Interesting to note was that the radiation seemed to both prevent the Alzheimer’s onset, if applied in young adulthood, and reverse memory impairment, if applied when Alzheimer’s was well under way.

But don’t schedule picnics at your local cell phone tower just yet. This is the first study to suggest this connection, and moreover, there is no known mechanism that could explain these effects. It’s also too early to say whether or not the results are repeatable and apply to humans as well.

So sorry mom, looks like you’re going to have to go to that home after all. Also, I’m taking your phone.

Read more: BBC News – Mobile phone radiation ‘protects’ against Alzheimer’s

This Samsung laptop prototype has a transparent OLED display. Although it does have some useful applications (who else is excited about Facebook chatting while doing donuts on Mr. Sweenson’s yard?), it’s a little too soon for this technology to have big impacts.  Until this can be used on windows, contacts, and ironically aforementioned windshields, this won’t be too popular, unlike breathing heavily and smelling like farts to Mr. Sweenson.

It’s only 2010. Pace yourself, technology. Like Mr. Sweenson does, when he has to push his portable lung and colostomy wagon up the hill to our street. And by the way: we all can see how impressive that is, Sweenson. No need to brag-cough about it.

Courtesy of:
Geekologie and Engadget

During my daily scramble to flush all of my free hours down the dirty toilets of the internet, I accidentally found a SEED magazine article which includes a great basic breakdown of why resveratrol is so important to the fight against aging.

In summary: sir2, a human enzyme, has two functions: controlling gene expression and repairing broken DNA. Over a human’s lifetime, more and more DNA becomes broken, and more and more sir2 is used to repair it, leading to shortage of sir2 for gene expression regulation. The resulting lack of gene expression regulation over time leads to diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

The theory then is that resveratrol, an ingredient in red wine, activates SIRT1, the gene which codes for sir2. So with enough resveratrol, our bodies could produce enough sir2 to both repair DNA and regulate gene expression. France’s high consumption of red wine, and therefore resveratrol, is the currently popular solution to the French paradox.

For more on this and the recent resveratrol studies on mice, check out the SEED article.

In accordance with his governmental policy of frenzied Latino passion, Uruguayan president Tabaré Vázquez instituted a program in 2007 that is providing all schoolchildren with their own One Laptop Per Child laptop. The program, which includes internet infrastructure and training, costs $260 per child, but only constitutes 5% of Uruguay’s education budget.

Uruguay is the first country to provide the OLPC universally, but it’s important to note that it’s one of the most highly developed countries in South America, and that the OLPC is still too expensive to break through the culture shock resistance it induces in most developing countries.

Courtesy of:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Laptop for every pupil in Uruguay:

The good news is, a lot of the old computers that we donate away when we upgrade are creating new jobs in places like Ghana and Hong Kong. The bad news is, these jobs consist of picking through toxic waste, burning plastic in the open air, and melting and boiling down toxic chemicals with no safety equipment. In the Chinese city of Guiyu alone, tens of thousands of people do this for a living.

Regulations like the proposed Indian law cited by the video might force electronics companies to take more interest in the end phase of their products’ lives.  Until that happens, the beautiful free market will send e-waste to the cheapest processing plants available: wide eyed, beautiful, slowly dying foreigners.

You can find where to recycle your e-waste at Earth911, but I can’t tell you where it will go. God help us all.

Courtesy of

• PBS FRONTLINE

These buddy cop movie stars-to-be are announcing Google Goggles, Google’s first stab at Augmented Reality (although yes, nitpickers, I suppose the Android GPS navigation system is also a form of AR). Goggles is an app for Android phones that enables quick photo search–you open the app, take a picture of an object, and are given a results page for the object. Like Layar, an Android/iPhone app, it can work without taking pictures, using GPS and compass information to tell you what buildings you are looking at to provide business information from the web. 

What will be interesting to see is the evolution of Google Goggles’s image recognition ability. Imagine it giving you the names of plants and animals you encounter on hikes, or the name of gross random vegetables you find on your plate at the ethnic restaurant your mom forced you to go to, even though you did all your homework and have been nice to Grandma even after she started smelling like Tiger Woods’ crash day Hanes. I suspect that with apps like Goggles, Android phones will start to look more and more like the device in the jaw dropping Sixth Sense TED presentation.

Since I don’t have a Droid yet (feel free to buy me one from my cam site wish list), I’m going to camp out tomorrow at my local early adopter geek hangout: the Whole Foods deli counter. I can’t wait to giggle at gaggles of Google Goggles goons gobbling gabagool.

University of Washington professor Babak Parviz has taken humanity one step closer to building Iron Man with a contact lens that possesses a microcircuit-powered LED. Its working control circuits, power circuits, communications circuits, and antenna  provide a proof of concept for Augmented Reality lenses that could receive information from a phone or computer and display it directly on our eyes. Now several tech fanboy rabbits have attested to its safety.

Parviz, an engineer with expertise in nanotechnology, microfabrication, and self assembly, detailed the material and size restraints that held his team back in a mid October letter to the IEEE. First, conventional processes for producing the silicon parts are incompatible with the lens polymer, so the God-players fabricate most of their own parts, which they have ingeniously arranged to then self assemble. Then there’s the safety aspect; the whole circuit is toxic, so it must be covered in biocompatible polymers. The size limit is also tough: all of the electronic parts have to fit within a 1.2 millimeter circle on the lens. But while the rabbit only got to try out the single LED version, Parviz’s team has already produced lenses with an 8 by 8 array, and sets a 60 by 60 version as their end goal.

What various pixel resolutions look like. Keep in mind that Parviz hasn’t mastered color differentiation yet for his displays.

One last point: am I the only one uncomfortable with testing these lenses on rabbits? Bugs Bunny already causes enough trouble; with a GPS enabled heads up display and some Acme tactical nukes, he could very well pass Marvin the Martian as the number one threat to America.

Courtesy of Singularity Hub and IEEE Spectrum

According to a random singer-songwriter and a guy whose right upper lip is in a fight with the rest of his body, Google is now ranking search results according to what they think you want to find, based on your browsing history.

Though personalization is old news at Google, this has potentially paradigm-shifting results for web business. If the top ten results for a given term are no longer the same for everyone, how do you know how your site ranks for your customers?

This is probably going to have far reaching effects on the already dying SEO business, and internet marketing will continue to move to the more conventional, and now more stable territories of blog word of mouth and Adsense. But not Twitter. Seriously, stay out of there.

Courtesy of:

• Your Next Google Search Is Going to Freak You Out [Google] (gizmodo.com)