Cognitive Labs

Even marine mammals can take cognitive tests

Scientists are finding that drops in combined visual and spatial processing skills can be an effective notification for possible onset of Alzheimer's. Visuospatial skills may be assessed through a combination of exercises that require acuity to detect changes in patterns across a field of view, often with lighted stimuli.

A request by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to France to return fragments of a mural from the tomb of New Kingdom official Tetaki - one of many objects in the Louvre, has apparently been successful, as French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand announced to the press. Copies of the Rosetta Stone may be found in various museums around the world, though the original is in the British Museum



In the register above, three muu's present a gift to the official Tetaki in Thebes

Look at this cool hack that lets you speed up your browsing experience by controlling the rendering speed of the browser in Windows.

Yes, it's accessible under the Command prompt when you right click the prompt from the Start menu and select 'administrator.' From there, define the display attributes using the syntax commands found inside the youtube flash video. Voila, your browser speeds up by a few milliseconds, correcting your PC's neuronal reflex latency...

Artist's rendering of moon impact mission


How much water is on the moon?

Scientists think there is quite a bit, potentially, hidden in dark craters.

In addition, moon rock samples also have been found to contain water. Even rocks on earth, from magma to sedimentary deposits like borax, also contain water molecules in crystalline form. It's possible that the moon had a much wetter past, and that life in some form may exist, if indeed the presence of water is significant - even in an underground, microscopic state. Remember the moon is only 250,000 miles from the earth, or approximately ten earth diameters away.


Water-bearing moon rocks

Asteroid or comet impacts on the earth over the last 1.3 billion years could have blanketed the moon with life-bearing debris which could have retained life, if it was kept warm enough and distant enough from the vacuum of space.

Yesterday was the birthday of the barcode, originally conceived as a bullseye pattern rather than vertical lines of varied width. (This bullseye pattern was later used in the small package industry as Maxicode or UPScode) and deployed at the CACHE hub or Chicago Area Consolidation Hub in the 1990's by UPS, which at the time was the largest and most sophisticated package sorting facility in the world, designed to serve midwest manufacturing and the industrial heartland of the U.S. including automotive suppliers.

Data was captured using Dick Tracy-like wrist and ring scanners. (Keep in mind that the state of the art at the time was pen and 'gun' laser scanning devices by companies like Symbol Technologies and Telxon; as well as L-Tron and Zebra Technologies, manufacturer of the all-important laser thermal label printers accompanying PC-based shipping systems, encoding all of the package information in the barcode; oftentimes this data was sent ahead of time using proprietary data configurations as well as ANSI X12 and EDIFACT(UN) EDI standards, plus XML; creating a kind of symbiosis between the dataflow and the printed label.

Australian surfer Mark Visser catches a 36-foot ride off of Cow Barbie, Australia associated with the recent geological activity in the South Pacific.

New research by Purdue researchers published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease suggests that polyphenols may be able to cross the blood-brain barrier after 10 or more days of regular, moderate consumption - in that antioxidant compounds were found in the brains of an animal subject group after consistent utilization. On the other hand, irregular, heavy consumption of polyphenols does not seem to provide a corresponding level of benefits. This category of antioxidant is found in red wines/grapes, berries, teas, and certain other natural substances and may inhibit the formation of amyloid plaques. Mastering the quantity, pacing, and variety of antioxidants in the diet appears to be key to optimizing the impact on human health.

Labels: polyphenols