Women that happen to be well endowed when it comes to bra size generally have plenty of well founded complaints. Large breasts cause back problems and for the athletic types they have on occasion had to resort to wearing two sports bras just to minimize bouncing.
Well, there’s bad news for those on the blue team, turns out you’re more likely to lose than the red team. There is actual scientific proof of it, yes, some scientist actually bothered to do a study on this.
Stanford decided to do a study to try to delve into the reason more men get addicted to video games than women and have come up with what they think is a suitable reason. It turns out that the part of the brain the generates those warm mushy rewarding feelings is more activated in men than it is for women while playing video games.
There have always been rumors that cellphones might have a few unwanted side effects, typically I have scoffed a bit at them. I am a bit curious about this new one though, especially since the researcher happens to be a former skeptic until the facts they discovered were too much to ignore.
Politicians are constantly ranting and raving about violent video games and their affect on children. Well some researchers, including two Harvard researchers have come up with a conclusion that is bound to really piss off anyone who has cried wolf about video games causing violence.
Actually, they will likely just ignore it entirely. The study began in 2004 and took $1.5 million to pull off. They closely examined 1,200 children after they had played games like Grand Theft Auto as well as the less violent games such as Sims.
Sony’s XEL-1 OLED TV is undeniably awesome, despite being only 11-inches, but owners may have less time to coo and weep over its beauty than they originally thought. According to a report from DisplaySearch, which goes into even more surgical detail than at the Embedded Systems Conference, Sony’s lifespan estimate of around 30,000 hours for the 3mm-thick TV is wildly inaccurate. Instead, the researchers are suggesting a total lifespan of around 17,000 hours before the screen loses 50-percent of its brightness.
Research firm IDC have spotted the current trend for budget ultraportable notebooks, but unlike the rest of us aren’t entirely convinced. Despite vast sales of the ASUS Eee – and multiple rivals with new notebooks landing every week – IDC don’t believe most mainstream customers will ever see the usually-Linux based devices as “proper” computers. Instead, they describe them as merely additive: augmenting rather than replacing traditional laptops.
MIT PhD student Pravan Mistry is the latest person to try to recreate Post-It notes for the digital age. His ‘Stickies’ project relies on both a digital pen – similar to Nokia’s - and sticky notes with embedded RFID tags allowing them to be located at a later point. Handwritten notes are automatically converted into text when on the computer. So far, nothing new, but Mistry’ project adds in artificial intelligence (AI) which uses a “commonsense knowledge engine” to put each message into context; that means, for instance, it can prompt your cellphone to remind you to buy milk when you’re actually at the grocery store, from a note you scrawled earlier that day.
Check out the video demo of Stickies after the cut
In the clamour to encourage us all to upgrade to high-definition BluRay players, manufacturers and disc producers themselves are touting the extra functionality above and beyond improved picture quality. Interactive web-connected games, messaging and “behind the scenes” extras all promise to enhance the movie experience. However, recent research suggest that, far from being a central factor driving upgraditis, all these extras – particularly those depending on web-based interaction – may actually have no effect on consumer appeal.
A team at Microsoft Research have developed a prototype interface [pdf link] for mobile devices that responds to twisting, squeezing, flexing and stretching to control and on-screen GUI. The system, called Force Sensing, relies on very small manipulations of a handheld device – in this case a modified Samsung UMPC – with different gestures mapped to navigation and other controls. Visual feedback, such as interfaces twisting or bending, apparently decreases the learning time necessary for users to adapt to the new controls.
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