3 videos from non-military robot drones
While drones have been used mostly in combat situations, hobbyists, real estate agents and scientists have found uses for the flying cameras.
Mobile Health: AgaMatrix iPhone glucose monitor | MedTech
This is an awesome device that turns the iPhone into your own personal blood glucose meter. Well…that’s boring right? My glucose meter does that right now. Not quite. With iPhone being directly linked to current wireless technology the app for iBGStar automatically logs data and sends it to the office of your health care professional so that data is available for review is a precise format. This way your healthcare professional can analyse the data as it comes in and make decisions to optimize the patient’s dosage and other medical management without the patient coming to the office.
I love this. I love how intelligent and worldly Will Smith is. He has some very interesting points that i truly agree with.
♥
Sarah
Pigeons Can Learn Higher Math as Well as Monkeys
By now, the intelligence of birds is well known. Alex the African gray parrot had great verbal skills. Scrub jays, which hide caches of seeds and other food, have remarkable memories. And New Caledonian crows make and use tools in ways that would put the average home plumber to shame.
Pigeons, it turns out, are no slouches either. It was known that they could count. But all sorts of animals, including bees, can count. Pigeons have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability that until now had been demonstrated only in primates. In the 1990s scientists trained rhesus monkeys to look at groups of items on a screen and to rank them from the lowest number of items to the highest.
They learned to rank groups of one, two and three items in various sizes and shapes. When tested, they were able to do the task even when unfamiliar numbers of things were introduced. In other words, having learned that two was more than one and three more than two, they could also figure out that five was more than two, or eight more than six.
Damian Scarf, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, tried the same experiment with pigeons, and he and two colleagues report in the current issue of the journal Science that the pigeons did just as well as the monkeys.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
This is Harry and Alfie from Blackrock in Dublin, Ireland.
They are pretty cool guys doing there thing in music. Unsigned and full of talent!
I have to support these guys i mean they are Irish!! <3
via Emory
Older musicians perform better on cognitive tests than individuals who did not play an instrument, according to a new study published in the April issue of Neuropsychology.
While much research has been done to determine the cognitive benefits of musical activity by children, this is the first study to examine whether those benefits can extend across a lifetime.
“Musical activity throughout life may serve as a challenging cognitive exercise, making your brain fitter and more capable of accommodating the challenges of aging,” says lead researcher and clinical neuropsychologist Brenda Hanna-Pladdy of Emory University. “Since studying an instrument requires years of practice and learning, it may create alternate connections in the brain that could compensate for cognitive declines as we get older.”
The study enrolled 70 individuals age 60-83 who were divided into three groups. The participants either had no musical training, one to nine years of musical study or at least 10 years of musical training. All of the participants had similar levels of education and fitness, and didn’t show any evidence of Alzheimer’s disease.
Cognitive performance was measured by testing brain functions that typically decline as the body ages, and more dramatically deteriorate in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
The high-level musicians who had studied the longest performed the best on the cognitive tests, followed by the low-level musicians and non-musicians, revealing a trend relating to years of musical practice.
The high-level musicians had statistically significant higher scores than the non-musicians on cognitive tests relating to visuospatial memory, naming objects, and cognitive flexibility, or the brain’s ability to adapt to new information.
“Based on previous research and our study results, we believe that both the years of musical participation and the age of acquisition are critical,” Hanna-Pladdy says. “There are crucial periods in brain plasticity that enhance learning, which may make it easier to learn a musical instrument before a certain age and thus may have a larger impact on brain development.”
(Source: stoweboyd)
46 seconds of wisdom
(Source: inspiredtolivelaughandrun)
