Can sitting too much kill you? – “We all know that physical activity is important for good health—regardless of your age, gender or body weight, living an active lifestyle can improve your quality of life and dramatically reduce your risk of death and disease. But even if you are meeting current physical activity guidelines by exercising for one hour per day (something few Americans manage on a consistent basis), that leaves 15 to 16 hours per day when you are not being active. Does it matter how you spend those hours, which account for more than 90% of your day? For example, does it matter whether you spend those 16 hours sitting on your butt, versus standing or walking at a leisurely pace? Fortunately or unfortunately, new evidence suggests that it does matter, and in a big way….”

Children can play computer games but can’t tie their shoelaces, research finds – “Practical skills in children are increasingly underdeveloped with traditional milestones being replaced by digital ones. Seven out of ten two to five year olds are happy playing on-line games compared to just 11 per cent who were capable of tying their shoelaces….”

3-D means headaches to many, yet companies push on – “From Hollywood studios to Japanese TV makers, powerful business interests are betting 3-D will be the future of entertainment, despite a major drawback: It makes millions of people uncomfortable or sick….” See also: If 3-D Gives You Headaches, Join the Club

10 billion bits of entanglement achieved in silicon – “Scientists from Oxford University have made a significant step towards an ultrafast quantum computer by successfully generating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement in silicon for the first time – entanglement is the key ingredient that promises to make quantum computers far more powerful than conventional computing devices….”

Texting woman falls in fountain, files lawsuit – “Earlier this week ABC30 showed you video of a woman who mistakenly fell into the fountain at a Pennsylvania mall, because she was distracted by text messaging. Well now that woman is suing the mall for not helping her….”

Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments – “A parole board considers the release of a prisoner: Will he be violent again? A hiring officer considers a job candidate: Will she be a valuable asset to the company? A young couple considers marriage: Will they have a happy marriage? The cached wisdom for making such high-stakes predictions is to have experts gather as much evidence as possible, weigh this evidence, and make a judgment. But 60 years of research has shown that in hundreds of cases, a simple formula called a statistical prediction rule (SPR) makes better predictions than leading experts do. Or, more exactly…”

It’s time for Steve Jobs to go with his dignity intact – “Iconic, turtle-neck sweater wearing genius or customer-service-shy megalomaniac, depending on your point of view: Steve Jobs is unwell. Again….”

Malaria caught on camera breaking and entering cell – “The video above captures the moment when a malaria parasite invades a human red blood cell – the first time the event has been caught in moving pictures….”

Italian scientists claim to have demonstrated cold fusion (w/ Video) – “Few areas of science are more controversial than cold fusion, the hypothetical near-room-temperature reaction in which two smaller nuclei join together to form a single larger nucleus while releasing large amounts of energy. In the 1980s, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann claimed to have demonstrated cold fusion – which could potentially provide the world with a cheap, clean energy source – but their experiment could not be reproduced. Since then, all other claims of cold fusion have been illegitimate, and studies have shown that cold fusion is theoretically implausible, causing mainstream science to become highly speculative of the field in general….”

Horizon – How Long Is A Piece Of String 1/4

World needs $100 trillion more credit, says World Economic Forum – “This doubling of existing credit levels could be achieved without increasing the risk of a major crisis, said the report from the WEF ahead of its high-profile annual meeting in Davos….”

Sony’s latest attack on customer freedom – “I go out of my way not to buy products from Sony. I occasionally regret this because some of Sony’s hardware is best-of-breed. But there are alternatives, and I do my best to find them, because Sony is Exhibit A in the abuse of intellectual-property laws by corporations that believe they have all the rights — including how products may be used after sale — with users and purchasers having no rights at all….”

Another Breakthrough In the Field of Nanotechnology – “The image to the left is a man-made motor, a motor so small 6,000 of them could fit on the head of a pin. Welcome to the world of the nanometer, a unit of measurement so small it’s one-billionth the size of a meter. In fact, a nanometer is 100,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair. Now that’s small!”

SpaceX proposes rocket-powered landing system – “SpaceX announced Monday it submitted a proposal to NASA last month to start an estimated $1 billion process upgrading the company’s Dragon capsule, the first step in making the ship ready for crew rotation flights to the International Space Station….”

Microsoft blames Windows Phone 7 data usage issue on unnamed 3rd party – “Microsoft has issued a vague response to say that the company has determined the cause of excessive Windows Phone 7 data use issues. In a statement given to SeattlePI, the company says that the configuration of a “third-party solution” is causing the operating system to transfer many tens of megabytes of data each day….”

Internal Structure of the Moon – “NASA deployed the frist seismographs on the moon as part of the Apollo Mission in 1969. These seismographs collected data and enabled researchers to determine that the moon’s structure consisted of a thin crust of about 65 kilometers, a mantle about 100 kilometers thick and a core with a radius of about 500 kilometers. At that time seismic data processing was not advanced enough to determine the characteristics of the core….”

Console typing

Mobile Home See also: Unicat

In Graphics: What Is a 401(k) Plan?

Anne Hathaway Cast as Catwoman in ‘Dark Knight Rises’

An update from the Chairman – “When I joined Google in 2001 I never imagined—even in my wildest dreams—that we would get as far, as fast as we have today. Search has quite literally changed people’s lives—increasing the collective sum of the world’s knowledge and revolutionizing advertising in the process. And our emerging businesses—display, Android, YouTube and Chrome—are on fire. Of course, like any successful organization we’ve had our fair share of good luck, but the entire team—now over 24,000 Googlers globally—deserves most of the credit….”

The miserable programmer paradox – “What I call “the miserable programmer paradox” states the following: “A good programmer will spend most of his time doing work that he hates, using tools and technologies that he also hates.” This is a paradox in the sense that it’s a counterintuitive result; you’d expect that the bad programmers would spend their time with crappy technologies, while the excellent programmers would spend their time with super-awesome technologies. Right?” See also: Some folks don’t use debuggers.

Boiling water reactor simulator (free) – “The BWR program fully integrates a full-featured training curriculum in nuclear power technology with a PC-based simulation of a typical BWR nuclear power plant. The program will teach you everything needed to understand and operate the simulator. …”

NASA Mars Rover Will Check for Ingredients of Life – “The instrument is Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, built by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. At the carefully selected landing site for the Mars rover named Curiosity, one of SAM’s key jobs will be to check for carbon-containing compounds called organic molecules, which are among the building blocks of life on Earth. The clean-room suits worn by Curiosity’s builders at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are just part of the care being taken to keep biological material from Earth from showing up in results from SAM….”

Need to breathe – “He also noticed that slow-growing, long-living reef fish such as grouper, which don’t move much and have small gills, died a lot quicker on the deck than fast-moving, short-lived ones such as mackerel and tuna, which have big gills. It was another phenomenon with no satisfying explanation….”

The Weirdest Plane Ever Created By NASA – “Your eyes are not deceiving you: The wing of this plane is oblique, turned 60-degrees across its fuselage. It’s the AD-1 Oblique Wing Aircraft and it’s the weirdest plane ever created by NASA. But why did they make it this way?”

YayTM – 1. Dispense dollar bills for quality dancing 2. Upload videos to youtube 3. ??? 4. Profit! – “YayTM is a physical piece which calls attention to itself at predetermined times, and asks passersby to dance for it, in exchange for a dollar. Using face tracking to measure dancing prowess, the YayTM determines if the user is dancing to its standards and dispenses a dollar if it likes what it sees. Then, regardless of the success or failure of the dancer, and without their previous knowledge, the YayTM uploads video of the dancer to YouTube and displays that video here, for you to make fun of. More info and terms here. Song played for dancers here…”

[[[Interesting Reading #668 – Nintendo 3DS Hands-on, Mini robot helicopters, Ultra-fast quantum computers, laser threat and much more!]]]

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