Foc.us: The first commercial tDCS headset that lets you safely overclock your brain After an interminable wait, the first brain-boosting tDCS headset has finally received FCC approval and will begin shipping in the next few days. Dubbed the Foc.us, the headset jolts your prefrontal cortex with electricity, improving your focus, reaction time, and ability to learn new skills. The Foc.us is being targeted at gamers looking to improve their skillz, but tDCS has the potential to improve — or more accurately to overclock — almost every aspect of your life. To give its full name, tDCS stands for transcranial direct current stimulation. Transcranial simply means that the direct current (i.e. from a battery rather than the AC mains) is passed across a region of your brain. In the case of the Foc.us, the direct current passes between the cathode and anode, which are placed over your prefrontal cortex. The amount of current used is very small — on the order of two milliamps, much less than the current a 9V battery delivers — and in theory there’s very little risk.
Why does so much weird news come from Florida Remember butterfly ballots and hanging chads? Not to mention a killer whale attack at SeaWorld. Florida, says a column in Slate, is home to the weird. Not that weird news doesn’t happen elsewhere. It certainly does. “When big news happens somewhere in the country, people in other states say, ‘Oh my goodness!’ Population is one explanation, Pittman writes. The history of the Sunshine State is shady — Slate points out that back when it was trying to bring in settlers, the state gave away deeds to swampland to anyone who promised to drain it or fill it. Then there’s the subtropical climate and the unusual flora and the scary fauna. The thick foliage means that machetes are a common backyard tool — and sometimes a weapon to use against burglars. The warm weather doesn’t seem to make for a marital paradise: Florida’s Panama City tops the country as the No. 1 divorce capital — due at least in part to the state’s lax divorce laws. There's an entire Twitter feed just for "Florida Man" stories.
Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers, Study Finds Correction Appended: Aug. 31, 2010 One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don't drink tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who had already incurred health problems associated with drinking. But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that — for reasons that aren't entirely clear — abstaining from alcohol does tend to increase one's risk of dying, even when you exclude former problem drinkers. Moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is associated with the lowest mortality rates in alcohol studies. But why would abstaining from alcohol lead to a shorter life? These are remarkable statistics.
Creating a $99 parallel computing machine is just as hard as it sounds Ten months ago, the chipmaker Adapteva unveiled a bold quest—to create a Raspberry Pi-sized computer that can perform the same types of tasks typically reserved for supercomputers. And... they wanted to sell it for only $99. A successful Kickstarter project raised nearly $900,000 for the so-called "Parallella," and the company got to work with a goal of shipping the first devices by February 2013 and the rest by May 2013. As so often happens, the deadlines slipped, but Adapteva has done what it set out to do. The first version of the board was finished in January, but it cost $150 to produce. Adapteva called Parallella "A Supercomputer For Everyone" in the title of its Kickstarter. "The board obviously isn't a supercomputer," Olofsson said; however, "you can put thousands of these boards together at a fraction of the cost you would pay for a traditional supercomputer." Each board has a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 chip as its CPU, which can offload tasks to Adapteva's Epiphany co-processor.
Carnac Stones The Carnac Stones The Carnac stones are an exceptionally dense collection of megalithic sites around the French village of Carnac, in Brittany, consisting of alignments, dolmens, tumuluses and single menhirs. The more than 3,000 prehistoric standing stones were hewn from local rock and erected by the pre-Celtic people of Brittany, and are the largest such collection in the world. Local tradition claims that the reason they stand in such perfectly straight lines is that they are a Roman legion turned to stone by Merlin - Brittany has its own local versions of the Arthurian cycle. In recent centuries, many of the sites have been neglected, with reports of dolmens being used as sheep shelters, chicken sheds or even ovens. There are three major groups of stone rows - Menec, Kermario and Kerlescan - which may have once formed a single group, but have been split up as stones were removed for other purposes. Menec alignments Kermario ("house of the dead") alignment Kerlescan alignments Saint-Michel
10 Reasons Why Video Games Were Better in the '80s You may be too young to remember, but the 1980s represented a simply awesome (and awesomely simplistic) decade of video games. The medium was innocent and goofy and as a result, so were the games. So how great were the '80s? Almost Every Game Had Cheat Codes Social Media Didnt Constantly Spoil Them ...Because Most of Them Only Cost a Quarter to Play And We Mostly Played Them in the Same Room So No Anonymous Children Could Berate Us From Thousands of Miles Away Controller Layouts Werent Totally Confusing There Was Practically No Voice Acting, So There Was Practically No Terrible Voice Acting No Console Wars Meant No Console Trolls And Most Importantly, Games Were Actually Hard.
10 really disgusting food facts you didn't know If you’re hungry right now, you won’t be after you read this article. There are some pretty horrendous facts about fast food and other food favorites out there if you’re willing to dig a little. Keep reading to learn about 10 disgusting food facts that McDonald’s and other food giants likely don’t want you to know about. Photo credit: Magic Madzik, Flickr 10 The average fast food patron eats 12 pubic hairs in a given year We’ve all got the occasional hair in our food at one point or another. 9 A strawberry McDonald’s milk shake contains 50 artificial flavors Apparently, real strawberries are expensive. 8 This is where chicken nuggets come from Before reshaping, foods like chicken nuggets, hot dogs, bologna and pepperoni look like a disgusting sludge of pink paste. 7 There are bugs and rodent hair in your peanut butter FDA laws allow for an average of 30 insect fragments per 100 grams of peanut butter. 6 Shellac is an important ingredient in jelly beans 1 Chicken McNuggets contain beef
Calories Matter – Stop Bashing The First Law Mike Vacanti is a NYC based fitness pro. He blogs – mostly on diet, training and psychology – and also runs a successful coaching business. Part head in the clouds, part nose to the grindstone – Mike believes owning your fitness regimen will blur the line between dream and reality as every area of your life is enhanced. Visit Mike on his Website, Facebook, Twitter or Fitocracy. At some point in the last 12-18 months, it became cool to rebel against the energy equation. You know, the first law of thermodynamics. Energy In – Energy Out = Weight Gain/Loss I’m not sure why it became cool. Calorie counting has been effective for a long time. Why All The Hate? Some are financially incentivized to make weight loss as mystical and confusing as possible. Others aren’t so malicious. And still others like to make red herring arguments in articles titled something like “a calorie is a calorie; or is it a calorie?” Five Arguments Against The Energy Equation Argument #1: PROCESSED FOODS MAKE YOU FAT Closing
Probes confirm Earth acts like a giant particle accelerator The narrative of the first few things put in orbit generally focuses on the space race between the US and Soviet Union. So it's often forgotten that some of the first objects put into space actually discovered something new: the Van Allen belts. These areas of high-energy particles are held in place by the Earth's magnetic fields, and they pose a radiation hazard to any people and equipment that orbit within them. Initially, the Van Allen belts were thought to be largely static, which meant explaining how the particles they contained ended up at such high energies wasn't much of an issue. The debate was left unsolved until NASA put the Van Allen Probes into space. If the new particles were accelerated before they entered the belts, the probes should have been able to track the migration of high energy particles inward toward the core area of the radiation zone.