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Fat Moms Have Stupider Kids
Women who are obese before they become pregnant are at higher risk of having children with lower cognitive function - as measured by math and reading tests taken between ages 5 to 7 years - than are mothers with a healthy prepregnancy weight, new research suggests.
This headline though.
Can posting pictures to Flickr reveal your hometown?
The idea is sort of obvious when you think about it. Provide an EXIF data of your photos that says where in the world you took them, and someone can guesstimate where you might be located. Now add a computer algorithm which can sort that for you. An interesting twist on the stalker central idea, written by yours truly.
Not only is ultraviolet from x-rays bad for you, science will spoil Christmas! But it does make for very neat art.
Someone dared took a video of me ice skating and made it into a Denver Museum commercial!
Time travel will never be possible
“The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had proved that a single photon, or unit of light, “obeys the traffic law of the universe.”
“Einstein claimed that the speed of light was the traffic law of the universe or in simple language, nothing can travel faster than light,” the university said on its website.”
I remember reading this a few days ago and thinking, well, that’s obvious (and ooh! Hai HKU!) Besides, if it was possible, then people from the future are really good are keeping it a secret from our world today…
[via Discovery]
Educational picnics here we come! (via Reddit).
I wish I had the patience to make something like this, Rube Goldbergs are the shiz
Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics
“Robot freaks weren’t the only people to explore the Kinect’s possibilities. Researchers, visual artists, and pornographers have all begun cobbling together home-brewed Kinect projects and posting the results online. Artist Robert Hodgin built a makeshift motion-capture animation program that allows users to manipulate video of themselves on the fly, turning their bodies into bulbous cartoon characters or reflective mercury-like blobs. Two students at Germany’s University of Konstanz bolted a Kinect to a helmet, creating a bare-bones navigational system for the blind. And a company called ThriXXX built a rudimentary sex game that allows players to rub women’s body parts with a creepy disembodied hand.”
Not gonna lie, the writer probably did a better job than I ever could as a young, recently graduated journalist … but the feeling that I thought I could produce this story with my own original ideas way back in last winter (which of course in journalism is five years) and seeing it in the magazine you’ve always aspired to write for is either totally frustrating or proves that I can truly belong there.
dork jokes forever
A solar flare, caught this morning by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, in which “a billion tons of material was thrust away from the sun before collapsing magnificently back to the surface.”
In other words, the sun farted.
(Source: neatorama.com)
Watson's Post-Jeopardy Career: Medical?
“Artemis, a software program built on the back of IBM analytics software similar to that powering Watson, is being tested as a means to provide early warnings when babies in the ICU acquire hospital-borne infections. Artemis, like Watson, takes its inputs on go. Information flows in, the software filters out the relevant bits (be they answers to questions or symptoms) and the rest of the data flows on downstream.”
Robots always makin’ me feel bad about under-accomplishment, boo.
[via Popular Science]
Study: Breast Cells Can Transform into Stem Cells
“According to a provocative new study … some specialised cells can spontaneously revert back to a stem-like state. Until now, no one thought that these reversions were possible, and scientists have spent a lot of effort finding ways of artificially reprogramming specialised cells into a stem-like state. Now it turns out that cells can naturally do the same thing. It’s like suddenly discovering that the people you pass every day in the street have been secretly gaining superpowers under your nose.”
The human body is seriously capable of an infinite amount of things, it’s almost scary.
[via Discover]
