Study: Facebook May Improve Memory

Broadening online worlds could help maintain and improve cognitive abilities in old age. 

Conor Friedersdorf recently put forward an interesting question: At what age will you stop using Facebook? Many of the college students, now twentysomethings, who made up Facebook's original user base may already be feeling the fatigue. But it may be through other groups of people, for whom the site was never specifically intended but have nonetheless been discovering it in droves, that Facebook may find new ways of remaining relevant.

For the rest of the story: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/study-facebook-may-improve-memory/273439/

The Terrifying Shortage Of U.S. Cyberwarriors

  

Cybersecurity analysts work in the "watch and warning center" during the first tour of the government's secretive cyberdefense lab on Sept. 29, 2011, in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

When the Soviet Union launched the first satellite in 1957, it set off an intellectual arms race that led to more than $1 billion of federal investment in science education. Within a decade, Americans were sending their own expeditions to outer space. Presidents and other public figures since then have made a tradition of referring to Sputnik to push their political agendas. But just because it's a convenient rhetorical lever doesn't invalidate the analogy. And when it comes to cybersecurity, it hits pretty close to the truth.

The United States doesn't have nearly enough people who can defend the country from digital intrusions. We know this, because cybersecurity professionals are part of a larger class of workers in science, technology, engineering, and math--and we don't have nearly enough of them, either. We're just two years into President Obama's decade-long plan to develop an army of STEM teachers. We're little more than one year from his request to Congress for money to retrain 2 million Americans for high-tech work (a request Republicans blocked). And it has been less than a month since the Pentagon said it needed to increase the U.S. Cyber Command's workforce by 300 percent--a tall order by any measure, but one that's grown even more urgent since the public learned of massive and sustained Chinese attempts at cyberespionage last month.

For the rest of the story: http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/you-call-this-an-army-the-terrifying-shortage-of-u-s-cyberwarriors-20130225

Former Obama advisor argues Comcast is a threat to the open Internet

 

Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard and a former advisor to President Obama, was not a fan of Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal. In fact, Crawford was so appalled by the transaction that she made the fight over the merger the focus of her book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

But Crawford's beef isn't only with Comcast. She sees the cable giant's growing size as a symptom of much larger problems with the telecommunications, media, and technology sectors. In her view, these communications industries fester with monopolies, collusion, and consumer-hostile business practices. A few big companies—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, Apple, Google, and Microsoft—"tacitly cooperate by carving out their separate areas of expertise," leaving customers with low quality and high prices.

For the rest of the story: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/former-obama-advisor-argues-comcast-is-a-threat-to-the-open-internet/

Why Aren't You Supposed to Wake a Sleepwalker?

  

Reader Gabrielle wrote in to ask: “Why can't we wake a sleepwalker? Is it a can't do, or a shouldn't do?”

Despite urban legends claiming that waking a sleepwalker will send them into shock or give them a heart attack, it’s pretty much harmless. While you can wake them up, you probably shouldn’t, and that’s for both your benefit.

Waking a sleepwalker has never been shown to cause them any harm, but there’s plenty of potential for the person doing the waking to get hurt. Sleepwalking usually occurs during Stage 3 non-rapid eye movement sleep, also known as slow wave sleep, and this stage of sleep is very deep. While waking straight from stage 3 is difficult, it can be done—but doing so can leave a person in a state of cognitive impairment (sleep scientists call it sleep inertia) for around 30 minutes.

For the rest of the story: http://mentalfloss.com/article/49053/why-arent-you-supposed-wake-sleepwalker

Air Force to Stealth Fighter Pilots: Get Used to Coughing Fits

  

The Air Force has some bad news for the pilots of its F-22 Raptor stealth fighters: Your planes are going to make you feel crappy and there’s not much anyone can do about it. And the message to the maintainers of the radar-evading jet is even more depressing. Any illness they feel from working around the Raptor is apparently all in their heads, according to the Air Force.

Those admissions, buried in newly released Congressional records, represent the latest twist in the years-long saga of the F-22′s faulty oxygen system, which since at least 2008 has been choking pilots, leading to confusion, memory loss and blackouts — combined known as hypoxia — that may have contributed to at least one fatal crash. Ground crews have also reported growing sick while working around F-22s whose engines are running.

The Air Force claims its has a handle on the in-flight blackouts. All 180 or so F-22s are having faulty filters removed and new backup oxygen generators installed. There have also been changes to the G-suits pilots wear. But the Air Force says the alterations won’t do anything to fix the so-called “Raptor cough,” a chronic condition afflicting almost all F-22 pilots.

For the rest of the story: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/02/stealth-pilots-coughing/

Dark Matter May Not Exist At All

When the idea of dark matter first pushed its way into astronomers’ consciousness a few decades ago, the primary reaction was: “Seriously? There’s a mysterious, invisible substance out there, with a mass six or more times greater than that of the visible stars and galaxies, only we have no way of detecting it, but really, it’s there? OK then.” Or something like that, albeit in more formal scientific language.

These days, dark matter is a firmly established principle of cosmology; most of the questions now focus on how the stuff is distributed through the universe, and which of many possible subatomic particles it’s made of.

Most of the questions, but not all. Ever since the early 80’s, a competing theory has been struggling for acceptance. 

Known as MOND, for Modified Newtonian Dynamics, it posits that dark matter’s main effect — allowing galaxies to spin faster than they should — isn’t caused by extra stuff, but instead by a change in how gravity works under certain conditions.

(MORE: Telescope to Hunt For Missing 96% of the Universe)

For the rest of the story: http://science.time.com/2013/02/26/cosmic-fuggedaboudit-dark-matter-may-not-exist-at-all/?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+Top+Stories%29 

The 9 Ways You Are Destroying Your Back With Terrible Desk Posture

From Sloppy Slouchers to Discreet Leaners: What’s Your Desk Posture?  

  

Grandma would be appalled. It seems no one sits up straight anymore. A study by furniture maker Steelcase (SCS) has just identified nine common ways that modern workers are sitting, mainly to use all those gadgets on their desks. The report, based on a survey of 2,000 people in 11 countries, also points out the stresses we impose on our bodies by sitting in unfamiliar postures.

For the rest of the story: http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2013-02-22/from-sloppy-slouchers-to-discreet-leaners-what-s-your-desk-posture#slide1