Author Archive
Dark chocolate a day keeps high blood pressure away
24
Oct
Artery-friendly flavonoids in dark chocolate are so powerful that a daily piece the size of a Hershey's Kiss can lower your blood pressure. Eating that much only once or twice a week cut heart failure risk by a third in a recent study.
Weird Science’s pessimistic dogs won’t play fetch
24
Oct
Your dog isn't misbehaving, it's just a pessimist: We make jokes about other people's separation anxiety, but people are hardly the only who experience it—our pets often do as well. Some dogs and cats (and possibly other species) will often respond to an owner's absence with various misbehaviors, from treating a bed as a litterbox to chewing up the furniture. Why do only some pets respond this way to their owner's absence? Because the ones that do are inherently pessimistic. Stick them in a situation where they had to run to a bowl that may or may not contain food, and the ones that showed separation anxiety tended to run to the bowl more slowly, as if they expected to be disappointed by its contents.
Senility strikes the bees (no word on the birds yet): No, it's not the cause of colony collapse, but the memory deficits that we humans develop with aging are apparently widespread in the animal kingdom. Bees that were given a chance to adjust to a change in hive location did worse if they were older. The problem isn't that they consistently fail to form new memories; instead, memory performance gets more variable, and the bees can't seem to get rid of memories of their old hive location.
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U.S. College Degrees by County
24
Oct
“Americans are better educated now than ever, but the distribution of people with college degrees is growing increasingly unequal,†write Roberto Gallardo and Bill Bishop in the Daily Yonder. “And the clustering of people with higher education is creating greater disparities in regional incomes and unemployment.†Their article includes three U.S. county maps showing how much above or below the national average each county has been in terms of number of adults with a college degree since 1990. Via David Brin.
U.S. College Degrees by County first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on October 24, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Crowe. Distributed under a Creative Commons licence.
Which of these is not a web browser?
22
Oct
Most readers landing upon this page wouldn’t require a seconds hesitation in answering the question posed above.
But for a contestant on India’s version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ it required an entire audience vote to pick an answer.
The contestant above isn’t alone in not being clued up on the divide between ‘the web’ and the tools one uses to access the web. Google’s infamous vox-pop on the streets of New York also proved this with less than 8% of people quizzed able to answer the question of ‘What is a browser?’.
But does it matter?
As an advocate for Ubuntu I’m acutely aware of how easy bamboozling casual users is when rolling off terms like ‘web browser’, ‘CPU’, ‘RAM’, ’64 bit’, ‘graphics chip’, ‘taskbar’, etc. It’s all a densely packed jargon-jungle for which they have no inclination to explore.
But dig a little deeper and people are actually a lot smarter than given credit for. Had those people in New York been given a laptop and asked to log in to Facebook the majority would’ve managed it fine.
Whether accustomed to the ‘little blue E’, ‘the orange ball’, ‘the big red O’ or the ‘rainbow wheel’ people know how to get online and it’s this ‘doing’ part that matters most.
Do Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol?
22
Oct
Smart kids end up drinking more as adults than less intelligent children, according to an analysis of U.S. and U.K. social data.
A robot uprising comedy from Jack Black and the director of Hot Tub Time Machine? [Exclusive]
22
Oct
New evidence that Alzheimer’s disease is infectious [Brains]
22
Oct
Guy Asks Obama: “Mr. President, Sign My iPadâ€
22
Oct
The above photo is probably one of the coolest things you’ll see all day. Not only does the guy wearing the Obama shirt look incredibly calm about meeting the President, but he’s also offering President Obama his iPad to sign. And, no – not with a permanent marker; with President Obama’s finger, using Adobe’s Ideas application. How cool is that?
Sylvester Cann IV, the iPad-toting gentleman, told TechCrunch:
At a rally in Seattle, WA at the University of Washington, the President used the touchscreen on my iPad to give me his autograph. Secret service was leery about the idea, but they warmed up to the idea and the President thought it was cool.
He looked slightly surprised, but proceeded to use his finger to scribble on the iPad using the Adobe Ideas app.
I have a video of the event as well. This HAS to be the first time an iPad has received a Presidential autograph.
We’ve embedded Sylvester’s video below, along with an iPad screenshot showing President Obama’s signature. In addition to this, you can also check out Sylvester’s mini-site which pays homage to the event, titled: “I figured, ‘Why not ask?’†All that’s left to say is: well done, Sylvester!
