Monday, January 15, 2007

Bilingualism Delays Onset of Dementia. Dee writes with word of a Canadian study indicating that lifelong bilingualism delays the onset of dementia by 4 years. The scientists were reportedly "dazzled" by the results. From the article: "The researchers determined that the mean age of onset of dementia symptoms in the monolingual group was 71.4 years, while the bilingual group was 75.5 years. This difference remained even after considering the possible effect of cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender as influencers in the results. "[Slashdot] 10:32:16 PM      Google It!.

Virtualbox Goes OSS. paltemalte writes to tell us that VirtualBox has gone open source. InnoTek released their virtualization product as open source and launched virtualbox.org to help cultivate the community and allow further development of the software. [Slashdot] 11:13:35 AM      Google It!.

3D Printers To Build Houses. gbjbaanb writes to point out an article in the Sunday Times describing two separate programs where robots are being developed to build houses. The Los Angeles project is farther along than the one in the UK, but the article provides more details on the techniques employed in the latter. Liquid concrete and gypsum will be sprayed from nozzles in a manner analogous to an inkjet printer. From the article: "The first prototype [~] a watertight shell of a two-story house built in 24 hours without a single builder on site [~] will be erected in California before April. The robots are rigged to a metal frame, enabling them to shuttle in three dimensions and assemble the structure of the house layer by layer. The sole foreman on site operates a computer programmed with the designer's plans... Inspired by the inkjet printer, the technology goes far beyond the techniques already used for prefabricated homes. 'This will remove all the limitations of traditional building,' said [an architect involved with the UK project]. 'Anything you can dream you can build.'"[Slashdot] -- this has real potential for disaster recovery and "temporary" housing --BL 11:05:24 AM      Google It!.

MIT Leads in Revolutionary Science, Harvard Declines. Bruce G Charlton writes "In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science, MIT emerged as best in the world. This contrasts with 'normal science' which incrementally-extends science in pre established directions." If you're interested in reading more about how this was determined, read more below.[Slashdot] 10:56:16 AM      Google It!.

Why "Upgrade" To Office 2007. walterbyrd writes "IMO: Office-2007 is a contender for the least useful upgrade in the history of computing. It's expensive, has a steep learning curve, and it's default format is even less compatible with anything else. Stan Beer discusses the "upgrade" in his article: Question: why do I need to upgrade to Office 2007?." [Slashdot] 10:54:46 AM      Google It!.

Teeny-Weeny Rules for Itty-Bitty Atom Clusters. Berkeley has become the first government body in the United States -- and possibly anywhere, according to some analysts -- to explicitly regulate businesses that make or use nanoparticles. The new regulation requires businesses to annually identif... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 10:52:02 AM      Google It!.