Attention, mind-control victims: mad scientists want to zap your brain. But you knew that.
It’s a problem every student has when cramming for an exam: some of the information is usually forgotten. The common belief is that your brain simply doesn’t have the capacity necessary to process both memories in quick succession. But is that true?
Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) decided… read more
Are you a geek who has trouble “reading” people? Now there new hope.
Research at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Cambridge to help people on the autism spectrum has spawned two new technologies to measure emotional response, along with a company called Affectiva to market them.
In the videos below, MIT’s Dr. Rosalind Picard demonstrates these technologies.
Remember the movie Brainstorm? Imagine watching someone’s dream, or tapping directly into the mind of a coma patient. University of California, Berkeley scientists claim they have finally achieved this classic futuristic movie “mind reading” trope. Sorta.
They’re using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models to decode and reconstruct people’s dynamic visual experiences.
So far, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips you’ve… read more
* Results may vary
I love the premise: take off on a global trek to interview the world’s oldest people, top health and fitness gurus, and smartest life-extension scientists, and ask one question: what’s your secret?
In How To Live Forever, a new film from Variance Films (opening in New York Friday May 13 and L.A. May 20), producer/director Mark Wexler (Seeing Double, Me & My Matchmaker,… read more
OK, this one’s right out of The Matrix and The Manchurian Candidate.
Imagine watching a computer screen while lying down in a brain imaging machine and automatically learning how to play the guitar or lay up hoops like Shaq O’Neal, or even how to recuperate from a disease — without any conscious knowledge.
Researchers at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan… read more
Attention, telephone babblers, library whisperers, and hecklers: Japanese researchers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology want you to shut the bleep up.
They’ve developed the “Speech-jammer” gun, which will reduce you to incoherent stuttering from up to 90 feet away.
It works by recording your words and then sending them back with a delay of a few hundred milliseconds (it’s more effective… read more
At Peter Thiel’s invitation-only “Breakthrough Philanthropy” event in San Francisco on December 7, which brought together Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs with eight of the most visionary non-profits, Patri Friedman, grandson of legendary economist Milton Friedman, presented one of the most radical, imaginative concepts I’ve heard in some time. Here’s the text of his four-minute talk (video below — other Breakthrough Philanthropy speaker videos here).… read more
“We are so excited and pleased to release a new version [of Flutter] that allows you to control music & videos in Google Chrome using gestures — just in time for the holiday season. Flutter now supports YouTube, Pandora, Grooveshark & Netflix. We will be updating AppStore version in early 2013. For now direct download the new version.”… read more
Evolutionary biologist Michael Rose, professor at University of California, Irvine, says he has discovered a natural way to achieve “biological immortality” without the use of anti-aging drugs and stem cell treatments.
“It’s one you can start this evening,” the author of Evolutionary Biology of Aging shared in his talk Saturday at Humanity+ @ Caltech in Los Angeles. “It comes at no cost, you don’t have… read more
This is fantastic news for journalists and voters: the Internet Archive has launched the free TV News Search & Borrow service.
The collection now contains 350,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C. The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired. Older materials are also being added.… read more
Well, the 44-year mystery has finally been solved, The Company of Biologists just announced. Biologists have settled the argument and resolved how fleas jump: with their toes, not their knees. (Ah, I could have told them that — ever try jumping with your knees, unless you’re a TM practitioner, that is?)
In 1967, Henry Bennet-Clark discovered that fleas store the energy needed to catapult themselves… read more
With tremendous volumes of information appearing online every day in social networks, websites, and blogs (mea culpa), the need to train computers to understand human language is now becoming critical, said Chris Manning, Stanford University associate professor of computer science and linguistics, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in San Diego on Feb. 19.
“The problem of the age is information overload.… read more
Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber is Director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab, IDSIA. His research team’s artificial neural networks (NNs) have won many international awards, and recently were the first to achieve human-competitive performance on various benchmark data sets. I asked him about their secrets of success.… read more
Keep the holiday bulge off by exercising, controlling cravings, and paying attention to weight and eating [J Consult Clin Psychol].
Eat right to keep weight off and live longer. You can lower risk your risk of an early death from chronic disease by making healthier food choices more frequently. Eat more frequent amounts of low-fat dairy products, poultry, fruits and vegetables, and fish;… read more
Welcome to our new weekly Health Tips column, covering breaking news of medical findings and other health-related information you can use now, or in the near future. This week: new stroke treatments, toxins in food packaging and cashier receipts, and new risks from alcohol and sugary drinks.
Three new stroke treatments: DHA, found in fish oil, protects the brain from damage and enhances recovery, even five hours… read more