Category: News

I experimented with a couple of ways of making donations for Haitian relief today. First, I visited the Red Cross web site and made a donation with a few clicks. It asked me for my credit card number and I entered it. Then it presented me with a thank-you note and a receipt, which I printed. It felt good, but it wasn’t necessarily a rewarding experience.

Then I visited my FarmVille game on Facebook. I’ve been playing the free game for a while now. The game’s publisher, Zynga, makes money from the game when you buy virtual goods, such as farm animals or tractors. I had never purchased anything until today. When I got to the game screen, it asked me if I wanted to donate money to Haitian relief by buying white corn seeds.

I proceeded to do so. I didn’t have any Zynga coins, so I had to buy those first. I went to the payments page and chose Boku, a mobile payments provider. I entered my mobile phone number. Then Boku sent me a text message. I responded by sending a text message with ‘Y’ in it to verify the transaction. The bill for the transaction will appear on my next cell phone bill. Meanwhile, I was able to buy the Zynga coins and then buy the white corn seeds. Zynga will make a donation on my behalf toward Haitian earthquake relief. The game asked me if I wanted to share the fact of my donation with the rest of my friends. I rarely do so with FarmVille, but in this case I went ahead and authorized it. Now my friends who see the message may make donations as well.

If you compared these two methods, it’s clear to me which one is more rewarding. Now, whenever I plant white corn seeds on my farm, I’ll remember the Haiti relief fund. Hopefully, this kind of donation will be popular not only in a time of disaster, but during relative calm as well. It’s a blessing for Haiti that it has become so much easier to make donations online.

Zynga said yesterday that its earlier Haiti meals-for-kids program in FarmVille and other Zynga games had already generated $1.2 million in donations for Haitian kids. And starting yesterday, it added the Haitian relief donation to FarmVille, Zynga Poker, and Mafia Wars. Those three games have 40 million daily active users, and 100 percent of the proceeds are being donated to Haiti relief being headed by the World Relief Programme.

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Here’s a handful of Friday’s noteworthy stories:

Text-to-donate total exceeds $10m – I think we’re onto something
New technology helps to remotely monitor the health of the elderly around the clock
Thanko’s Spy Button Camera gets an upgrade
Mathletes appreciate the Pi shower curtain
Interview: We talk to the lead developer of Plex Media Center for Mac OS X: It was doing Boxee-like stuff before Boxee was cool

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The Otago Daily Times has an article on a tidal power project proposed for Dunedin’s harbour – Otago Harbour tidal power idea gets boost.

There are renewed calls for Dunedin to consider investing in tidal power generation in Otago Harbour, stimulated by progress towards a $600 million scheme north of Auckland.

Auckland-based power company Crest Energy is seeking consent for a 200-turbine, 200-megawatt scheme, costing about $600 million, at the entrance to Kaipara Harbour. The scheme would be the first of its kind in New Zealand, and could power 250,000 homes.

The Environment Court has given a positive recommendation to Conservation Minister Tim Groser, while requesting work to address lingering environmental concerns.

The progress encourages David Tucker, of Dunedin, who argues a similar scheme should be considered for Otago Harbour. Mr Tucker, a semi-retired consultative engineer and former Dunedin City Council consultant, said Otago Harbour could be as effective as a source of renewable energy.

He envisaged turbines on the sea floor at the mouth of Otago Harbour, driven by the tide to generate power, or a barrage from Port Chalmers to Portobello – or both.

Laugh at the website’s design if you want, but the subject matter depicted therein is un-mockable: Decades upon decades of sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly cameras bought from junk stores. Check out some of our favorites after the jump.

God, these are great. Makes me want to go hit the Goodwill and pick up whatever 35mm remembrance of things past I can find. [Junk Store Cameras via Boing Boing]

I’ve just clocked a stunning experiment, shortly to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, that recorded brain activity from patients who had part of their skull surgically removed for several months and had only flaps of skin between their brain and the outside world.

The operation is called a hemicraniectomy and is often used when the brain swells or the pressure builds up inside the skull to the point where it is damaging the brain.

Neurosurgeons will sometimes remove a portion of the skull (see the scans on the left) and just leave the scalp protecting the brain until the swelling subsides, before replacing the skull flap some months later.

As an aside, sometimes the surgeons will surgically insert the piece of skull into the abdomen so the bone marrow doesn’t die and it can be replaced ‘alive’ when the time comes. There’s a great description of this here.

The patients normally wear helmets, for obvious reasons, but they are unique in having such a thin covering of the brain.

A team of researchers, led neuroscientist Bradley Voytek, realised this provided a unique opportunity to examine the exactly how the skull affects EEG, one of the most common techniques for measuring the electrical activity of the brain.

EEG records brain activity from electrodes on the skull, but the signal gets ‘smeared’ as the electrical charge passes through the bone and so the source of the activity can’t be located very precisely to specific brain areas.

By working with the hemicraniectomy patients, the researchers could compare electrical activity on one side of the brain – recorded through just the skin, and the other, where recordings were made normally – through electrodes on the skull.

The researchers found that the non-skull signals were richer, were less subject to interference, were more closely tied to specific tasks and could be better linked to specific brain areas.

On the right is a comparison of the signal coming from a listening task, where participants are suddenly presented with an ‘oddball’ noise in the midst of a bunch of otherwise identical sounds. The brain reacts strongly to the change and this is reliably reflected in a positive spike in the electrical activity at about 50 milliseconds (consequently, the wave is called the ‘P50’ signal).

You can see that the activity on the craniectomy side is much stronger, tighter and cleaner whereas on the skull side it is quite indistinct. The team found similar results in several other tasks.

This not only helps us better understand EEG results on people with intact skulls, but it also meshes with brain activity recordings that are taken from electrodes implanted directly in the brains of patients undergoing neurosurgery.

Link to PubMed entry for study.
pdf of scientific article.
Link to Bradley Voytek’s blog post about his work.

As foods go, eggs are very high in cholesterol. Back when it was thought that eating cholesterol caused an increase in blood cholesterol, people with high cholesterol or heart disease were warned away from eggs. But then it was found that while some people’s cholesterol levels rise significantly from eating cholesterol, most people’s do not. So where does that leave eggs?

The findings have been somewhat mixed over the years. The most recent paper I found was a 2008 report from the Physicians’ Health Study (a trial to study low dose aspirin and beta-carotene’s effects on the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer among US male physicians) (1). They found the following when comparing consumption of 7+ eggs per week to less than 1 per week:

• No correlation with stroke or heart attacks
• A 23% increased risk of mortality (1.23, 1.11-1.36)
• A doubled risk of mortality among men with type 2 diabetes (2.01, 1.26-3.20)

These results were adjusted for age, body mass index, smoking, hypertension, vitamin intake, alcohol consumption, vegetable consumption, breakfast cereal consumption, physical activity, treatment group, atrial fibrillation, diabetes mellitus, hypercholesterolemia, and parental history of premature myocardial infarction.

The authors of this paper reviewed the previous literature on eggs and mortality:

“Limited and inconsistent data have been reported on the association between egg consumption and coronary heart disease. Among 514 Australian Aborigines, consumption of 2+ eggs per week was associated with a 2.6-fold increased risk of coronary heart disease in a prospective analysis (2). Mann et al. (3) reported a 2.7-fold increased risk of death with a higher egg consumption (6+ per week) among British subjects. In contrast, other large prospective cohorts with longer follow-ups did not observe any association between egg consumption and CHD or mortality (4-7).”

They discussed other research showing 7+ eggs increased the risk of heart disease in men and women with diabetes (5).

In conclusion, it appears that in comparison to less than one egg per week, eating 7+ egg per week could increase your risk of early death, especially if you have type 2 diabetes.

References

1. Djousse L, Gaziano JM. Egg consumption in relation to cardiovascular disease and mortality: the Physicians’ Health Study. Am J Clin Nutr. 2008 Apr;87(4):964-9.

2. Burke V, Zhao Y, Lee AH, et al. Health-related behaviours as predictors of mortality and morbidity in Australian Aborigines. Prev Med 2007;44:135–42. [PubMed: 17069878]

3. Mann JI, Appleby PN, Key TJ, Thorogood M. Dietary determinants of ischaemic heart disease in health conscious individuals. Heart 1997;78:450–5. [PubMed: 9415002]

4. Dawber TR, Nickerson RJ, Brand FN, Pool J. Eggs, serum cholesterol, and coronary heart disease. Am J Clin Nutr 1982;36:617–25. [PubMed: 7124663]

5. Hu FB, Stampfer MJ, Rimm EB, et al. A prospective study of egg consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease in men and women. JAMA 1999;281:1387–94. [PubMed: 10217054]

6. Nakamura Y, Okamura T, Tamaki S, et al. Egg consumption, serum cholesterol, and cause-specific and all-cause mortality: the National Integrated Project for Prospective Observation of Noncommunicable Disease and Its Trends in the Aged, 1980 (NIPPON DATA80). Am J Clin Nutr 2004;80:58–63. [PubMed: 15213028]

7. Nakamura Y, Iso H, Kita Y, et al. Egg consumption, serum total cholesterol concentrations and coronary heart disease incidence: Japan Public Health Center-based prospective study. Br J Nutr 2006;96:921–8. [PubMed: 17092383]

Yoga Day USA

We talk about yoga a lot in this blog, so it makes sense to tell you about a way to try out yoga for free. Saturday, January 23 is Yoga Day USA, created by the Yoga Alliance. Search for a free yoga class or workshop at yogadayusa.com.

Green Tea Great for Smokers

Smoking isn’t a healthy habit, duh. However, drinking green tea could help protect smokers from lung cancer. According to a new hospital-based, randomized study conducted in Taiwan, people (whether they smoke or not) who don’t drink green tea have a 5.6% increased risk of lung cancer when compared to people who have at least one cup of green tea each day. For smokers, not drinking green tea carried a 12% increased risk of lung cancer. The research was recently presented at a conference of the American Association for Cancer Research.

What Running Shoes May Be Doing to You

Running is good for your heart, but the typical running shoe could be harming your hips, knees and ankles. Researchers found that running shoes exert more stress on the hip, knee and ankle joints than you’d get from running barefoot or walking in high-heeled shoes! Researchers noted that the typical construction of current running shoes allows for good support of the foot, but they cause increased stress on each of the three lower extremity joints. They blame the increased stress on the running shoe’s elevated heel and increased material under the medial arch. Get the full details of this study at PM&R: The Effect of Running Shoes on Lower Extremity Joint Torques.

(Image via stock.xchng)

Post from: Blisstree

Health Bits: Yoga Day USA, Green Tea

Eco Factor: Ecofriendly cellphone charger harnesses kinetic energy for a green recharge.

Students at the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS) in East Java capital Surabaya have come up with a prototype charger that can juice your cellphone every time you move. The kinetic energy charger can be clipped onto a belt and convert motion energy into electricity.

(more…)

Eco Factor: Lightweight motorcycle powered by electric batteries.

Hirsch Design has unveiled a lightweight all-electric motorcycle, the Comoto, which is planned for production later this year. The 118-pound electric machine is developed using an aircraft-grade T6 aluminum monocoque frame that features twin flat panels, containing the electronics and batteries within.

(more…)

Eco Factor: Self-sufficient structure generates solar and wind energy.

Coop Himmelb(l)au has unveiled the design for the “Energy Roof” in Italy. The structure is part of the research project, “Walking through the history” of the University of Perugia. The roof is designed to serve as a canopy in the center of Perugia, while producing enough energy to sustain the underground passage and the roof itself.

(more…)

Since the royal unveiling of HP’s six new Elitebooks and ProBooks last week, the Elitebook 8440w (w standing for workstation) has been making the review rounds, and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from the chaps at Notebook Review, LAPTOP and Computer Shopper. All were impressed by the Core i7-620M and NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M power that’s been crammed into the 14-inch chassis, but unsurprisingly that causes some warm underside temperatures. Other than that, the 8440w received high praise for its durable gunmetal-build and “exceedingly” comfortable keyboard, but the touchpad was noted as being too small. Actually, the guys over at Notebook Review even go as far to say that the laptop would be “absolutely perfect” if that pad and its buttons weren’t so squished. Now that’s quite a bold statement. All in all, the 8440w seems like a solid and very mobile workstation, but hit up the sources if you’re dying to know more about the $1,650 rig.

Filed under: Laptops

HP EliteBook 8440w lives up to its “workstation” title, says the reviewing masses originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Students and teachers from northwestern Colorado learn from Colorado University Boulder instructors about renewable energy and conservation. This hands-on workshop was open to teams of students from the fifth to eighth grades. Here is a brief …