Comcast Is Bringing Skype to TV Soon you might be heading to the television to take a call instead of the phone. Comcast has partnered with Skype, a video-calling service that was recently purchased by Microsoft, to offer the service for TVs sometime next year. Subscribers who rent a video kit from Comcast will be able to use their TVs to make and receive calls from other Skype users — regardless of whether those people are also using a TV for the call. The kit will also come with a remote that has a keyboard to allow chat. Although Skype-enabled TVs have been available since last year, this is the first time that Skype will be available to Comcast subscribers regardless of which TV they own. Comcast hasn't yet announced what it will charge for the kit, but presumably it will be less expensive than purchasing a Skype-enabled television. "Your television is ringing" might become a new household phrase. [via Associated Press]
02.22.2010 - An afternoon nap markedly boosts the brain’s learning capacity If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter. Students who napped (green column) did markedly better in memorizing tests than their no-nap counterparts. Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. “Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the lead investigator of these studies. In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap.
Flying Car Gets Green Light From Feds Flying car company Terrafugia, whose website conveniently includes a pronunciation guide (say it with me: “Terra-FOO-gee-ah”), has announced that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has granted the company specific exceptions regarding their Transition vehicle. The Transition aims to fulfill the dream that we’ve been promised since the earliest days of prognostication: The flying car. Unlike other projects like the Skycar, the Transition is meant to function as both a street-legal car and a light aircraft. The idea is that you could drive it from your home, right onto the airfield, and take off. But to balance the requirements of the stresses of flight, the Transition needed heavy duty tires and a heavy-duty polycarbonate windscreen. Both of these required special exemptions from the NHTSA, which Terrafugia has now secured. For Terrafugia, receiving these exceptions is a great accomplishment but it is by no means the last hurdle for the Transition.
Hypnagogia and Hypnopompia | The Dream Studies Portal Hypnagogia is the imagery, sounds and strange bodily feelings that are felt at “sleep onset.” This is a simplification though, as researchers have noted hypnagogic imagery in the lab at periods of quiet wakefulness as well as stage 1 sleep. Others have correlated hypnagogia with pre-sleep alpha waves and also REM intrusion into sleep onset. whispy lights, multi-dimentional geometric objects, or a sudden image like a stranger’s face Few people remember hypnagogic imagery. Strange noises, voices and rushing sounds are typical, as well as weird mechanistic sounds like beeps and boops. Some hear music — I personally have had lucid hypnagogic orchestras from time to time, with the ability to listen passively or focus on a particular instrument to induce a solo. Entoptica - by Ryan Hurd, 2005, acrylic: inspired by my hypnagogic imagery Lastly, the bodily sensations felt during hypnagogia are just bizarr-o. Some people are haunted by the hypnagogic imagery. Creativity and Discovery Reference
Lucid Dreaming By lucid dreaming, you can gain complete control over the one place that no one will ever care about: your imagination. Just The Facts Lucid dreaming is a scientifically proven phenomenon. While some get into lucid dreaming in order to treat chronic nightmares, or to experience all facets of the human experience, approximately 99.8% of people use it as a tool for cheap and interactive 3D porn. A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming, and he or she can even choose to control and manipulate his or her dream. Dream, dream, dream. How to Take Control of Your Dreams: So, you've doubled your weight over the past five years, you own a record-shattering collection of greasy pizza boxes and broken aspirations, and you're beginning to consider installing a toilet bowl in the place of your computer chair? In order to even begin to get control over your dreams, there are a few preliminary tasks you must complete. The Tasks: 1. "What?" Calm down! 2.
Neuron : Temporally Structured Replay of Awake Hippocampal Ensemble Activity during Rapid Eye Movement Sleep To view the full text, please login as a subscribed user or purchase a subscription. Click here to view the full text on ScienceDirect. Fig. 1 Behavioral Task and Hippocampal Unit Activity (A) Schematic of the four-trial sequence in the circular track task. (B) Spatial firing characteristics of three example CA1 cells. (C) Periodic repetition of characteristic ensemble spiking pattern. Fig. 2 Identification of REM Sleep Templates for Correlation Analysis (A) Experimental design. (B) Schematic of sliding window correlation analysis. Fig. 3 Example Correspondence between a REM Template and RUN Activity (Top) Rasters of 10 pyramidal cells during a 75 s window from RUN. . Fig. 4 Ensemble Pattern Shuffle Analyses (A) BIN shuffle. (B) COLUMN shuffle. (C) SWAP shuffle. (D) SHIFT shuffle. Fig. 5 Template Correlation Analysis of REM-RUN Correspondence (A) Example correlation z score analysis. (B) Behavioral epoch analysis of two example REM episodes. Fig. 6 (A) Schematic of recording session time course.