Men who use computers as they enter their winter years have a better chance of avoiding dementia than those who don’t, according to a new Australian study.

Older Men Who Use Computers Have Lower Risk of Dementia, compiled by researchers at the University of Western Australia’s Centre for Health and Ageing, is one output of the the Health In Men Study (HIMS) study that has seen “5506 community-dwelling men aged 69 to 87 years followed for up to 8.5 years.”
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Robots are already stronger than humans, able to lift thousands of pounds at a time. In many ways, they’re smarter than people, too; machines can perform millions of calculations per second, and even beat us at chess. But we could at least take solace in the fact that we could still outrun our brawny, genius robot overlords if we needed to.

Until now, that is. A four-legged robot, funded by the Pentagon, has just run 28.3 miles per hour. That’s faster than the fastest man’s fastest time ever. Oh well, ruling … Read More → "Pentagon’s robot cheetah is faster than Usain Bolt"

Leveraging the high number of specialized heat-transfer veins in the palm of the human hand, researchers at Stanford have developed a thermal exchange glovethat is able to cool a person’s core temperature in a matter of minutes. Turns out this is helpful for athletes.

The glove’s effects on athletic performance didn’t become apparent until the researchers began using the glove to cool a member of the lab — the confessed “gym rat” and frequent coauthor Vinh Cao — between sets of pull-ups. The glove seemed to nearly erase his muscle fatigue; … Read More → "Magic cooling glove “better than steroids” for athletic performance improvement"

While it’s not something most people will ever have to resort to, there are a few legitamate reasons to fake your own death. Of course, if you do it because you think you’re wanted for a crime, it might be a good idea to check that you are actually wanted first:

Bennie Wint thought he was a wanted man, so he went. On the eve of his marriage to Patricia Hollingsworth in 1989, he went for a swim, and never came back. He was presumed drowned, and his fiance, his ex-wife, and … Read More → "10 people who have faked their own deaths"

There’s no shortage of heart rate monitor apps available for the iPhone, most of which take their readings by detecting the pulsating blood flow through a finger placed over the iPhone camera’s lens. But we’ve recently seen the release of a new kind of heart rate app that doesn’t require any physical contact with the phone as it takes its readings by simply looking at your face.
via Gizmag

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Residents of Linz, Austria recently saw lights in the sky. 50 of them, actually, as that’s the number of quadrotors that took to the air to perform a synchronized light show.

Called “The Cloud in the Web,” the show featured 50 AscTec Hummingbird quadrocopters all communicating via radio, programmed by a team formed from Ars Electronica Futurelab and Ascending Technologies GmbH. 50 is apparently the highest number of quadrotors that have synchronized with … Read More → "Record-breaking swarm of 50 quadrocopters puts on show"

Although it has a pretty wide following within a certain community of geeks and web natives, Reddit achieved another whole level of mainstream status recently when President Obama agreed to do one of the site’s crowdsourced “Ask Me Anything” interviews. In the wake of that event,New York Times media writer David Carr looked at how the web community has been able to grow even after being acquired by Advance Publications, the Newhouse-owned media giant that also owns a number of newspapers such as the recently downsized& … Read More → "What newspapers and other media could learn from Reddit"

Fast-food giant McDonald’s will be eschewing its trademark beef burgers to open its first all-vegetarian outlet in the world. 

The vegetarian McDonald’s restaurant will be opening its doors by mid-next year, in northern India, near the Golden Temple in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar. 

Consumption of meat is forbidden at the shrine, and vegetarian meals are served as part of the pilgrim’s experience.
via Design Taxi

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Starting next month, Kinect’s awesome gestural control powers are coming to commercial/consumer Windows apps, and to prepare developers, Microsoft is getting ready to release some interesting new design samples for Kinect and Windows.

Overall, Kinect coming to Windows desktop apps means that developers who’ve never had to think about designing for gestural controls are about to run into a fun, new minefield of challenges. To help devs prepare for the inevitable, the company has released a new set of guidelines and how-tos for creating Kinect Windows apps.
via Read More → "Microsoft preps for Kinect-controlled Windows apps, including new UI guidelines"

Last Friday the Sun put on a magnificent display, ejecting a massive solar filament that was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in all its glory.

According to NASA’s announcement, the filament – a form of solar prominence – had been hovering in the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona, since early August, and erupted into space at 8:36pm GMT on August 31.
via The Register

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