Cognitive Labs

Inset: image of planet Fomalhaut b orbiting star Fomalhaut

UC Berkeley and LLNL astronomers led by Paul Kalas and Eugene Chiang have taken the first optical picture of a planet outside the solar system, with collaboration from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and JPL in Pasadena.

The planet, with a mass of no more than 3 Jupiters and a likely Saturn-like ring system, orbits the star Fomalhaut (Arabic: fum al-hawt فم الحوت or 'mouth of the whale') in the constellation Piscis Austrinis, 25 light years away. Fomalhaut has a diameter 1.7 times that of the sun and is only 300 million years old, compared to an estimated 5 billion for the sun. Over the past decade, exoplanet hunting has become an intriguing new field, with the presence of planets mostly detected through careful measurements of radial velocity. In 2007, the first-ever spectroscopy of exoplanets commenced with HD209458b in Pegasus, where the planetary spectrum could be resolved against the overwhelming glare of its sun.

It's now believed that those stars with heavier elements in their spectra (e.g., iron) will have a corresponding greater likelihood of earth or mars-like solid planets, leading to a vast potential for discovery using well established spectroscopic techniques coupled with more powerful telescopes to probe the basic DNA of stars and accompanying planetary systems without ever leaving earth.

Fomalhaut has appeared frequently in fiction and also in the RPG Final Fantasy as the nomenclature referring to a class of lasergun. Berkeley-native and writer Phillip K. Dick (Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, etc.) believed that he periodically was in receipt of communications beamed from Fomalhaut's then-unknown planetary system which he imagined exerted a matrix-like control over earth. Interestingly, Ursula K. LeGuin, daughter of UC-Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (studies of Ishi, the last 'wild Indian') wrote a novel, Rocannon's World, speculatively set on the second planet of Fomalhaut, which of course, happens to be known as Fomalhaut b today - and has now been photographed.

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With the Coming of the New Year, you'll now be able to test and train your brain a little bit, or a lot.

There are several completely new exercises and, in addition, on every test there is an intensity adjuster. Start low, at 5 or 10 repetitions - and increase to 30 or 40 repetitions as you get more proficient.

This might remind you of a routine at the gym.

As you increase your ability to concentrate and focus, you'll begin to change your brain for the better. As the experts have said, regular workouts for an extended period of time are the key. But even if you can only spend a few minutes a day, with the lower rep settings you can exercise your brain in just a few minutes - with a variety of exercises that focus on different memory and attention capacities - a much more concentrated form of exercise than suggestions to "read" or do "crossworld puzzles," and 2X to 3X more effective, in less time according to a recent JAMA article, with benefits measureable many years into the future.

While they may be fun, crosswords don't have a time element. Time-definite exercise trains your brain to be quicker through enhancement of "neural conduction velocity" which is the scientific term used for "brain speed."

These changes can make your brain act younger by stimulating neural connections and if you are young, increase the potential to learn, store, and recall information. The variety and depth insures that you get a balanced exercise.

Labels: alzheimers, brain, brainage, brainspeed, learning, neural, nintendo, velocity, youth