassy in Beijing who visited in March 2018 and warned the State Department, “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” 3) A third photo, showed a broken seal on one of the lab’s refrigerators holding 1,500 different coronavirus strains, any or all of which could have escaped because of this. Interestingly, the WIV web site does admit that “once the test tube for storing viruses is opened in the laboratory, it is like opening the Pandora’s Box.”Video evidence (this link) shows China’s own government workers admitting on camera that the work being done with coronavirus bats is risky and has the great potential to unleash a pandemic. “We can easily get contact with the feces of bats which contaminate everything,” says Tian Junhua, a researcher who works at the nearby Wuhan Centre for Disease Control. “So it is highly risky here,” he adds. “I feel the fear. The fear of infections.” A coronavirus typically acquires one mutation a month.The timeline created by NBC News supports suspicions that the virus may have leaked from a lab:A Jan. 24 study published in the medical journal The Lancet found that three of the first four cases - including the first known case - didn't provide a documented link to the Wuhan wet market.The bats that carry the family of coronaviruses linked to the new strain are obtained in Yunnan, more than 1,000 miles away from Wuhan open-air, food markets…where, in Wuhan labs, they were being studied.Photos and videos have emerged of researchers at both labs collecting samples from bats without wearing protective gear, which experts say poses a risk of human infection.A U.S. State Department expert who visited the WIV in 2018 wrote in a cable reported by The Washington Post: "During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, [U.S. diplomats] noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory."According to Senate Intelligence Committee member Tom Cotton, R-Ark., the Chinese military posted its top epidemiologist to the WIV in January.The Shanghai laboratory where researchers published the world's first genome sequence of the coronavirus was shut down Jan. 12, according to The South China Morning Post.According to U.S. intelligence assessments, including one published by the Department of Homeland Security and reviewed by NBC News, the Chinese government initially covered up the severity of the outbreak. Government officials threatened doctors who warned their colleagues about the virus, weren't candid about human-to-human transmission and still haven't provided virus samples to researchers.RaBtCoV/4991 was allegedly discovered by 'Batwoman' Shi and colleagues in 2012 and published in 2016, and colleagues have been asking if it's the same virus as RaTG13.Given the 100% identity on this short gene segment between RaBtCoV/4991 and RaTG13, the field has demanded clarification of whether or not these two names refer to the same virus. Dr. Shi would not respond. The answer finally came from Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and long-term collaborator of Shi, who claimed that was RaTG1327.It makes sense that the two would be the same. Shi and her team wouldn't have conducted whole genome sequencing of RaBtCoV/4991 before 2020, as it was suspected in the deaths of miners who suffered from severe pneumonia after clearing out bat droppings in a Chinese mineshaft. Given the Shi group’s consistent interests in studying SARS-like bat coronaviruses and the fact that RaBtCoV/4991 is a SARS-like coronavirus with a possible connection to the deaths of the miners, it is highly unlikely that the Shi group would be content with sequencing only a 440-bp segment of RdRp and not pursue the sequencing of the receptor-binding motif (RBM)-encoding region of the spike gene. In fact, sequencing of the spike gene is routinely attempted by the Shi group once the presence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus is confirmed by the sequencing of the 440-bp RdRp segment 25, 32, although the success of such efforts is often hindered by the poor quality of the sample."Clearly, the perceivable motivation of the Shi group to study this RaBtCoV/4991 virus and the fact that no genome sequencing of it was done for a period of seven years (2013-2020) are hard to reconcile and explain.” Meanwhile, genomic sequencing of RaTG13 was conducted in 2018.Second, why did Shi delay publication on RaTG13 until 2020 when it's got a Spike protein that can bind with human ACE2 receptors?...if the genomic sequence of RaTG13 had been available since 2018, it is unlikely that this virus, which has a possible connection to miners’ deaths in 2012 and has an alarming SARS-like RBM, would be shelved for two years without publication. Consistent with this analysis, a recent study indeed proved that the RBD of RaTG13 (produced via gene synthesis based on its published sequence) was capable of binding hACE2.Third, there has been no follow-up work on RaTG13 by Shi's group. Upon obtaining the genomic sequence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus, the Shi group routinely investigate whether or not the virus is capable of infecting human cells. This pattern of research activities has been shown repeatedly. However, such a pattern is not seen here despite that RaTG13 has an interesting RBM and is allegedly the closest match evolutionarily to SARS-CoV-2Direct genetic evidence proving RaTG13 is fraudulent also comes from Yan's group which closely examined the sequences of specific spike proteins for relevant viruses. They specifically compared mutations and found that the spike genes of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 do not contain evidence of natural evolution when compared to other coronaviruses which naturally evolved.A logical interpretation of this observation is that SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 could not relate to each other through natural evolution and at least one must be artificial. If one is a product of natural evolution, then the other one must be not. It is also possible that neither of them exists naturally. If RaTG13 is a real virus that truly exists in nature, then SARS-CoV-2 must be artificial.It is also highly likely that the sequence of the RaTG13 genome was fabricated by lightly modifying the SARS-CoV-2 sequence to achieve an overall 96.2% sequence identity. During this process, much editing must have been done for the RBM region of the S1/spike because the encoded RBM determines the interaction with ACE2 and therefore would be heavily scrutinized by others.Evidence clearly indicates that the novel coronaviruses recently published by the CCP-controlled laboratories are all fraudulent and do not exist in nature.One final proof of this conclusion is the fact that all of these viruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with bat coronaviruses ZC45 and ZXC21, which, as revealed in our earlier report1, should be the template/backbone used for the creation of SARS-CoV-2. Despite its conserved function in the viral replication cycle, the E protein is tolerant and permissive of amino acid mutations. It is therefore impossible for the amino acid sequence of the E protein to remain unchanged when the virus has allegedly crossed species barrier multiple times (between different bat species, from bats to pangolins, and from pangolins to humans). The 100% identity observed here, therefore, further proves that the sequences of these recently published novel coronaviruses have been fabricated.Yan notes that while it's not easy for the public to accept that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon due to its relatively low lethality, it indeed meets the criteria of a bioweapon. In 2005, Dr. Yang specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.It is highly contagious and transmits easily, often through respiratory routes in the form of aerosols. The most dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of supporting targeted release.All of the above have been met bySARS-CoV-2: it has taken hundreds of thousands lives, led to numerous hospitalizations, and left many with sequela and various complications; it spreads easily by contact, droplets, and aerosols via respiratory routes and is capable of transmitting from human to human, the latter of which was initially covered up by the CCP government and the WHO and was first revealed by Dr. Li-Meng Yan on January 19th, 2020 on Lude Press; it is temperature-insensitive (unlike seasonal flu) and remains viable for a long period of time on many surfaces and at 4°C (e.g. the ice/water mixture).What's more, COVID-19 spreads asymptomatically, which "renders the control of SARS-CoV-2 extremely challenging.” "In addition, the transmissibility, morbidity, and mortality of SARS-CoV-2 also resulted in panic in the global community, disruption of social orders, and decimation of the world’s economy. The range and destructive power of SARS-CoV-2 are both unprecedented.” Clearly,SARS-CoV-2 not only meets but also surpasses the standards of a traditional bioweapon. Therefore, it should be defined as an Unrestricted, manmade, deliberately released, Bioweapon, as an act of war.If you’ve any evidence contrary to what I’ve presented here, please let me know.

I read this article on web may it help youScience: Are gamers smarter than non-gamers?Non-gamers might describe them as unproductive and social recluse individuals who spend countless of hours a day in front of their PC or favourite gaming consoles. This is inevitable. Gamers have the habit of detaching themselves from the real world to dive into an otherworldly environment where they can solve problems, complete quests, or slay their virtual adversaries.But not all gamers are antisocial. In fact, a study by Nicholas Taylor, Jennifer Jenson, Suzanne de Castell, and Barry Dilouya found out that gaming augments the social lives of gamers.The researchers travelled to more than 20 public gaming events in Canada and U.S. to observe the social behaviours of gamers and survey another 375 gamers playing massive multiplayer online role playing games such as EVE Online and World of Warcraft. In tracking both the online and offline behaviours of these individuals, they found out that gaming was only one aspect of social behaviour at gaming events.“We found that gamers were often exhibiting many social behaviours at once: watching games, talking, drinking, and chatting online,” said Taylor, lead author and a professor of communication. “Gaming did not eliminate social interaction, it supplemented it.“This was true regardless of which games players were playing, and whether a player’s behaviour in the online game was altruistic. For example, a player could be utterly ruthless in the game and still socialise normally offline.”There is also a reason to believe that gamers are not only socially aware but also equipped to function in several social situations. A report based on a United States survey by research and consultancy firm LifeCourse Associates and published by gaming site Twitch revealed that gamers have more positive attributes than their non-gamer counterparts. To be specific, these gaming-obsessed individuals are more sociable and educated than non-gamers.The survey specifically revealed that gamers consider family a top priority (82 percent versus 68 percent) while also placing a high importance on friends (57 percent vs. 35 percent) than non-gamers. Gamers and their parents are also more likely to have finished their college education (43 percent and 52 percent, respectively) than non-gamers and their parents (36 percent and 37 percent, respectively).In terms of values and norms, gamers are more likely predisposed to making a positive impact on society (76 percent vs. 55 percent). They prefer patronising businesses that promote social causes (58 percent vs. 36 percent) and they give more importance on ethical business practices (78 percent vs. 65 percent).There are more benefits to gaming according to other studies. For instance, a research from the U.S. Department of Defense discovered that gamers are considerably smarter than non-gamers. There is a commonly held belief that most individuals achieve their full brain capacity by the age of 20. However, the research of Rey Perez, program officer at the warfighter performance department of the Office of Naval Research, that centred on exploring the effects of video game-like training programs has produced surprising results.Gamers perform 10 to 20 percent higher in terms of perceptual and cognitive abilities compared to non-gamers according to the research. Furthermore, the research revealed gamers have longer attention spans and larger field of vision than normal people.The aforementioned benefits have made video games an important training tool inside the U.S. Department of Defence. Perez said that video games increase the fluid intelligence of individuals regardless of their age. Accordingly, fluid intelligence is the ability to change, to meet new problems, and to develop new tactics and counter-tactics without prior knowledge or experience.Although there is empirical evidence of increased brain plasticity in video games, Perez noted that the biological and neurological process behind the phenomenon is not well understood. He hypothesised that the neural networks involved in video gaming become more pronounced, have increased blood flow, and become more synchronised with other neural networks in the brain.But not all genres of video games produce the same advantages. The study of Vikranth R. Bejjanki et al demonstrated for the first time that people who played action games like “Call of Duty” and “Unreal Tournament” had greater visual performance and prediction capacity than those who play non-action games.The Bejjanki et al study specifically compared the visual performance of 10 action gamers with that of 10 non-action gamers who played for 50 hours over nine weeks. To gauge this, the researchers measured the ability of the two groups to distinguish one set of black and white lines from another that were presented in rapid fashion. Results revealed that action gamers outperformed the non-action gamers.To further understand why action gamers had better visual performance, the researchers turned to neural modelling. They subsequently found out that the brains of these individuals were more capable of estimating what various pattern of lines would look like before they appeared and then match to those expectations to what they saw. This advantage develops from playing fast-paced action games that on the other hand, sharpens the prediction skills of the brain as it becomes exposed to better perceptual templates.Researchers from Drake University have also found out that gamers see more than non-gamers. To be specific, L. Gregory Appelbaum, Matthew S. Cain, Elise F. Darling, and Stephen R. Mitroff compared the visual sensitivity of gamers and non-gamers by subjecting them under a visual sensory memory task. Results revealed that gamers outperformed non-gamers and it further confirmed an earlier research that these individuals are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than their non-gamer counterparts.“Gamers see the world differently,” said Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry. They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.”The researchers examined three possible reasons for the apparent superior ability of gamers to make probabilistic interferences. Either they see better, they retain visual memory longer, or they have improved their decision-making. Based on the results of their study, Appelbaum et al believed that memory retention is not the reason. Instead, two other factors might be in play—it is possible that gamers see more immediately and they are better able to make the most appropriate decisions from available information.Another small study from researchers at Brown University suggests that gaming not only improves the visual skills of gamers but also may improve their learning ability for those skills. The study authored by Andrew V. Berard et al involved pitting nine frequent gamers against a control group of nine people who play video games rarely if ever. The two groups participated in a two-day trial of visual task learning. Subjects were shown an on-screen “texture” of either visual or horizontal lines and had to quickly point out—in a fraction of a second—the one area where an anomalous texture appeared. In visual processing research this is a standard protocol called a texture discrimination task.Earlier studies demonstrated that most people can be trained to improve their performance on texture discrimination tasks, but only if they are given enough time for the learning to “consolidate” in their mind, presumably as neural circuits embodying the learning take shape. If they move on to a second task too quickly, for example, that could interfere with their learning of the first one.Berard et al wanted to find out if gamers were better able to overcome this interference, compared to non-gamers. They therefore trained the subjects on a second similar task soon after training them on the first. If in the first task the main texture was horizontal, for example, the second time it was vertical, or vice versaThe researchers found out that gamers managed to improve performance on both tasks, while non-gamers did what was expected: They improved on the second task they trained on, but not on the first. Learning the second task interfered with learning the first.The data showed that gamers on average improved their combination of speed and accuracy by about 15 percent on their second task and about 11 percent on their first task. Non-gamers produced the same average 15 percent improvement on their second task, but they actually got a bit worse on the first task they learned, by about 5 percent. Despite the small number of participants, the results proved statistically significant.During the recent years, research on the positive impacts of video games have become increasingly important for researchers from several fields including communication, psychology, and neuroscience, among others. There is more to video games than merely passing the time according to them.“A lot of people still view video games as a time-wasting activity even though research is beginning to show their beneficial aspects,” Berard said. “If we can demonstrate that video games may actually improve some cognitive functioning, perhaps we, as a society, can embrace newer technology and media with positive application.”According to the Twitch report, perceptions about the effects of games have taken a positive turn. Today, educational games are increasingly being integrated into classroom teaching and workplace environments as educators and employers use them to engage individuals and hone the development of new skills. In retirement homes, gaming consoles have become instrumental in keeping the physical and mental facets of aging individual active and sharp.Further details of the LifeCourse Associates survey are found in the report “The new face of gamers” published in 2014 by Twitch. More details of the study of Taylor et al are in the article “Public displays of play: Studying online games in physical setting” published in 2014 in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. More information about the research and works of Perez are found in the article “Adults benefit from playing video game” published online in 2010 by the Defense Media Activity of the U.S. Department of Defense.Further details of the study of Bejjanki et al are in the article “Action video game play facilitates the development of better perceptual templates” published in 2014 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More details of the study of Appelbaum et al are in the article “Action video game playing is associated with improved visual sensitivity, but not alterations in visual sensory memory” published in 2013 in the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Further details of the study of Berard et al are in the article “Frequent video game players resist perceptual interference” published in 2015 in the journal PLoS One.Source LinkScience: Are gamers smarter than non-gamers? | Version Daily