BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Taxi drivers ‘have brain sat-nav’ If using your brain to navigate makes it bigger and better, than what does using satnav and other technologies do for it? (tags: transport neuroscience navigation brain) India Se Online As Non-Resident Indians (or NRIs) we are among the most educated and highest earning ethnic […]
I can’t find the original article on the IHT website, but there’s a great piece in today’s edition on how pharmaceutical companies push their drugs by funding — I would say bribing — doctors. It’s written by Daniel Carlat, who writes a blog and publishes the Carlat Psychiatry Report. The most interesting part of the […]
Doctor’s Decorating Taste Originally uploaded by Jeremy Wagstaff. Maybe other countries are different, but where I live doctors don’t just put any old picture on the wall. They seem to prefer to scare the bejesus out of you with graphic cross sections of your innards, usually in a state of advanced decay. This one had […]
Football (OK, soccer) is pushing to the forefront of adopting interesting technologies. Here’s one I hadn’t heard from Bolton Wanderers, where players enter a chamber at minus 120 degrees Celsius to enhance muscle recovery after training. It’s called cryotherapy, according to the Daily Mail: The technique was originated in Japan in 1978 to help […]
I long suspected this was the case, and now we’ve proof: Try too hard to remember something and you can almost feel yourself forgetting it. Stop trying to remember and it will come back. Of course, this could be extended to other mental activity: Your brain can only cope with so much stuff, so better […]
Great piece in the NYT/IHT on the company behind Sudoku and similar games. Their approach — no trademarking, harnessing users to help develop and perfect games — all sounds very Open Source: clipped from www.iht.com Nikoli’s secret, Kaji said, lay in a kind of democratization of puzzle invention. The company itself does not actually create […]
Jan Chipchase, who has to have one of the coolest jobs on the planet, points out that as phones get cheaper — or at least appear to, as they are sold for very little as part of a service package — so does our perception of their value. Living in a country where you buy […]
A remark by Will Wright picked up by Jason Kottke captures why movies and computer games are different, and why we should not think one is going to edge out the other. I would add something else: Computer games allow us to experience emotion, while movies allow us to feel those emotions vicariously. We have […]
My WSJ column for the BBC on devices to wake you up in the morning. Here are some links for products mentioned in the piece: Clocky SleepTracker
Those who got excited about the idea of a washable keyboard (which I wrote about in a WSJ.com column a few weeks back — sorry, subscription only; a version appeared on the BBC World Service, and is available as a podcast) can now get excited about Washable Computer Mice, from Unotron: Unotron’s pioneering mice design […]