This will be an on going thread. This is what 2013+ is lookin' like.
11 Reasons to Ditch Processed Foods
Processed foods hide some dirty secrets. Here's how to avoid them.
BY LEAH ZERBE
1 Your Wallet
The Facts: Processed foods may seem like a deal in terms of convenience, but when you break down the cost, it's generally cheaper—and way healthier—to make those same foods from scratch. For instance, a popular brand's microwave bowl of chili costs $3.39 and includes harmful bisphenol A, fake food dye, and industrial meat raised using antibiotics, as well as other questionable additives.
Healthy Tip: You can whip up a batch of gourmet, 100-percent-organic chili from scratch using fresh ingredients, including omega-3-rich, heart-healthy grass-fed beef, for about $2.86 per serving. Cheaper, tastier, organic, and healthier!
2 Cereal Crimes?
The Facts: Breakfast bombshell: Residues of more than 70 pesticides have been found in individual boxes of cereal. Why? Many pesticides today, particularly the go-to chemical applied to genetically engineered crops, are systemic. That means the chemicals wind up inside of the food you're eating.
Healthy Tip: Beware of "natural" cereals. Testing by the Cornucopia Institute found that "natural" cereals are often contaminated with crop pesticides, warehouse fumigation chemicals, and genetically modified ingredients (GMOs). Choose organic if you truly want to avoid toxic chemicals in your food.
3 Shorter Lifespan
The Facts: Letting your kitchen go dormant in favor of relying on processed foods could shave years off of your life. A 2012 study published in the journal Public Health Nutrition found that people who cooked at home at least five times a week were 47 more likely to be alive after 10 years than the people who relied more on processed foods.
Healthy Tip: To get your feet wet cooking fresh, seasonal ingredients, consider joining a vegetable community-supported agriculture program. Farmers often share recipes, cooking tips, and sometimes even hold cooking demonstrations to teach you the healthiest ways to prep the food they grow. Try a half share if you're afraid you won't have enough time to cook a larger share of the bounty.
4 Accelerated Aging
The Facts: Your face could start resembling crinkle-cut chips if you turn to munching processed foods on a regular basis. Research shows both the phosphates and the genetically engineered ingredients often added to processed foods promote aging.
Healthy Tip: Instead of processed foods, choose fare that actually promotes younger-looking skin, including alkaline-forming foods like kale, parsley, almonds, pears, and lemons. Foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, such as pastured eggs, wild-caught Alaskan salmon, and walnuts, also help hydrate your skin, reducing wrinkles. Tomatoes help fight damaging sunburns, reduce skin roughness, and boost collagen.
5 Hidden Kidney Killers
The Facts: Flavored noodle mixes, processed meats, packaged mac and cheese, soda, frozen dinners, other processed foods, and fast food are notorious for containing questionable levels of phosphate-laden ingredients that could promote kidney deterioration and weaker bones.
Healthy Tip: If you're in a pinch and do reach for processed foods, avoid ones with ingredients like "sodium phosphate," "calcium phosphate," and "phosphoric acid," or anything with "phos-" in the word.
6 Relentless Hunger
The Facts: Added sugars, specifically fructose from table sugar and the high-fructose corn syrup found in most processed foods, block the hormonal signal that tells your brain it's time to stop eating, according to obesity research by Robert Lustig, MD, a pediatric neuroendocrinologist at the University of California–San Francisco. The result? Never-ending hunger that leaves you fatter yet feeling unsatisfied.
Healthy Tip: According to the American Heart Association, we down about 22 teaspoons of sugar a day; that's about 25 pounds more than people consumed annually just a few decades ago. Watch out for surprising hidden sources of added sugars, such as bread, crackers, bottled tea, frozen dinners, and sauces and marinades.
7 Low-Fat Fraud
The Facts: Since the low-fat fad began, Americans have become fatter and sicker. One reason? Low-fat dairy products are stripped of conjugated linoleic acid, a healthy fat shown to fight weight gain and cancer. Added sugar often takes the place of fat, making you feel hungry and unsatisfied.
Healthy Tip: Know your fats. Industrial fats like partially hydrogenated oils are dangerous, but fat from organic, grass-fed animal products like yogurt actually benefit your heart and brain.
8 Colorful Lies
The Facts: Processed foods—even pickles, cake mixes, and "healthy" juices—often contain food dyes that make food appear fresher than it really is, in essence, tricking you, the consumer. Some berry juices contain 0 percent fruit juice, relying solely on artificial coloring. The problem? Some food dyes are tied to serious health problems like ADHD, asthma, allergies, and cancer.
Healthy Tip: Stick with organic foods, since organic standards ban the use of artificial food dyes, so organics are colored with food sources like turmeric and beets. Better yet, try your hand at making your own homemade pickles and other kitchen staples to avoid harmful additives.
9 Junky Tendencies
The Facts: Added sugar is the not-so-sweet trick the makers of processed foods use to get you hooked. In 2005, Princeton researchers found that eating sugar triggers the release of opioids, neurotransmitters that light up your brain's pleasure center. Addictive drugs like morphine and heroin stimulate those same pleasure pathways. Scary fact? After 21 days on a high-sugar diet, you could start showing signs of withdrawal—chattering teeth, anxiety, and depression—when sugar is taken away.
Healthy Tip: Don't replace a healthy breakfast like low-sugar organic oatmeal with a sugary coffee drink.
10 Airway Assault
The Facts: Kids who eat fast food two to three times a week face a significantly higher risk of developing asthma, possibly due to the processed foods' ability to create inflammation in the body. The trans fats and sugar common in fast-food menu items trigger inflammation, an unhealthy condition tied to asthma.
Healthy Tip: Skip the drive-thru and eat fruits and vegetables at least three times a week, a move that research found was associated with lower rates of asthma.
11 Lab Rats
The Facts: Eat processed foods? If so, you're an unknowing participant in a huge experiment. To date, more than 80,000 chemicals have been approved for use in the U.S., many of them used in processed foods. Unfortunately, only about 15 percent have been tested for long-term impacts on human health.
Healthy Tip: Cook like your great-grandmother. If an ingredient looks like it belongs in a science lab, avoid the product. Make a vow to visit your local farmer's market regularly to experiment with fresh ingredients. Form a neighborhood cooking club, and hold get-togethers at which members whip up a different bulk meal from whole ingredients. Break the results down into smaller servings, swap, and share for a fridge full of healthy options all week long—without investing tons of time in the kitchen!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A Look Into Raw, Organic Cannabis Juicing
People globally enjoy partaking in the pungent flowers of the Cannabis plant, seeking the euphoric psycho-activity unique to this plant, whether for pain relief, pleasure or pastime. Many people though are unaware of the amazing benefits of Raw, organic Cannabis Juice.
In raw form, Cannabis leaves and the tri-chrome covered flowers are concentrated with non-psychoactive, anti-biotic, anti-fungal, anti-viral, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, immune-regulating and anti-cancer nutrient compounds including lesser-known Tetrahydrocannabicannabidiol (CBD), and Tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV) both of which are proving to be therapeutic substances capable of preventing and/or reversing a plethora of chronic and debilitating illnesses.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
M.I.T. Computer Program Reveals Invisible Motion in Video
A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that can amplify both movement and color, the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat.
The amplification process is called Eulerian Video Magnification, and is the brainchild of a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The team originally developed the program to monitor neonatal babies without making physical contact. But they quickly learned that the algorithm can be applied to other videos to reveal changes imperceptible to the naked eye. Prof. William T. Freeman, a leader on the team, imagines its use in search and rescue, so that rescuers could tell from a distance if someone trapped on a ledge, say, is still breathing.
“Once we amplify these small motions, there’s like a whole new world you can look at,” he said.
The system works by homing in on specific pixels in a video over the course of time. Frame-by-frame, the program identifies minute changes in color and then amplifies them up to 100 times, turning, say, a subtle shift toward pink to a bright crimson. The scientists who developed it believe it could also have applications in industries like manufacturing and oil exploration. For example, a factory technician could film a machine to check for small movements in bolts that might indicate an impending breakdown. In one video presented by the scientists, a stationary crane sits on a construction site, so still it could be a photograph. But once run through the program, the crane appears to sway precariously in the wind, perhaps tipping workers off to a potential hazard.
It is important to note that the crane does not actually move as much as the video seems to show. It is the process of motion amplification that gives the crane its movement.
The program originally gained attention last summer when the team presented it at the annual computer graphics conference known as Siggraph in Los Angeles.
Since then, the M.I.T. team has improved the algorithm to achieve better quality results, with significant improvements in clarity and accuracy.
Michael Rubinstein, a doctoral student and co-author on the project, said that after the presentation and subsequent media coverage, the team was inundated with e-mails inquiring about the availability of the program for uses ranging from health care to lie detection in law enforcement. Some people, says Mr. Rubinstein, inquired about how the program might be used in conjunction with Google’s glasses to see changes in a person’s face while gambling.
“People wanted to be able to analyze their opponent during a poker game or blackjack and be able to know whether they’re cheating or not, just by the variation in their heart rate,” he said.
The team posted the code online and made it available to anyone who wanted to download it and run the program. But to do so required some technical expertise because the interface was not simple to use. Last week, Quanta Research Cambridge, a Taiwan-based manufacturer of laptop computers that helped finance the project, provided a way for people to upload video clips to their Web site and to see a video that is run through the program.
The project is also financed by the National Science Foundation and Royal Dutch Shell, among others.
The team is also working toward making the program as an app for smartphones. “I want people to look around and see what’s out there in this world of tiny motions,” said Mr. Freeman.
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Potable Water Generator
I’ve never cared much for billboards. Not in the city, not out of the city — not anywhere, really. It’s like the saying in that old Five Man Electrical Band song. So when the creative director of an ad agency in Peru sent me a picture of what he claimed was the first billboard that produces potable water from air, my initial reaction was: gotta be a hoax, or at best, a gimmick.
Except it’s neither: The billboard pictured here is real, it’s located in Lima, Peru, and it produces around 100 liters of water a day (about 26 gallons) from nothing more than humidity, a basic filtration system and a little gravitational ingenuity.
Let’s talk about Lima for a moment, the largest city in Peru and the fifth largest in all of the Americas, with some 7.6 million people (closer to 9 million when you factor in the surrounding metro area). Because it sits along the southern Pacific Ocean, the humidity in the city averages 83% (it’s actually closer to 100% in the mornings). But Lima is also part of what’s called a coastal desert: It lies at the northern edge of the Atacama, the driest desert in the world, meaning the city sees perhaps half an inch of precipitation annually (Lima is the second largest desert city in the world after Cairo). Lima thus depends on drainage from the Andes as well as runoff from glacier melt — both sources on the decline because of climate change.
Enter the University of Engineering and Technology of Peru (UTEC), which was looking for something splashy to kick off its application period for 2013 enrollment. It turned to ad agency Mayo DraftFCB, which struck on the idea of a billboard that would convert Lima’s H2O-saturated air into potable water. And then they actually built one.
It’s not entirely self-sufficient, requiring electricity (it’s not clear how much) to power the five devices that comprise the billboard’s inverse osmosis filtration system, each device responsible for generating up to 20 liters. The water is then transported through small ducts to a central holding tank at the billboard’s base, where you’ll find — what else? — a water faucet. According to Mayo DraftFCB, the billboard has already produced 9,450 liters of water (about 2,500 gallons) in just three months, which it says equals the water consumption of “hundreds of families per month.” Just imagine what dozens, hundreds or even thousands of these things, strategically placed in the city itself or outlying villages, might do. And imagine what you could accomplish in any number of troubled spots around the world that need potable water with a solution like this.
Mayo DraftFCB says it dropped the billboard along the Pan-American Highway at kilometer marker 89.5 when summer started (in December, mind you — Lima’s south of the equator) and that it’s designed to inspire young Peruvians to study engineering at UTEC while simultaneously illustrating how advertising can be more than just an eyesore. (Done and done, I’d say.)
“We wanted future students to see how engineers can also solve social needs in daily basis kinds of situations,” said Alejandro Aponte, creative director at Mayo DraftFCB.
The city’s residents could certainly use the help. According to a 2011 The Independent piece ominously titled “The desert city in serious danger of running dry,” about 1.2 million residents of Lima lack running water entirely, depending on unregulated private-company water trucks to deliver the goods — companies that charge up to 30 soles (US $10) per cubic meter of H2O, or as The Independent notes, 20 times what more well-off residents pay for their tapwater.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
DARPA researchers learn to control rat's brain over Internet
Government mind control may not be as farfetched as it sounds: after 15 years of research, scientists have found a way to transmit information from one brain to another, thereby controlling the thoughts of its test subject.
Scientists have successfully captured the thoughts of a rat in Brazil and electronically transmitted them through the Internet to the brain of a rat in the US. The Brazilian rat had been energetically running around in a lab. When the American rat received the brain waves of its South American counterpart, it immediately began to mimic the behavior – despite the thousands of miles between them, Reuters reports.
Scientists refer to the technique as a “brain link”. The $26 million study of brain-machine interfaces was funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which ultimately hopes to have this technology available to humans.
By linking human brains together, scientists believe they can combine brainpower to solve problems that are too difficult for one person to handle alone, Duke University Medical Center neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis told Reuters. Nicolelis refers to this link as an “organic computer”, and said scientists will first test it out on monkeys to determine its feasibility.
But not all researchers are excited about the prospect of brain manipulation.
“Having non-human primates communicate brain-to-brain raises all sorts of ethical concerns,” one neuroscientist told Reuters. “Reading about putting things in animals’ brains and changing what they do, people rightly get nervous.”
This sort of technology raises the concern about the possibility of using humans or animals as soldiers in battle, the scientist added.
While the idea may be unbelievable to some, neurobiologists claim that brain-machine interfaces have actually moved far beyond what is publicly known. Andrew Schwartz, a University of Pittsburgh neurobiologist, says that the experiment with the rats “is of limited interest” considering other advances in the field.
“It’s cool that the stimulus came from another brain” rather than an electrical device,” bioengineer Douglas Weber told Reuters. “[But] many labs have shown that animals can detect electrical stimuli delivered to the brain. This paper simply shows that the animals can detect electrical stimuli… from another rat’s brain.”
The same team of DARPA-funded researchers have also been able to send rats brain signals that caused them to press a lever a the sight of a red light, distinguish narrow openings from wide ones, and poke water a water port with their nose.
But by granting $26 million to scientists to develop this sort of technology, DARPA is likely expecting the research to be of use to the Pentagon at some point – whether it’s for problem-solving or other uses not yet defined.
http://rt.com/usa/rat-brain-darpa-pentagon-645/
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3D-printing pen turns doodles into sculptures
Free yourself from the tyranny of paper and boring 2D. With a $75 pen you can draw in thin air.
The 3Doodle pen, developed by US start-up WobbleWorks, works much like a handheld 3D printer. It contains a mains-powered heater that melts the plastic beads used in such printers.
You can draw normally using the colourful plastic as your ink – but with a fantastic twist. Lift the nib in the air and a length of plastic exudes from the nib and solidifies, allowing you to create 3D objects by building up multiple wispy strands of plastic.
The pen's key component is a tiny fan that cools the plastic as it leaves the nib. "This makes it solidify very quickly," says company spokesman Daniel Cowen. Intricate "drawings" of a peacock and the Eiffel Tower in the launch video show how well it works (see video).
The firm launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund $30,000 towards its development programme this week. If it raises enough money, the 3Doodle should be ready for sale later this year. A battery-powered version should follow, says Cowen. "It's power usage means that a lot of work is needed for a wireless version - but that is in the works."
Still, you need to be careful: although using it is child's play, the pen is a craft tool rather than a toy. Its nib melts plastic at a toasty 270 °C – as hot as a soldering iron.
In the future, WobbleWorks might also make a version for creating food, letting people make lattice-structured sweets and candies. "We could in theory use the pen to melt sticks of sugar," says Cowen. "But we don't want to get into food safety issues just yet. We will be running some [food] tests soon - and we'd have to lower the temperature in the pen, too."
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11 Reasons to Ditch Processed Foods
Processed foods hide some dirty secrets. Here's how to avoid them.
BY LEAH ZERBE
1 Your Wallet
The Facts: Processed foods may seem like a deal in terms of convenience, but when you break down the cost, it's generally cheaper—and way healthier—to make those same foods from scratch. For instance, a popular brand's microwave bowl of chili costs $3.39 and includes harmful bisphenol A, fake food dye, and industrial meat raised using antibiotics, as well as other questionable additives.
Healthy Tip: You can whip up a batch of gourmet, 100-percent-organic chili from scratch using fresh ingredients, including omega-3-rich, heart-healthy grass-fed beef, for about $2.86 per serving. Cheaper, tastier, organic, and healthier!
2 Cereal Crimes?
The Facts: Breakfast bombshell: Residues of more than 70 pesticides have been found in individual boxes of cereal. Why? Many pesticides today, particularly the go-to chemical applied to genetically engineered crops, are systemic. That means the chemicals wind up inside of the food you're eating.
Healthy Tip: Beware of "natural" cereals. Testing by the Cornucopia Institute found that "natural" cereals are often contaminated with crop pesticides, warehouse fumigation chemicals, and genetically modified ingredients (GMOs). Choose organic if you truly want to avoid toxic chemicals in your food.
3 Shorter Lifespan
The Facts: Letting your kitchen go dormant in favor of relying on processed foods could shave years off of your life. A 2012 study published in the journal Public Health Nutrition found that people who cooked at home at least five times a week were 47 more likely to be alive after 10 years than the people who relied more on processed foods.
Healthy Tip: To get your feet wet cooking fresh, seasonal ingredients, consider joining a vegetable community-supported agriculture program. Farmers often share recipes, cooking tips, and sometimes even hold cooking demonstrations to teach you the healthiest ways to prep the food they grow. Try a half share if you're afraid you won't have enough time to cook a larger share of the bounty.
4 Accelerated Aging
The Facts: Your face could start resembling crinkle-cut chips if you turn to munching processed foods on a regular basis. Research shows both the phosphates and the genetically engineered ingredients often added to processed foods promote aging.
Healthy Tip: Instead of processed foods, choose fare that actually promotes younger-looking skin, including alkaline-forming foods like kale, parsley, almonds, pears, and lemons. Foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, such as pastured eggs, wild-caught Alaskan salmon, and walnuts, also help hydrate your skin, reducing wrinkles. Tomatoes help fight damaging sunburns, reduce skin roughness, and boost collagen.
5 Hidden Kidney Killers
The Facts: Flavored noodle mixes, processed meats, packaged mac and cheese, soda, frozen dinners, other processed foods, and fast food are notorious for containing questionable levels of phosphate-laden ingredients that could promote kidney deterioration and weaker bones.
Healthy Tip: If you're in a pinch and do reach for processed foods, avoid ones with ingredients like "sodium phosphate," "calcium phosphate," and "phosphoric acid," or anything with "phos-" in the word.
6 Relentless Hunger
The Facts: Added sugars, specifically fructose from table sugar and the high-fructose corn syrup found in most processed foods, block the hormonal signal that tells your brain it's time to stop eating, according to obesity research by Robert Lustig, MD, a pediatric neuroendocrinologist at the University of California–San Francisco. The result? Never-ending hunger that leaves you fatter yet feeling unsatisfied.
Healthy Tip: According to the American Heart Association, we down about 22 teaspoons of sugar a day; that's about 25 pounds more than people consumed annually just a few decades ago. Watch out for surprising hidden sources of added sugars, such as bread, crackers, bottled tea, frozen dinners, and sauces and marinades.
7 Low-Fat Fraud
The Facts: Since the low-fat fad began, Americans have become fatter and sicker. One reason? Low-fat dairy products are stripped of conjugated linoleic acid, a healthy fat shown to fight weight gain and cancer. Added sugar often takes the place of fat, making you feel hungry and unsatisfied.
Healthy Tip: Know your fats. Industrial fats like partially hydrogenated oils are dangerous, but fat from organic, grass-fed animal products like yogurt actually benefit your heart and brain.
8 Colorful Lies
The Facts: Processed foods—even pickles, cake mixes, and "healthy" juices—often contain food dyes that make food appear fresher than it really is, in essence, tricking you, the consumer. Some berry juices contain 0 percent fruit juice, relying solely on artificial coloring. The problem? Some food dyes are tied to serious health problems like ADHD, asthma, allergies, and cancer.
Healthy Tip: Stick with organic foods, since organic standards ban the use of artificial food dyes, so organics are colored with food sources like turmeric and beets. Better yet, try your hand at making your own homemade pickles and other kitchen staples to avoid harmful additives.
9 Junky Tendencies
The Facts: Added sugar is the not-so-sweet trick the makers of processed foods use to get you hooked. In 2005, Princeton researchers found that eating sugar triggers the release of opioids, neurotransmitters that light up your brain's pleasure center. Addictive drugs like morphine and heroin stimulate those same pleasure pathways. Scary fact? After 21 days on a high-sugar diet, you could start showing signs of withdrawal—chattering teeth, anxiety, and depression—when sugar is taken away.
Healthy Tip: Don't replace a healthy breakfast like low-sugar organic oatmeal with a sugary coffee drink.
10 Airway Assault
The Facts: Kids who eat fast food two to three times a week face a significantly higher risk of developing asthma, possibly due to the processed foods' ability to create inflammation in the body. The trans fats and sugar common in fast-food menu items trigger inflammation, an unhealthy condition tied to asthma.
Healthy Tip: Skip the drive-thru and eat fruits and vegetables at least three times a week, a move that research found was associated with lower rates of asthma.
11 Lab Rats
The Facts: Eat processed foods? If so, you're an unknowing participant in a huge experiment. To date, more than 80,000 chemicals have been approved for use in the U.S., many of them used in processed foods. Unfortunately, only about 15 percent have been tested for long-term impacts on human health.
Healthy Tip: Cook like your great-grandmother. If an ingredient looks like it belongs in a science lab, avoid the product. Make a vow to visit your local farmer's market regularly to experiment with fresh ingredients. Form a neighborhood cooking club, and hold get-togethers at which members whip up a different bulk meal from whole ingredients. Break the results down into smaller servings, swap, and share for a fridge full of healthy options all week long—without investing tons of time in the kitchen!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A Look Into Raw, Organic Cannabis Juicing
People globally enjoy partaking in the pungent flowers of the Cannabis plant, seeking the euphoric psycho-activity unique to this plant, whether for pain relief, pleasure or pastime. Many people though are unaware of the amazing benefits of Raw, organic Cannabis Juice.
In raw form, Cannabis leaves and the tri-chrome covered flowers are concentrated with non-psychoactive, anti-biotic, anti-fungal, anti-viral, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, immune-regulating and anti-cancer nutrient compounds including lesser-known Tetrahydrocannabicannabidiol (CBD), and Tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV) both of which are proving to be therapeutic substances capable of preventing and/or reversing a plethora of chronic and debilitating illnesses.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
M.I.T. Computer Program Reveals Invisible Motion in Video
A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that can amplify both movement and color, the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat.
The amplification process is called Eulerian Video Magnification, and is the brainchild of a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The team originally developed the program to monitor neonatal babies without making physical contact. But they quickly learned that the algorithm can be applied to other videos to reveal changes imperceptible to the naked eye. Prof. William T. Freeman, a leader on the team, imagines its use in search and rescue, so that rescuers could tell from a distance if someone trapped on a ledge, say, is still breathing.
“Once we amplify these small motions, there’s like a whole new world you can look at,” he said.
The system works by homing in on specific pixels in a video over the course of time. Frame-by-frame, the program identifies minute changes in color and then amplifies them up to 100 times, turning, say, a subtle shift toward pink to a bright crimson. The scientists who developed it believe it could also have applications in industries like manufacturing and oil exploration. For example, a factory technician could film a machine to check for small movements in bolts that might indicate an impending breakdown. In one video presented by the scientists, a stationary crane sits on a construction site, so still it could be a photograph. But once run through the program, the crane appears to sway precariously in the wind, perhaps tipping workers off to a potential hazard.
It is important to note that the crane does not actually move as much as the video seems to show. It is the process of motion amplification that gives the crane its movement.
The program originally gained attention last summer when the team presented it at the annual computer graphics conference known as Siggraph in Los Angeles.
Since then, the M.I.T. team has improved the algorithm to achieve better quality results, with significant improvements in clarity and accuracy.
Michael Rubinstein, a doctoral student and co-author on the project, said that after the presentation and subsequent media coverage, the team was inundated with e-mails inquiring about the availability of the program for uses ranging from health care to lie detection in law enforcement. Some people, says Mr. Rubinstein, inquired about how the program might be used in conjunction with Google’s glasses to see changes in a person’s face while gambling.
“People wanted to be able to analyze their opponent during a poker game or blackjack and be able to know whether they’re cheating or not, just by the variation in their heart rate,” he said.
The team posted the code online and made it available to anyone who wanted to download it and run the program. But to do so required some technical expertise because the interface was not simple to use. Last week, Quanta Research Cambridge, a Taiwan-based manufacturer of laptop computers that helped finance the project, provided a way for people to upload video clips to their Web site and to see a video that is run through the program.
The project is also financed by the National Science Foundation and Royal Dutch Shell, among others.
The team is also working toward making the program as an app for smartphones. “I want people to look around and see what’s out there in this world of tiny motions,” said Mr. Freeman.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Potable Water Generator
I’ve never cared much for billboards. Not in the city, not out of the city — not anywhere, really. It’s like the saying in that old Five Man Electrical Band song. So when the creative director of an ad agency in Peru sent me a picture of what he claimed was the first billboard that produces potable water from air, my initial reaction was: gotta be a hoax, or at best, a gimmick.
Except it’s neither: The billboard pictured here is real, it’s located in Lima, Peru, and it produces around 100 liters of water a day (about 26 gallons) from nothing more than humidity, a basic filtration system and a little gravitational ingenuity.
Let’s talk about Lima for a moment, the largest city in Peru and the fifth largest in all of the Americas, with some 7.6 million people (closer to 9 million when you factor in the surrounding metro area). Because it sits along the southern Pacific Ocean, the humidity in the city averages 83% (it’s actually closer to 100% in the mornings). But Lima is also part of what’s called a coastal desert: It lies at the northern edge of the Atacama, the driest desert in the world, meaning the city sees perhaps half an inch of precipitation annually (Lima is the second largest desert city in the world after Cairo). Lima thus depends on drainage from the Andes as well as runoff from glacier melt — both sources on the decline because of climate change.
Enter the University of Engineering and Technology of Peru (UTEC), which was looking for something splashy to kick off its application period for 2013 enrollment. It turned to ad agency Mayo DraftFCB, which struck on the idea of a billboard that would convert Lima’s H2O-saturated air into potable water. And then they actually built one.
It’s not entirely self-sufficient, requiring electricity (it’s not clear how much) to power the five devices that comprise the billboard’s inverse osmosis filtration system, each device responsible for generating up to 20 liters. The water is then transported through small ducts to a central holding tank at the billboard’s base, where you’ll find — what else? — a water faucet. According to Mayo DraftFCB, the billboard has already produced 9,450 liters of water (about 2,500 gallons) in just three months, which it says equals the water consumption of “hundreds of families per month.” Just imagine what dozens, hundreds or even thousands of these things, strategically placed in the city itself or outlying villages, might do. And imagine what you could accomplish in any number of troubled spots around the world that need potable water with a solution like this.
Mayo DraftFCB says it dropped the billboard along the Pan-American Highway at kilometer marker 89.5 when summer started (in December, mind you — Lima’s south of the equator) and that it’s designed to inspire young Peruvians to study engineering at UTEC while simultaneously illustrating how advertising can be more than just an eyesore. (Done and done, I’d say.)
“We wanted future students to see how engineers can also solve social needs in daily basis kinds of situations,” said Alejandro Aponte, creative director at Mayo DraftFCB.
The city’s residents could certainly use the help. According to a 2011 The Independent piece ominously titled “The desert city in serious danger of running dry,” about 1.2 million residents of Lima lack running water entirely, depending on unregulated private-company water trucks to deliver the goods — companies that charge up to 30 soles (US $10) per cubic meter of H2O, or as The Independent notes, 20 times what more well-off residents pay for their tapwater.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
DARPA researchers learn to control rat's brain over Internet
Government mind control may not be as farfetched as it sounds: after 15 years of research, scientists have found a way to transmit information from one brain to another, thereby controlling the thoughts of its test subject.
Scientists have successfully captured the thoughts of a rat in Brazil and electronically transmitted them through the Internet to the brain of a rat in the US. The Brazilian rat had been energetically running around in a lab. When the American rat received the brain waves of its South American counterpart, it immediately began to mimic the behavior – despite the thousands of miles between them, Reuters reports.
Scientists refer to the technique as a “brain link”. The $26 million study of brain-machine interfaces was funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which ultimately hopes to have this technology available to humans.
By linking human brains together, scientists believe they can combine brainpower to solve problems that are too difficult for one person to handle alone, Duke University Medical Center neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis told Reuters. Nicolelis refers to this link as an “organic computer”, and said scientists will first test it out on monkeys to determine its feasibility.
But not all researchers are excited about the prospect of brain manipulation.
“Having non-human primates communicate brain-to-brain raises all sorts of ethical concerns,” one neuroscientist told Reuters. “Reading about putting things in animals’ brains and changing what they do, people rightly get nervous.”
This sort of technology raises the concern about the possibility of using humans or animals as soldiers in battle, the scientist added.
While the idea may be unbelievable to some, neurobiologists claim that brain-machine interfaces have actually moved far beyond what is publicly known. Andrew Schwartz, a University of Pittsburgh neurobiologist, says that the experiment with the rats “is of limited interest” considering other advances in the field.
“It’s cool that the stimulus came from another brain” rather than an electrical device,” bioengineer Douglas Weber told Reuters. “[But] many labs have shown that animals can detect electrical stimuli delivered to the brain. This paper simply shows that the animals can detect electrical stimuli… from another rat’s brain.”
The same team of DARPA-funded researchers have also been able to send rats brain signals that caused them to press a lever a the sight of a red light, distinguish narrow openings from wide ones, and poke water a water port with their nose.
But by granting $26 million to scientists to develop this sort of technology, DARPA is likely expecting the research to be of use to the Pentagon at some point – whether it’s for problem-solving or other uses not yet defined.
http://rt.com/usa/rat-brain-darpa-pentagon-645/
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3D-printing pen turns doodles into sculptures
Free yourself from the tyranny of paper and boring 2D. With a $75 pen you can draw in thin air.
The 3Doodle pen, developed by US start-up WobbleWorks, works much like a handheld 3D printer. It contains a mains-powered heater that melts the plastic beads used in such printers.
You can draw normally using the colourful plastic as your ink – but with a fantastic twist. Lift the nib in the air and a length of plastic exudes from the nib and solidifies, allowing you to create 3D objects by building up multiple wispy strands of plastic.
The pen's key component is a tiny fan that cools the plastic as it leaves the nib. "This makes it solidify very quickly," says company spokesman Daniel Cowen. Intricate "drawings" of a peacock and the Eiffel Tower in the launch video show how well it works (see video).
The firm launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund $30,000 towards its development programme this week. If it raises enough money, the 3Doodle should be ready for sale later this year. A battery-powered version should follow, says Cowen. "It's power usage means that a lot of work is needed for a wireless version - but that is in the works."
Still, you need to be careful: although using it is child's play, the pen is a craft tool rather than a toy. Its nib melts plastic at a toasty 270 °C – as hot as a soldering iron.
In the future, WobbleWorks might also make a version for creating food, letting people make lattice-structured sweets and candies. "We could in theory use the pen to melt sticks of sugar," says Cowen. "But we don't want to get into food safety issues just yet. We will be running some [food] tests soon - and we'd have to lower the temperature in the pen, too."
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