MartyEmail Goes Blog

Matthew Nagle, 25, was left paralysed from the neck down and confined to a wheelchair after a knife attack in 2001.

The pioneering surgery at New England Sinai Hospital, Massachusetts, last summer means he can now control everyday objects by thought alone.

The brain chip reads his mind and sends the thoughts to a computer to decipher.

Mind over matter

He can think his TV on and off, change channels and alter the volume thanks to the technology and software linked to devices in his home.

Scientists have been working for some time to devise a way to enable paralysed people to control devices with the brain.

Studies have shown that monkeys can control a computer with electrodes implanted into their brain.

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posted by Marty  # 4:20 PM 0 comments

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posted by Marty  # 4:32 PM 0 comments

You're North Dakota!

You are rather remote, and even inaccessible to the average person. While
many would thus describe you as stuck-up, to you it seems more like you're just stuck.
When no one is looking, you yearn to engage in 19th-century European political
subterfuge. When looking for peace, head for the garden. But please, be extremely careful
around wood-chippers.


Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

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posted by Marty  # 6:07 PM 0 comments

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. -- The family of a Fort Bragg officer recently back from Iraq said Capt. Terrance Wright seemed to hiccup almost constantly for weeks before he died earlier this month.

The Army said Wright died of an unknown illness shortly after returning from Iraq in February. His body was found in a Fayetteville motel room on March 2.

Wright's mother, Sandra Wright, and an aunt, Karen Wright, said Wright had been a healthy 33-year-old before he deployed to Iraq in November. It was his second tour in Iraq.

Karen Wright said she spoke to her nephew in Iraq in early February.

"He could not speak one sentence without hiccuping," she said.

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posted by Marty  # 7:05 PM 0 comments

Two species of tropical octopus have learned a neat trick to avoid predators — they lift up six of their arms and walk backward on the other two.

This first report of bipedal behavior in octopuses, written by University of California, Berkeley, researchers, will be published in the March 25 issue of Science.

When walking, these octopuses use the outer halves of their two back arms like tank treads, alternately laying down a sucker edge and rolling it along the ground. In Indonesia, for example, the coconut octopus looks like a coconut tiptoeing along the ocean bottom, six of its arms wrapped tightly around its body.

UC Berkeley graduate student Crissy Huffard clocked the two-legged speed of one coconut octopus at two and a half inches per second, while a second individual zoomed along, backwards, at five and a half inches per second. This is faster than they can crawl, but probably slower than they jet around.

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posted by Marty  # 1:09 PM 0 comments

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posted by Marty  # 8:28 PM 3 comments

A chewing gum which the makers say can help enhance the size, shape and tone of the breasts has proved to be a big hit in Japan.

B2Up says its Bust-Up gum, when chewed three or four times a day, can also help improve circulation, reduce stress and fight ageing.

The gum works by slowly releasing compounds contained in an extract from a plant called Pueraria mirifica.

In theory, this helps to keep the muscle tissue in good order.

Pueraria mirifica, also known as Kwao Krua, is a species found in Thailand and Burma.

It has long been used by indigenous hill tribe people as a traditional
medicine.

The plant's underground tubers contain a number of chemicals called
phytoestrogens - natural compounds which mimic the effects of the female sex hormone oestrogen.

These include miroestrol and deoxymiroestrol, which are believed to
exert a particularly strong effect, as they are very close in chemical structure to oestradiol, the main human oestrogen.

B2Up says that it is the effect of these two chemicals, coupled with a
third phytooestrogen isoflavone, which makes its gum so effective.

It cites tests carried out by Thailand's Chulalongkorn University which found Pueraria mirifica therapy was able to enhance breast size by 80%.

Further tests carried out in England found that the plant had a
beneficial effect on the skin, and hair, as well as the breasts.

"Holding other family characteristics constant, students perform significantly worse if they have computers at home," the authors conclude. By contrast, children with access to 500 books in their homes performed better. The negative correlation, the researchers explain, is because children with computers neglect their homework more.

The Royal Society's quantitative approach mirrors concerned raised by qualitative analysis of technology in education. Children are now awash with "facts", but don't know what to do with them.

Schoolchildren are developing a "problem-solving deficit disorder", and losing the ability to analyze. A better way, experts insist, is to encourage creativity. And the best remedy for this is to turn off the computer and stimulate childrens' imaginations.

The value of creativity, imagination and critical thinking over
"information" access is self-evident, you'd think. But an alliance of
convenience between technology vendors, who want to stuff more unwanted computers into classrooms, lazy governments, for whom IT is a way of appearing "modern" while cutting education budgets, ensures the issue doesn't stay in the headlines for very long.

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posted by Marty  # 4:55 PM 0 comments

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posted by Marty  # 3:03 PM 0 comments

Official Survivor Congratulations! You scored 63%!

Whether through ferocity or quickness, you made it out. You made the right choice most of the time, but you probably screwed up somewhere. Nobody's perfect, at least you're alive.

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posted by Marty  # 5:40 PM 0 comments

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posted by Marty  # 5:57 PM 0 comments

The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the
boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch
researcher Kees Moeliker.

It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig
Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will
be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one
in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual - no one would raise an eyebrow in the
liberal Netherlands - but they regularly indulge in "attempted rape flights"
when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. "Rape is a normal
reproductive strategy in mallards," explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual
necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the
Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had
crashed into the glass facade of the building. "I went downstairs immediately to
see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos)
lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The
unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of
about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another
male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was
present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into
the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the
corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking
the side of the head.

"Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the
window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs
and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted
only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the
head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three
minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At
19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only
reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five metres, he
did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of
two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls (the 'conversation-call' of Lorentz 1953). I secured
the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present
at the site, calling 'raeb-raeb' and apparently looking for his victim (who, by
then, was in the freezer)."

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posted by Marty  # 2:40 PM 0 comments

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posted by Marty  # 10:05 PM 0 comments

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

You are a four-sided die, a d4. Otherwise known as a tetrahedron, a "Caltrop",
or (to a lesser degree) "Ol' Pointy". This crap bores you, so I'll get to the
point. Others tend to see you as petty, conniving, manipulative, argumentative,
defensive, greedy, and needlessly antagonistic. You see yourself as focused,
effective, efficient, influencing, shrewd, tactical, and direct. Both points of
view are in fact correct. You always know the best way to get things done, a
fact that never wins sympathy with others. Whenever you manage to gain control
of a situation, your solutions are swift and brutal. Unfortunately everyone else
is convinced that granting you such power is, "a bad thing" and often conspire
to keep it out of your hands. Such short-sighted fools!

Yeah, I waste a lot of time on the net, but maybe someday I'll get a press pass for it:

http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/07/technology/07press.html&OP=19dd70bf/DOQ20(D8cbQ24IccHQ2BDQ2B}}BD}TD}Q5CDHQ20bZXcPcQ5BQ25D}Q5CkIQ20Q24Q24Q23ZHQ5EP

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posted by Marty  # 9:01 PM 0 comments

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posted by Marty  # 10:40 AM 0 comments

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posted by Marty  # 6:49 PM 0 comments