Embarrassment can have an advantage.
If tripping in public or mistaking an overweight woman for a mother-to-be leaves you red-faced, don’t feel bad. A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that people who are easily embarrassed are also more trustworthy, and more generous…
Continue reading… “Easily embarrassed? Study finds people will trust you more”
Two faces are not better than one.
Doctors at Holy Family Hospital in Rawalpindi have been trying to save a baby born with two faces, as he has been having breathing problems. They have been unable to feed the baby through the mouth, sources have said. The baby is the third child of a couple from Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Paediatric Ward Senior Registrar Dr Qaisar Aziz said that the new born baby has been shifted to the intensive care unit of the children’s ward and was being take good care of…
Continue reading… “Two-faced baby born in Pakistan”
Is Wi-Fi the new spy eye?
Neal Patwari of the University of Utah discovered that breathing affects Wi-Fi signal strength. Chest expansion during a breath bends the wireless signals and they lose some power. This slight drop can be measured and used to calculate your breathing rate.
Measuring someone’s breathing rate is helpful, but the use of this technology as a spy tool is where things get interesting…
Continue reading… “Wi-Fi signals may be used to track your movement inside your house”
Drinking that depression away.
For many women, the mood-elevating effects of a cup of coffee may be more than fleeting. A new study shows that women who regularly drink coffee – the fully caffeinated kind – have a 20 percent lower risk of depression than nondrinkers. Decaf, soft drinks, chocolate, tea and other sources of caffeine did not offer the same protection against depression, possibly because of their lower levels of caffeine…
Continue reading… “Coffee drinking linked to less depression in women”
Information is now moveable in the brain.
This is uncanny: A Tel Aviv University team lead by Professor Matti Mintz have developed a synthetic cerebellum that can receive sensory inputs from the brain, analyze them, and return information to other parts of the brain!
The device is now working in rats, and has effectively restored lost brain functions caused by damaged tissue. However, the most important thing is that this proves that brain-to-machine communication can work in a bi-directional way, with a machine getting information from the brain, analyzing it and then talking back to the brain. As Mintz puts it…
Continue reading… “Scientists can now extract, record and return information to the brain”
Will rent-a-pet services take off around the world?
Guinea pigs are sociable animals and Swiss law prohibits owners from keeping the furry rodents on their own. But what happens when one dies? Don’t fret, just call Priska Küng, who runs a ‘rent-a-guinea pig’ service to provide companionship for grieving, lonely animals in the twilight of their years. She lives with around 80 of the furry, squeaky little creatures, in addition to six cats, a number of rabbits, hamsters and mice in the village of Hadlikon, some 30 kilometers from Zürich.
Küng, 41, rents out her guinea pigs, a service that has been in high demand in the Alpine nation ever since animal welfare rules were tightened up a few years ago. Switzerland has forbidden people from keeping lone guinea pigs because the animals are sociable and need each other’s company. As a result, the sudden death of a guinea pig, shocking enough in itself, can also place the hapless owners outside the law if they only had two of the pets. That is where Küng comes in…
Continue reading… “Rent-a-guinea pig service takes off in Switzerland”
Costs have risen dramatically for raising children.
According to the US Dept of Agriculture, the cost of raising a child in a middle-income family has increased by 40 percent over the past ten years. Every major category of child-rearing expense has seen steep increase: day-care, education, food, gas, medical insurance, and so on. At this rate, childrearing may become a luxury item for America’s increasingly wealthy super-rich…
Continue reading… “Cost of raising middle-income child in USA increases by 40% in ten years”
Scientists have just created the antimagnet.
Scientists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona designed a magnetic cloak that’ll both shield an object from an outside magnetic field and prevent an internal one from leaking out. It’s an antimagnet and it’ll have various military and medical applications.
The antimagnet uses a superconducting material that blocks the internal magnetic field of an object and several dampening layers to block the effect of the superconductor on the external magnetic field. Sounds complicated, and it is, but it could save your life some day…
Continue reading… “Scientists design a novel magnetic cloaking device”
Is his theory out the window?
This is extremely shocking: CERN scientists using a 1300-ton particle detector have measured particles travelling faster than the speed of light. If confirmed, this discovery could invalidate Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity and revolutionize physics.
Einstein’s theory says that there’s nothing in the universe that could travel faster than light. Now, CERN scientists believe this may be wrong according to their latest experiment…
Continue reading… “Faster than light particles could wreck Einstein’s Relativity Theory”
An amazing new find.
Chalk another one up for Google Earth seeing everything we can’t. Australian armchair archaeologist David Kennedy simply fired up the app and managed to rediscover the ancient ruins of structures that rival the Nazca lines in southern Peru.
The lines were originally discovered by British RAF pilot Percy Maitland in 1927, but this is the first time they’ve ever been seen in all their glory. Kennedy used Maitland’s photos with Google Earth to pinpoint their locations. And Google offers really the only high resolution glimpse at them that can be seen by the ordinary viewer…
Continue reading… “Google Earth reveals strange Nazca-Like ruins in Saudi Arabia”
If you live in the US and think the internet speeds are as fast, you may be surprised to find out that the country is actually ranked 26th in a list of average global download speeds. In the eye-catching infographic below the US (outside of Google’s offices that is) looking like a digital laggard, but who could be sitting pretty at the top?
Digital download delivery company Pando surveyed about 35 petabytes (a petabyte is 1000 terabytes) of data from 27 million downloads from 20 million computers in 224 countries, and found that South Korea has the world’s fastest internet service, in terms of download speed. The country averaged download speeds of 17.62 Mbps. Compared to the download speeds in the US, 4.93 Mbps, South Korea is lightning fast…
Continue reading… “US download speeds ranked at just 26th in the world”
Another reason the patent system is so difficult.
Last month, Google stepped up to defend Android coders against notorious patent troll Lodsys. Apple fought the company a few months earlier on behalf of iOS developers. Patent reform is a hot topic right now, especially after President Obama just signed legislation that means the U.S. is shifting to a “first to file” (over “first to invent”) system. This won’t help much with the patent troll situation, which Boston University researchers James Bessen and Mike Meurer say have cost publicly-traded defendants $500 billion since 1990…
Continue reading… “Patent Trolls costing an astronomical $500 Billion”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.