Who in their right mind will be going around saying “It's Brown Thursday!”? sounds like they are excited to go poop -

Who in their right mind will be going around saying “It's Brown Thursday!”? sounds like they are excited to go poop - 



There is no better time for family and friends to get together than the holiday of Thanksgiving.

Everyone is gathering around to see all the food that is cooking or they are cheering on their football team. It is a time to relax and have a huge feast. Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to do that, as most retailers have started to open their doors for their customers as early as 6 p.m. Thanksgiving night, denying people enough time with their families. But, now the media has decided to come up with the most ridiculous headline: Thanksgiving is now being called Brown Thursday.

First off, that just sounds disgusting. Who in their right mind will be going around saying “It’s Brown Thursday!”? It sounds like they are excited to go poop. But, the problem is how the media loves to try to make up buzz words to catch on. Yes, there is Black Friday, but that has been long known as a day that retailers would be able to turn a profit and have their stores go from the red (a loss) to the black (a profit).

Jimmy Kimmel summed up his feelings on this phase when he did his monologue Thursday night:



Read more - 

http://guardianlv.com/2013/11/thanksgiving-now-being-called-brown-thursday-by-the-media/

Tongue piercing allows paralyzed to drive wheelchairs... -

Tongue piercing allows paralyzed to drive wheelchairs... - 



An experimental device is letting paralyzed people drive wheelchairs simply by flicking their tongue in the right direction.

Key to this wireless system: Users get their tongue pierced with a magnetic stud that resembles jewelry and acts like a joystick, in hopes of offering them more mobility and independence.

Researchers reported Wednesday that 11 people paralyzed from the neck down rapidly learned to use the tongue device to pilot their wheelchairs through an obstacle course full of twists and turns, and to operate a computer, too.

"It's really powerful because it's so intuitive," said Jason DiSanto, 39, of Atlanta, who was among the first spinal cord-injured patients to get his tongue pierced for science and try out the system. "The first time I did it, people thought I was driving for, like, years."

The team of researchers in Atlanta and Chicago put the Tongue Drive System to the test against one of the most widely used assistive technologies, called sip-and-puff, that users operate by breathing into a straw. Using the tongue, patients operated their wheelchairs a bit faster but just as accurately - and on average, they performed about three times better on video game-like computer tests, said lead researcher Maysam Ghovanloo, director of Georgia Tech's bionics lab.

Read more - 

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MED_TONGUE_CONTROLLED_WHEELCHAIRS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-11-27-14-19-44

STUDY: Seeing Natural Wonders Increases Belief in God... -

STUDY: Seeing Natural Wonders Increases Belief in God... - 



Amazing natural sights such as the the Grand Canyon or the Northern Lights might increase people's tendency to believe in God and the supernatural, according to new research by US scientists.
The findings suggest that awe-inspiring sights increase our motivation to make sense of the world around us, and may underlie a trigger of belief in the supernatural.
Psychological scientist Doctor Piercarlo Valdesolo, of Claremont McKenna College in the United States, said: ‘Many historical accounts of religious epiphanies and revelations seem to involve the experience of being awe-struck by the beauty, strength or size of a divine being, and these experiences change the way people understand and think about the world.

‘We wanted to test the exact opposite prediction: it's not that the presence of the supernatural elicits awe, it's that awe elicits the perception of the presence of the supernatural.’
Dr Valdesolo and his colleague Jesse Graham, of the University of Southern California, tested the prediction by having participants watch awe-inspiring scenes from BBC's Planet Earth documentary series or neutral video clips from a news interview.

Afterwards, the participants were asked how much awe they felt while watching the video, and whether they believed that worldly events unfold according to some god's or other non-human entity's plan.

Overall, the participants who had watched the awe-inspiring video tended to believe more in supernatural control, and were more likely to believe in God when compared with the news-watching group. 
The effect held even when awe-inspiring but impossible scenes, such as a massive waterfall through city streets, were presented.
Another study showed that participants who watched the awe-inspiring clips became increasingly intolerant of uncertainty. 
This particular mindset - a discomfort with uncertainty - may explain why feelings of awe produce a greater belief in the supernatural, according to the researchers.
Dr Valdesolo said: ‘The irony in this is that gazing upon things that we know to be formed by natural causes, such as the jaw-dropping expanse of the Grand Canyon, pushes us to explain them as the product of supernatural causes.’
However, the researchers also pointed out that the figures could also shed light on why certain individuals seek to explain the world through secular and scientific means.
The experience of awe may simply motivate us to search for explanations, no matter what kinds of explanations they are.
Dr Valdesolo said this might be why, in another experiment, participants who watched the awe-inspiring video showed greater discomfort and were more likely to believe a random string of numbers was designed by a human hand.
Based on their preliminary findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers are now looking at factors that modulate the effect of awe on belief in the supernatural.
For example, they are testing whether adopting submissive body postures, which make us feel less powerful, might dispose us to experiences of awe. 
Dr Valdesolo said such a link could perhaps explain the presence of such postures in religious practice, such as kneeling, bowing, and gazing up.
He added: ‘The more submissive we act, the more awe we might feel, and perhaps the stronger our beliefs become.’


Read more: - 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2513796/How-Grand-Canyon-makes-religious-Natural-wonders-increase-tendency-believe-God-supernatural.html

Germ-killing nanosurface opens up new front in hygiene - a forest of spikes just 500 nanometres high -

Germ-killing nanosurface opens up new front in hygiene - a forest of spikes just 500 nanometres high - 



Imagine a hospital room, door handle or kitchen countertop that is free from bacteria -- and not one drop of disinfectant or boiling water or dose of microwaves has been needed to zap the germs.

That is the idea behind a startling discovery made by scientists in Australia.

In a study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, they described how a dragonfly led them to a nano-tech surface that physically slays bacteria.

The germ-killer is black silicon, a substance discovered accidentally in the 1990s and now viewed as a promising semiconductor material for solar panels.

Under an electron microscope, its surface is a forest of spikes just 500 nanometres (500 billionths of a metre) high that rip open the cell walls of any bacterium which comes into contact, the scientists found.

It is the first time that any water-repellent surface has been found to have this physical quality as bactericide.

Last year, the team, led by Elena Ivanova at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, were stunned to find cicada wings were potent killers of Pseudomonas aeruginsoa -- an opportunist germ that also infects humans and is becoming resistant to antibiotics.

Looking closely, they found that the answer lay not in any biochemical on the wing, but in regularly-spaced "nanopillars" on which bacteria were sliced to shreds as they settled on the surface.

They took the discovery further by examining nanostructures studding the translucent forewings of a red-bodied Australian dragonfly called the wandering percher (Latin name Diplacodes bipunctata).

It has spikes that are somewhat smaller than those on the black silicon -- they are 240 nanometres high.

The dragonfly's wings and black silicon were put through their paces in a lab, and both were ruthlessly bactericidal.

Smooth to the human touch, the surfaces destroyed two categories of bacteria, called Gram-negative and Gram-positive, as well as spores, the protective shell that coats certain times of dormant germs.

The three targeted bugs comprised P. aeruginosa, the notorious Staphylococcus aureus and the ultra-tough spore of Bacillus subtilis, a wide-ranging soil germ that is a cousin of anthrax.

The killing rate was 450,000 bacterial cells per square centimetre per minute over the first three hours of exposure.

This is 810 times the minimum dose needed to infect a person with S. aureus, and a whopping 77,400 times that of P. aeruginosa.

If the cost of making black silicon is an obstacle, many other options are around for making nano-scale germ-killing surfaces, said the scientists.

"Synthetic antibacterial nano-materials that exhibit a similar effectiveness... can be readily fabricated over large areas," they wrote.

Read more - 

http://www.france24.com/en/20131126-germ-killing-nanosurface-opens-new-front-hygiene