Cognitive enhancement is not about future generations playing video games via neural implants and thought interfaces. Presently, it is about a large fraction of the worlds scientist shortening their lives (speak about lifespan enhancement) via caffeine, nicotine, and sugar intake that leads to diabetes and cardio vascular illnesses via hypertension with high blood pressure and heart troubles, teeth grinding, frequent urination, and so on. Coffee is a must at all conferences. No brew, no chance of surviving afternoon talks in a fully conscious state.

Fantasy baseball as fans understand it today began in the 1980s but actual fantasy baseball, beyond kids trading baseball cards, began 50 years ago.   Hal Rickman, an accountant in New York City, started finalizing  work on something he had begun when he was much younger.   It was Strat-O-Matic Baseball.

Rickman told USA Today's Mike James that as a young boy he rolled dice 5,000 times to make a table of probabilities and looked at baseball statistics in the newspaper to match probability to performance and see what would happen.   In 1961 he started producing the game and later the year Roger Maris would eclipse the ghost of Babe Ruth for the single season home run record.

In the 'gay sex is bad unless it's women' cultural milieu, a survey by a University of Texas at Austin psychologist determined that men are more than twice as likely to continue dating a girlfriend who has cheated on them with another woman than if she cheated with another man.

The survey used 700 college students so calibrate accordingly - men may not like their girlfriends sleeping with another guy but a girlfriend sleeping with another girl is a porn movie.

Measuring 'intelligence' is a much art as science.   Even using the word intelligence sends people down a philosophical rabbit hole, disagreeing about what the word means.

So can there be a 'universal' intelligence test that measures...okay, we have to use the world 'intelligence' despite it being a logical fallacy to use it in its own definition...intelligence regardless of cultural or language?

José Hernández-Orallo, a researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, says he can do even better.   He says his intelligence test can fairly measure the intelligence of adults or kids.  Even robots.

If wearing 3-D glasses makes you feel like we haven't progressed much since the 1950s, you are not alone.   Fortunately, MIT is in the 1970s - namely, the movie "Star Wars" from 1977, using a 2011 Microsoft Xbox Kinect to create streaming holographic video of Princess Leia, among other things.

Their work is still research, achieving a few frames per second and low resolution, but it may make 3-D TV irrelevant.

In the quarterly lamentation about the need for science outreach in the U.S., what often gets lost is that not everyone will be good at science.   Lack of science knowledge is regarded as some sort of defect, but it is never an issue with the child, instead it is society or schools.   We need more funding for cartoon characters and flashy animation to explain science because that is what today's kids 'need', we are told.   If you are in that camp, the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress will make you happy.   

Can olive oil prevent mental illness?

A new study says the ingestion of trans-fats and saturated fats increases the risk of suffering depression and that olive oil protects against this mental illness. 


The study by researchers from Navarra and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria used 12,059 SUN Project volunteers over the course of six years; the volunteers had their diet, lifestyle and ailments analyzed at the beginning of the project, over its course and at the end of the project. The researchers say none of the volunteers reported depression at the beginning of the study but, at the end, 657 new cases had been detected.