Category: ideas

“Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time.”

“Could the temptation for stealing iPods be so strong that they’re behind an increase in the crime rate? Researchers at a public policy institute say yes.”

“Traffic that grinds to a halt and then restarts for no apparent reason is one of the biggest causes of frustration for drivers. Now a team of Japanese researchers has recreated the phenomenon on a test-track for the first time.”

The survey of 1,000 people “found participants average six hours and 40 minutes of sleep a night on weeknights, even though they estimated they’d need roughly another 40 minutes of sleep to be at their best.”

“The idea that major cities of the world, rather than the nations they belong to, will be the rising powers of the 21st century is a fashionable one these days. These wealthy cities set the world agenda in finance and fashion and just about everything in between.” So where does Los Angeles and its telegenic mayor fit?

More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay–in fact it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there–even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written.

“Music is absolutely normal for members of our species, but utterly quirky. Moreover, it is known that music activates almost all the human brain: the sensory centers, the prefrontal cortex that underlies rational functions, the emotional areas (cerebellum, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens), the hippocampus for memory, and the motor cortex for movement. When you listen to a piece of music your brain is abuzz with intense neural activity.”

If you’ve never heard of PowerPoint Karaoke, that probably means you’re neither German nor a hardcore techie. The phenomenon has been spreading geek to geek and conference to conference since it was invented by a German artists’ group in 2005.

“A meme is an idea or thing that is passed from person to person and is either adopted for its usefulness or other purpose — in some cases becoming a wildly popular idea that can’t be stopped — or abandoned to die a quick and ignoble death. British scholar Susan Blackmore says that human beings are being overrun by memes that want to use us for their own advancement.”

“A huge 12.8 billion-pixel image was made of the linen, on which the smudged outline of the body of a man is indelibly impressed. The image was made following a Vatican request to obtain the most detailed reproduction of the yellowing ancient cloth. The technology allows a level of scrutiny of the linen as never achieved before.”