It is often said that, as we age, our attention and executive functions gradually decline. However, this recent study from Georgetown University Medical Center counters this popular belief. The results from this study suggest that there are key mental abilities that could actually improve as we get older. Michael T. Ullman, the senior investigator of the study, describes the findings as “amazing, and have important consequences for how we should view aging.”

“This is all the more important because of the rapidly aging population, both in the US and around the world,” Ullman says. He adds that with further research, it may be possible to deliberately improve these skills as protection against brain decline in healthy aging and disorders.

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The components they studied are the brain networks involved in alerting, orienting, and executive inhibition. Each has different characteristics and relies on different brain areas and different neurochemicals and genes. Therefore, Ullman and Veríssimo reasoned, the networks may also show different aging patterns.

Alerting is characterized by a state of enhanced vigilance and preparedness in order to respond to incoming information. Orienting involves shifting brain resources to a particular location in space. The executive network inhibits distracting or conflicting information, allowing us to focus on what’s important.

The study found that only alerting abilities declined with age. In contrast, both orienting and executive inhibition actually improved.

Aging is not so bad after all.

(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)

If you think that tortoises are one of the longest-living animals in the world, then this list may come as a surprise for you. Why? Because tortoises don’t even make it to this list of ten longest-living animals. That’s right. While tortoises indeed live long, their lifespan seems short when compared to the animals on this list. Now you may wonder, “how long can these so-called longest-living animals live?” Here is the answer: some of them have been alive for over 10,000 years, and then there are some that are potentially immortal.

Check out the list over at Live Science.

(Image Credit: Hemming1952/ Wikimedia Commons)

Ever since the release of Windows 7 in 2009, MS Paint, the beloved program of meme-makers and Picasso-wannabes, has remained mostly untouched and unchanged. The only thing that the aforementioned operating system did for the doodling app was the incorporation of the “ribbon” user interface — a feature introduced in Office 2007. Some time later, the app was pushed aside in favor of its little brother, Paint 3D.

Now, after over a decade of being ignored, MS Paint finally received some love.

Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay posted a brief video of the new design, showing off its updated look, a new dark mode, better text tools, updated brushes, and other tweaks that collectively serve to modernize the app a bit.

But don’t expect the app to be on the same level as Adobe Photoshop or any modern photo-editing software out there. MS Paint is still a doodling app at the end of the day. What you can expect, however, is that the next generation can still bear witness to the app that made childhood in the 90s fun.

The new MS Paint will be made available for Windows Insider soon.

(Image Credit: Microsoft via Ars Technica)

Coming unprepared for an exam, or finding oneself naked in a public place are some examples of recurring dreams. You may have experienced one or both of these themes in your dreams, and they might have bothered you for quite some time.

Why do we have recurring dreams? What causes these dreams to repeat, and what makes these dreams disappear? Some theories say that recurring dreams could be associated with unresolved conflicts and stress.

Studies suggest that dreams, in general, help us regulate our emotions and adapt to stressful events. Incorporating emotional material into dreams may allow the dreamer to process a painful or difficult event.

In the case of recurrent dreams, repetitive content could represent an unsuccessful attempt to integrate these difficult experiences. Many theories agree that recurring dreams are related to unresolved difficulties or conflicts in the dreamer's life.

And, as these recurring dreams begin with a kind of stress, these dreams also end once the stress is finally resolved.

ScienceAlert has more things to say about recurring dreams. See them over at the site.

(Image Credit: Pexels/ Pixabay)

Jason deCaires Taylor is a British artist known for his underwater sculpture installations, such as the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park, the first underwater sculpture park in the world, in Grenada, as well as the Cancun Underwater Museum in Mexico. Now, he has a new underwater sculpture installation, this time located in Mediterranean waters. His new installation, the Museum of Underwater Sculpture in Cyprus, features 93 sculpted figures, each made with materials that attract marine life. Taylor hopes that his work will “bring people closer to the marine environment and the conservation and protection of our marine ecosystem.”

His installation apparently cost €1 million (about $1.17 million).

Some of the figures featured include huge trees weighing up to 13 tons as well as children pointing cameras at shapes depicting the human race while playing hide and seek.

"I tried to incorporate as many references to climate change and habitat loss and pollution as I could, because those are really the defining issues of our era," Taylor tells CNN Travel.

"I'm kind of hoping that it leaves the visitor with a sense of hope along with a sense that the human impact isn't always negative. That we can reverse some of the things we've done.

(Image Credit: MUSAN/ Jason deCaires Taylor via CNN)

Ruin your friendships with class with the Monopoly Glass Edition made by the WS Game Company. This edition of the beloved (and hated) board game comes with a 16” x 16” tempered glass game board instead of the regular game board. It also comes with translucent houses and hotels, instead of the regular opaque ones.

This edition indeed looks gorgeous. However, you might have to control your emotions while you play with this glass edition, as the board is really fragile.

(Image Credit: Technabob)

Meditation is a great activity for clearing up the mind, which helps oneself to focus on what is necessary. Those who practice it claim that it helps their brains. Scientifically speaking, however, the effects of meditation have been very difficult to prove. A new study from Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science just filled this knowledge gap recently, and they found out that meditation does, indeed, benefit the brain.

The results, recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, show that meditation training led to faster switching between the brain’s two general states of consciousness.

One is called the default mode network, which is active when the brain is at wakeful rest and not focused on the outside world, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. The other is the dorsal attention network, which engages for attention-demanding tasks.

Learn more about this exciting research over at EurekAlert.

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Yup. You’ve read the title correctly. There are spiders who prey on snakes, which could be up to 30 times their size. And not just any snake, mind you; these arachnids prey upon the most venomous snakes in the world.

Take the Australian redback. Not including legs, a female of this species of spider is only about the size of an M&M candy. But she can take down relatively big prey such as juvenile eastern brown snakes, which are among the most venomous serpents in the world. A snake that gets trapped in a redback’s web — a messy tangle of long, sticky silk threads that dangle to the ground — is quickly set upon by the spider, which subdues the struggling victim with more sticky silk before delivering a toxic bite that eventually kills the snake.

Biologist Martin Nyffeler describes this finding as “very fascinating and a little frightening”, and it really is what he describes.

But it’s not just the Australian redback spider that is capable of killing (and then eating) snakes, as there are at least 11 different families of spiders capable of doing the same thing.

More about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Daniel R. Crook via ScienceNews)

The quest for breaking the world record of the most accurate value of pi continues to this day. In 2019, a Google employee from Japan named Emma Haruka Iwao calculated the number to 31 trillion digits. In 2020, a man from Huntsville, Alabama, USA, named Timothy Mullican calculated 50 trillion digits of the number. This year, a new challenger for the world record arrived.

Swiss researchers said Monday they had calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8 trillion figures using a supercomputer.

"The calculation took 108 days and nine hours" using a supercomputer, the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement.

Its efforts were "almost twice as fast as the record Google set using its cloud in 2019, and 3.5 times as fast as the previous world record in 2020", according to the university's Centre for Data Analytics, Visualisation and Simulation.

Unfortunately, the team will not reveal the whole number until the Guinness Book of Records confirms their achievement.

The number pi is one of the most interesting numbers in the world of mathematics. Because of the non-repeating nature of its non-terminating decimal numbers, computer scientists can use it to test the capabilities of their computers (while trying to set a new world record in the process). What’s more...

The Swiss team said that the experience they built up calculating pi could be applied in other areas like "RNA analysis, simulations of fluid dynamics and textual analysis".

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Speedrunners love to beat the clock. And because they are always striving for the fastest possible time, speedrunners will look in every nook and cranny of a certain game to look for shortcuts and glitches that can save even the tiniest fraction of time. Thanks to the internet, speedrunners can share the glitches they discovered with other speedrunners. But sometimes, glitches can be discovered by people who just play to have fun, but speedrunners can still learn from them.

When Twitch streamer Boba played Metal Gear Solid for the first time ever, she stumbled upon a glitch which could save up to 2-3 minutes in a speedrun.

In Metal Gear Solid, you eventually reach a section where you need to go up and down some communication towers, fighting a helicopter, climbing a bunch of stairs, and even rappelling down a rope. It’s a lot. During this section, Boba was running from guards and reached a locked door, so she turned around to fight the swarm of angry armed goons. As she did so, she was shot multiple times, getting pushed back enough that Snake’s model clipped through the door and seemingly activated a trigger, letting Boba skip the stairs and enter the outside area early.

Players have already replicated the bug successfully, and they have also investigated if the strategy could be applied elsewhere in the game. Gamers are already calling this strategy the “Boba Skip.”

Amazing.

(Image Credit: boba_witch/ Twitter)

last night i broke metal gear
get rekt speedrunners pic.twitter.com/6tqhBvP5LA

— 🌙 boba 🖤 (@boba_witch) August 15, 2021

Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or Tinder, the best thing you can do if you’re looking for a date online is to put your best foot forward by posting your most attractive pictures. But if you don’t know how to pose for pictures like a model, then it’s your lucky day! These animal photos over at Sad and Useless will teach you how.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

Wolves gather in groups and hunt large prey such as moose and deer in the winter. Throughout the spring season, however, they become more solitary predators as their pups are born. We know these things thanks to decades of research dedicated to studying the lives of wolves. However, our knowledge about how wolves live in the summer is very limited. We only know that they hunt small prey like beavers, but they are very elusive. It is difficult for scientists to observe these animals in this season because of the dense vegetation. Thanks to modern technology, we now have filled this knowledge gap.

With the help of advanced GPS-tracking technology and remote video cameras, the Voyageurs Wolf Project has been able to get a closer look at the summer ecology of wolves in northern Minnesota.

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The GPS-collars have helped reveal not only what wolves are eating, but also where they are killing prey and the locations of den sites. This research has revealed new aspects of wolf hunting behavior and has shown just how variable a wolf’s diet is during the summer. It's also given insight into the complex and fascinating lives of wolves in northern Minnesota.

The team has compiled hours of footage in this video which shows the wildlife in this game trail in Voyageurs National Park. Some wolves can be seen in this video.

(Image Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project/ YouTube)

Mammoths may not have recorded their adventures on Earth in stone, but they have something else that documents their journeys: their tusks. This particular tusk, however, is very special, as it belonged to a mammoth that covered a distance enough to circle the planet twice.

Published in the journal Science, researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks looked at the isotopes inside a 1.7-meter-long (5.6-foot) tusk from a woolly mammoth that lived in present-day Alaska just over 17,000 years ago.

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“It’s not clear-cut if it was a seasonal migrator, but it covered some serious ground,” added Matthew Wooller, senior and co-lead author of the paper from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “It visited many parts of Alaska at some point during its lifetime, which is pretty amazing when you think about how big that area is.”

Learn more about this mammoth over at IFL Science.

That’s a lot of steps!

(Image Credit: JR Ancheta, University of Alaska Fairbanks)

The San Diego Zoo is home to different animals like lions, koalas, and giraffes. They also have a YouTube channel where they show how these animals live inside the zoo. In this video, the Zoo shares with us footage of how flamingos eat. Watch as these pink animals poke their heads in and through the water and suck in water and mud through the front of their bills, and pump them at the side. Thanks to the filters found in their mouths which trap tiny shrimp and small critters, the flamingos can have a decent meal as they scan the waters.

Yum!

(Image Credit: San Diego Zoo)

Presentation is an essential part when it comes to selling food, as it gives customers a good picture on how the food will taste, and maybe how the food is prepared. With this in mind, these buns from WuPaoChun Bakery in Taiwan are clearly a product of hard work, sweat, and tears.

But does it taste good?

What do you think?

(Image from Manna Chu via Facebook)