Last year, Kristen Sorensen was diagnosed with a rare disorder called Guillain Barre syndrome, which affects the nervous system, and the then 55-year-old woman was paralyzed from the neck down.

"It came out of nowhere," says Sorensen. "I'd been fine and exercising every day, but it just started with tingling in my fingertips then progressed."

Sorensen never expected to walk again.

But earlier that year, the Brooks Cybernic Treatment Center in Jacksonville, Florida, became the first US center to use a unique rehabilitative technology developed in Japan -- the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL).

HAL -- essentially a wearable cyborg -- helps those with spinal cord injuries and muscular dystrophy regain their movements and strengthen their nerves and muscles. Known as exoskeletons, they're a type of lightweight suit, with joints powered by small electric motors, that serve as mechanical muscle.

Here's what's truly mind-blowing: Patients use their brain waves to control them.

See more details over at CNN.

(Image Credit: CNN)

“Don’t pick up wildlife,” warned officials after a Colorado Springs woman, on Wednesday, just put a 20-pound (9-kilogram) bobcat inside her car, inches away from the safety seat where her 3-year-old son was.

Bill Vogrin, the spokesman for the Colorado Parks and Wildlife, states that the woman saw the injured adult male bobcat while driving, and wrapped it in a blanket and put it in the back of her SUV.

Agency officials told her to get her boy and herself out of the vehicle when she called to ask what to do.

Vogrin says District Wildlife Manager Sarah Watson responded to the call, opened a door and slammed it shut when she spotted the 20-pound (9-kilogram) cat.

Watson used a trapping device to remove the animal, which was hissing and resisting despite severe internal injuries and paralyzed rear legs. The mortally injured cat was euthanized.

Hopefully the bobcat is in bobcat heaven now, but this is still sad news.

(Image Credit: Colorado Parks and Wildlife via AP)

It is ambitious to dream of visiting every country on Earth. It is more ambitious to dream of fulfilling that dream before you turn 40, but this man just fulfilled that thanks to his considerable stockpile of credit cards. This man is Stefan Krasowski.

Krasowski is part of a growing subculture of people for whom earning points has become a kind of sport.

And that's why Krasowski founded a group called Reach For The Miles in New York, a meetup of travel hackers and deal optimizers who trade tips for gaming the points system.

"I've taken out over 46 credit cards in five years and earned 2.6 million miles just in sign-up bonuses" said Janice Lintz, a travel blogger. She's a regular at Reach For The Miles and, like Krasowski, she's determined to visit every country in the world. She's at 135.

Earlier this month, she had just gotten back from Easter Island. The trip was great, but what Lintz really wanted to talk about was all the points she earned by flying there.

"So I'm not sure where I came out, but I think I may have been paid to go to Easter Island," Lintz said.

Krasowski and Lintz are only two people out of many who dabble on this highly risky “credit card game.”

As for me, I’d rather play it safe. What about you? What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Stefan Krasowski/Rapid Travel Chai)

If you’re someone who can’t start your day without drinking a cup of coffee (like me), then probably coffee, not blood, runs in your veins already (just kidding). People like us know how important it is to start our day with coffee.

Did you know that caffeine has the potential to improve athletic performance? Numerous studies have shown that it has positive effects on strength, power output, and endurance. It is no wonder, therefore, that companies now are infusing ingredients like mushrooms and algae with coffee.

Outside Online presents to us six of these “next-gen coffee”. See them over at the site.

(Image Credit: Christoph/ Pixabay)

Learning how to read activates the parts of the brain which process non-written visual objects such as houses, faces, and tools, according to a new research. Rather than negatively affecting brain responses to these types of objects, the study, published in the journal Science Advances, states that reading may cause increased brain responses to them.

Learning to read causes the development of a letter- and word-selective brain region known as the visual word form area (VWFA). However, some researchers have claimed that the development of this area takes up space that is otherwise available for processing objects.

To decipher what really happens, researchers led by Alexis Hervais-Adelman from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands recruited 29 completely illiterate adults from two rural villages near Lucknow in northern India for a six-month literacy training program.

The participants learned to read and write the alphabet, two-letter and three-letter words and sentences, including basic grammar rules such as verbs, nouns, pronouns, tense and gender in Devanagari script, the writing system for Hindi, the local language.

[...]

They found no evidence that brain areas for responding to non-word objects shrank in the brains of participants in the literacy program. Instead, reading reuses the same brain areas that are usually used for processing objects, keeping such areas intact.

More details of the study over at Cosmos.

(Image Credit: Faulk Huettig)

The artificial intelligence has been infiltrating every industry over the years, with its impact ranging from transportation, medicine, and language, and there’s a lot of hype surrounding it. DataRobot CEO Jeremy Achin puts it this way: “Everyone knows you have to have machine learning in your story or you’re not sexy.”

But which companies are using AI in a meaningful way, and demonstrate big business potential? With the help of Meritech Capital, Forbes assembled a list of private, U.S-based companies which fit the criteria.

Check out the list over at Forbes.

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)

#Batman is alive and well in Melbourne pic.twitter.com/0aVdmIf7G0

— Danny Grasso (@DannyInSpecs) September 21, 2019

Last Saturday, cities around the world celebrated “Batman Day”, an invented holiday where DC Comics and Warner Bros. work together to promote the vigilante superhero.

This year marked the 80th anniversary of the first recorded sighting of the Caped Crusader, and, to celebrate this event, ten cities around the world lit up the iconic distress beacon used to summon the superhero, the Bat Signal. Unfortunately, the Caped Crusader did not answer their call.

See the photos over at Slate.

(Image Credit: Danny Graso/ Twitter)

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Martha Stewart have something in common: they are part of the 1 percent. But when I say “the one percent”, I’m not referring to their monetary stature — I’m talking about them being a part of the people who “thrive on far less sleep than what is recommended by doctors and researchers”. These people have what scientists call short sleeper syndrome.

Trump, Musk and Stewart all reportedly get by on less than six hours a night, making them part of the so-called “sleepless elite.” Most people need around seven to nine hours of sleep a night for overall health and well-being. But it seems that these guidelines don’t apply to a small segment of the population officially called natural short sleepers. 

Short sleepers wake up feeling refreshed and wide awake, despite clocking six or less hours of sleep per night. Some short sleepers say a mere few hours of shut-eye a night is all they need to feel great.  

It’s sort of like being both a night owl and early riser at the same time. And, unsurprisingly, this group has caught the interest of researchers due to their sleep efficiency.

These people really are a fascinating group to study. Find out more about them over at Discover.

(Image Credit: Free-Photos/ Pixabay)

Things sure have changed a lot since the 1960s, when engineers aimed to teach computers to see, and the proposals were, according to John Tsotsos, a computer scientist at York University, “clearly motivated by characteristics of human vision.” Now, computers beat us at our own game.

Computer vision has grown from a pie-in-the-sky idea into a sprawling field. Computers can now outperform human beings in some vision tasks, like classifying pictures — dog or wolf? — and detecting anomalies in medical images. And the way artificial “neural networks” process visual data looks increasingly dissimilar from the way humans do.

[...]

… This raises the question: Does computer vision need inspiration from human vision at all?

In some ways, the answer is obviously no. The information that reaches the visual cortex is constrained by anatomy: Relatively few nerves connect the visual cortex with the outside world, which limits the amount of visual data the cortex has to work with. Computers don’t have the same bandwidth concerns, so there’s no reason they need to work with sparse information.

According to Tsotsos, however, disregarding human vision is folly.

Find out more about this over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: PublicDomainPictures/ Pixabay)

From large Ponzi schemes to multi-million dollar cases of manipulating financial records, Canada has had its fair share of high-profile scams over the years. But how do people manage to pull off this kind of scheme? 

The Walrus presents to us several ways that criminals in order to get money from you. Check it out over at the site.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

As we breathe in, our lungs fill with air which is carried through every part of our lungs through tubes that are organized in a certain way. These tubes branch off, with one going to the left lung, and the other going to the right. By branching again and again into tinier and tinier tubes, our lungs are filled with air. Without this type of process, we would be dead, and this type of process depends on the principle called self-similarity.

Self-similarity is everywhere in nature. Look at a fern: Each fern leaf is composed of smaller replicas of itself, which are composed of yet smaller replicas. Or think of vast deltas, where huge rivers branch out into smaller and smaller streams and rivulets until they vanish into the earth or oceans. Each branching of a river is similar to a previous branching that created that river.

Why is this principle present everywhere? Because it is efficient. And when I say, everywhere, it really is present everywhere — even in language.

Human language is amazingly creative. If you make up a sentence of any complexity, and search for that exact sentence on the Internet, it’s almost never there. Virtually everything we say is novel. Yet at the heart of this capacity of ours lies an incredibly simple piece of mental technology: Merge. Merge takes two bits of language, say two words, and creates out of them another bit of language. It builds the hierarchical structures of language.

Merge was proposed by Noam Chomsky in the early 1990s. He argued that this single piece of mental technology, plus language specific constraints that children could learn from their linguistic experiences, was enough to capture the syntax of all human languages.

Know more about this principle over at Nautilus.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

There are two different perspectives when it comes to the nature of human beings. There is one, which argues that humans are inherently good, and there is the other, which argues that humans are inherently evil. The latter, for some reason, has become an unquestioned principle among many evolutionary biologists.

It is a tendency that began some time ago. When the Australian-born anthropologist Raymond Dart discovered the first australopithecine fossil in 1924, he went on to describe these early hominids as:

“Confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of the victims and greedily devouring living writhing flesh.”

But according to David Barash, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, this idea is a dangerous one.

Find out his reason over at Aeon.

(Image Credit: alles/ Pixabay)

🚨Starting TODAY!🚨 Find #ImpossibleBurger in a 12 oz retail pack only at your local Gelson's 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️

Bringing you another exciting FIRST TO MARKET EXCLUSIVE!

Learn More: https://t.co/4WsLNn15mn@ImpossibleFoods pic.twitter.com/vQo0nvOsKs

— Gelson's Markets (@gelsonsmarkets) September 20, 2019

For several years, the companies Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have been continuously gaining attention because of their meat alternatives, which have been made possible through the use of state-of-the-art technology. However, the two companies have not crossed paths yet, as Beyond Meat focused on getting into grocery stores, while Impossible Foods focused on the restaurant market. 

Both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods sell their ground burger alternatives in similar packaging. They look about like ground meat and both reportedly char—like the real thing—when cooked in a skillet. But just how they will stack up against each other in the hands of home cooks remains to be seen.

Now, people will be able to judge which meat alternative is the better one, as Impossible Foods announced on September 20 that they will be moving their product into grocery stores.

It will roll out first into 27 Gelson’s grocery stores in California, and has promised news of more expansion in the coming months. A 12-ounce package of Impossible’s plant-based meat goes for about $9 a pop.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Gelson’s Markets/ Twitter)

We are bombarded by a lot of information every day. Much of this information that we receive turns into memories in our brains. Unfortunately, as with the words of Ronald Davis, a neurobiologist at the Scripps Research Institute, “we simply cannot deal with all of it.” And so, it is necessary that we forget some things.

In a study of mice, researchers led by Akihiro Yamanaka of Japan’s Nagoya University have pinpointed neurons which help the brain forget excess memories.

[As they] report in the journal Science, special cells called melanin-concentrating hormone, or M.C.H., neurons, release electrical signals during R.E.M. sleep—a sleep phase marked by rapid eye movement, heightened heart rate and intense dreams. This process, in turn, enables the brain to filter out unneeded information and create room for new memories.

According to Sheikh, Yamanaka and his colleagues realized M.C.H. neurons’ significance while studying sleep patterns in mice. Spurred by the realization that these cells interfere with the hippocampus, a brain region needed to consolidate memories, the team decided to conduct a series of tests.

Know more about this study over at Smithsonian.com.

(Image Credit: Robert-Owen-Wahl/ Pixabay)

This is the Weald and Downland Living Museum, spread over 40 acres in the village of Singleton, in West Sussex. This museum is dedicated to real historic buildings. It showcases over 50 buildings which date from the 10th to the 19th century. The aforementioned buildings were rescued from demolition.

Each building has been carefully dismantled, transported from its original site, and painstakingly reconstructed here. There are homes, farmhouses, workers’ cottages, shops, barns, schools, churches and more. They come from all over South East England.

In other words, what you see here are not merely reproductions; they are the authentic ones.

The buildings are furnished just as they would have been in the past, so exploring the houses is like walking through almost a thousand years of rural English life. You can climb the stairs of a 17th-century craftsman’s cottage to lie on the straw bed, grind flour in the 17th-century watermill, or even taste some beef with prune pottage and walnuts in a 1540’s Tudor kitchen.

See the photos over at the Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Adrian Cable/ Wikimedia Commons)