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POPSSleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter This insight paved the way for a new understanding of organic chemistry and earned Kekulé a title of nobility in Germany. Although most of us have not been ennobled, there is something undeniably familiar about Kekulé’s problem-solving method. Whether deciding to go to a particular college, accept a challenging job offer or propose to a future spouse, “sleeping on it” seems to provide the clarity we need to piece together life’s puzzles. But how does slumber present us with answers?
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POPSRobots Detect Behavioral Cues to Follow Humans
“As humans, we constantly incorporate other peoples' current actions as clues (cues) as to what they may do in the future,” Sanjay Joshi of the University of California, Davis, told PhysOrg.com. “For instance, we have a ‘sixth sense’ on the highway to know that a certain car will swerve into our lane soon, based on the driver's current driving patterns. Then, we may become more defensive in our own driving. In our work, we wanted to begin the process of allowing robots to use behavioral cues (of humans or other robots), to make the robot's mission more reliable and accurate. In social work environments populated by numerous people and robots, these types of cues should be abundant.” The researchers explained that behavioral cues that robots might use could include any action or signal that the leader exhibits that hints at a future action. These might be intended behaviors, such as pointing or waving. Other cues might be unconscious, such as behaviors that indicate stress or sadness,
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POPSWhy Having Big Buttocks Is Good for Your Health Working on mice, the team transplanted fat from one location of the animals' body to the other. Subcutaneous fat removed to the abdomen triggered body weight and fat mass losses, and a decrease in blood sugar levels. The rodents also got more responsive to insulin, the hormone controlling the way in which the body metabolizes sugar. Insulin resistance triggers the type 2 diabetes. When visceral fat was placed to other body regions, it induced no effect.
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POPSNew Scifi Story About How Google Achieves Consciousness rom the story: When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else.
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POPSWhen Rape is OK: Female Contractors in Iraq
Women like -- as you may remember -- Jamie Leigh Jones, 23, a former employee of military contractor KBR who has been unable to get her charges of gang rape heard in court; women like Mary Beth Kineston, who was fired after complained about harassment and groping incidents. "I felt safer on the convoys with the Army than I ever did working for KBR," Kineston told the Times. "At least if you got in trouble on a convoy, you could radio the Army and they would come and help you out. But when I complained to KBR, they didn't do anything. I still have nightmares. They changed my life forever, and they got away with it." Jones testified in Congress in December -- and yesterday -- in order to draw attention to such cases and urge lawmakers to change regulations governing private arbitration. Emboldened by Jones, more women have begun to step forward, talking about mysteriously disappearing complaints and about being given, for their grievances, an 800 number and a pat on the head.
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POPS"Mark Twain ; God Knows Where" "Mark Twain was now regarded by many as the foremost American author. Certainly he was the most widely known. As a national feature he rivaled Niagara Falls. No civilized spot on earth that his name had not reached" Another letter addressed: "Mark Twain, The Devil Knows Where" also reached him, and he answered, “He did, too.”
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POPSGoodbye To Faulty Software? The program that performs the computation is equivalent to the proof of the theorem. By proving the theorem the program is guaranteed to be correct. It is not that simple, of course, but so promising is type theory that since 1989 the EU has been funding a string of projects to develop it under the Future and Emerging Technologies programme. That style of working is going to change so that we spend more effort on actually writing programs than testing them.
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POPSNanotechnology: Entirely New Way Of Storing Gas Created The transition happens quickly and is controlled simply by heating the material to close the nanovalves, then adding water to the substance to re-open them and release the trapped gas. The paper includes video footage of the process taking place under a microscope, showing gas bubbles escaping from the crystals with the introduction of water. "The process is highly controllable and because we're not breaking any strong chemical bonds, the material is completely recyclable and can be used indefinitely," Shimizu said.
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POPSNikola Tesla Built an Electric Car in 1931 Tesla is one of my biggest heroes. In 1900 he understood the concepts behind what finally became the "web" and would have built it given the right support. He also had plans to distribute electricity wirelessly around the world for free. I truly believe he would have accomplished that too.
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POPSSuper-Space Cube "to Link All Known Technologies" It's not just the connections that are built for extraterrestrial operation: the unit is highly impact resistant, of course compact, and draws a minuscule five watts to operate. The trade off for these tiny requirements is less than impressive specs: a 300 MHz processor and only 16 MB of RAM.
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POPS7 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop don't forget Google’s Picasa 2 ..very easy to use and though limited it does do some quick and easy cropping, black and white from color, soft focus, slide shows, red-eye removal. It's fast and easy for bulk editing a lot of photos… export (batch resize) all starred images at the end of a session to a folder and bulk upload them to Flickr. It’s not very good/intuitive for resizing photos to exact dimensions
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