Did it take you more than 20 minutes to finish Mario Galaxy? Was it difficult getting through Halo 3’s first level? Relax, the Japanese company Cyber Gadget has the pill for you, the “Game Suppli” vitamin suppliment! If you require endurance for long gaming periods try Blueberry, for extreme concentration drop a DHA.

I almost forgot… These are some of the same nutrients Grandma grew in her garden for years… But hey… Now you can buy them as pills!

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Spinal injuries that leave people paralyzed are currently incurable, one of the most feared and rehabilitating things that can happen to you. But researchers at Northwestern University are looking to change that for good, as they’re hard at work on a new nanotechnology that could enable us to completely heal cut and severed spinal cords, allowing the previously paralyzed to walk again.

The tech takes the form of a gel that, when injected into mice with spinal cord injuries, allowed them use of their hind legs again after a mere 6 weeks. The procedure hasn’t been tested on humans yet, but it’s certainly a promising step forward towards a time where spinal cord injuries won’t necessarily mean a life confined to a wheelchair.

Official URL

Basically it’s having a look at which areas of the brain activate when you make a purchase. Once you know that, you can rig people up to brain scanners, show them different ads and see if the areas light up. If they light up – hey presto: good ad! And then fine tune it.

Is this kind of advertising a bit too much manipulation, like subliminal advertising is considered to be, though?

The Boston Retinal Implant Project recently developed a bionic eye implant that will restore vision to those affected by degenerative blindness. The device works by being implanted into the back of the eyeball and working as a light transmitter to the brain, where the two are connected by a nerve/wire thinner than a human hair.

Now, the technology has its limitations; it won’t give sight to those born blind or who suffer glaucoma, nor will it offer perfect vision. Only for those who previously had sight, and a semi-functional optical nerve, is this possible. The idea is that it will give the blind a general sense of their surroundings so they can function on a basic level. But researchers do hope to improve the technology so that users can recognize things like facial detail and expressions in the future.

Android Tech: Researchers Create Bionic Eye Prototype, Render Guide Dogs Obsolete

So… when are they coming with zoom and record functionality? It may take a little while yet, but the first steps have been made!

spoiler: it’s the hydrogen peroxide

Just like some people can fix computers just by being near them, there are also people – SLIders – who can destroy them just by being near them. SLI stands for Street Light Interference, as they tend to turn off street lights as they pass by.

I first found out in the followin article, an anecdote that caught my imagination:

Meet Mavis, the super-charged grandmother whose touch BLOWS UP kettles | the Daily Mail

Allthough people are sceptical, there is enough anecdotal evidence around. NB All the pages warn people that it’s perfectly possible they’re imagining it!

loads of write in anecdotes

some guy with his story Loads of these pages around.

Unfortunately there’s little in the way of scientific experiments confirming it, as wiki notes

About.com does have some links to ongoing research in this area, with some interesting results coming from Princeton.

They allready give them speed, but now Viagra?

These guys are a bit like train spotters. Except they spot satellites. And calculate their trajectory. And find out what they are. And there is no such thing as a spy train.

What a great idea! Anyway, it looks viable to me – so we’re going to have to mix our solar panels with these, as well as put them on the floors of our showers

Lectures and course materials from all over the world which have been put online are findeable through the World Lecture Hall.

The International Meteor Organization has a calendar with the meteor showers we can expect this year. It has pictures of where to look as well as data on how many to expect and on what they base these predictions.

Indian scientists have quite accidentally stumbled upon a way to store light for longer periods of time. So far this could only be done for a few nano-seconds.
This potentially allows us to create light based switching systems.

And not only are humans evolving quickly, we’re also evolving differently on different continents.

This scanner takes a whole load of x-ray images of the whole body in a very small time using a rotating ring. This makes the images 3D so they can be rotated and viewed on computers. It can capture bone structures as well as organs.

Scientists have managed to create stem cells without extracting them from embryos using a simple lab technique.

Google has teamed up with the X-Prize foundation to offer incentives to get onto the moon:

It worked as the X-Prize to get Burt Rutan’s Spaceship One into space, so why not this? Good plan!

This is basically Youtube for Science. All the content presented on here has to have been published in a mainstream publication. Because it’s new the publications are fairly limited, but this will grow with time.

Well, not entirely, but it certainly lowers the chances of women getting it drastically due to the increased melatonin production. Of course, it does raise the chances of skin cancer.

By using electrodes to provide electricity thereby boosting signals inside the thalamus, a patient who after a traumatic head injury could only move his eyes and a finger slightly can now communicate, move and eat independently. This could revolutionarise how (near) comatose patients are treated.

This three hour miniseries is available on Internet in seperate chapters from Nova. A lovely scientific series covering many elements of physics.

If you administer this drug whilst you’re visualising something, the drug removes first certain (possibly unconcious) associations with the memory and should after continued use, be able to remove the memory entirely.

This is being looked at quite seriously – Pennsylvania State University researchers have stated that there was definite something before the Big Bang, based on new knowledge of quantum physics. Due to cosmic forgetfulness we won’t know exactly what, but we can have a look what the universe looked like running up to the event.

Space.dom has this

Yahoo has this

Register has this

DNA splicing has now come such a long way from 5 years ago, that the experts are starting to become optimistic of being able to reacreate whole DNA sequences and cloning them into living animals fairly soon in the future. These guys want woolly mammoths back. Give me a sabre tooth tiger!

Slashdot users have apparently been going to town on LiftPort’s ass. Enough that a fairly frank and complete rebuttal has been issued by the presidents of the space elevator company, showing how they think the company can work and how much work has allready been done.

Hitachi scientists have a machine that tracks the blood moving around in the brain using optical topography, and by thinking of calculations you can force blood to go through a specific area of the brain, allowing the machinery to perform an action. Currently it seems to be a binary system, but they’re hopeful that it will expand to be useable as a full keyboard.