Re-Mission is a 3rd-person shooter designed for teens and young adults with cancer, developed by HopeLab and RealTime Associates. Players pilot a nanobot, Roxxi, through the body of a fictional cancer patient to destroy cancer cells and infections. The Re-Mission Outcomes Study enrolled 375 teens and young adults with cancer, randomized them to receive a computer with the game or without. Data from the study showed statistically significant improvements in cancer-related self-efficacy, social quality of life, cancer-specific knowledge, and adherence to prescribed medication regimens in patients who played Re-Mission. The game (and related online community) is free of charge to teens and young people living with cancer and will be available to others in May at a suggested donation of $20. (related)
posted on Apr 27, 2006 - View this thread

From Genesis to Apocalypse: one more threat to NASA's pure research funding.
posted on Sep 8, 2004 - View this thread

Language tree rooted in Turkey.
posted on Dec 7, 2003 - View this thread

Fishing for Information? Try Better Bait. [NYT] It's nice to see the NY Times take a stab at helping normal folk become better at searching the web. They point to Gary Price's resourceshelf.com, Greg R. Notess's searchengineshowdown.com and Danny Sullivan's searchenginewatch.com and Tara Calishain's researchbuzz.com.
It's just nice to see a story that's not All About Google for a change. Somewhat related articles: One over at O'Reilly On How To Build Your Own, and one at CNET on Nutch, an open-source web search engine.
Anyone have any favorite search engine tricks to share?
posted on Aug 22, 2003 - View this thread

Riddle me this: why are so many people in such a hurry to monitor, record and analyze every aspect of modern life? A UCLA professor wants to outfit an entire first grade classroom with minuscule sensors. The National Science Foundation awarded $1.8 million to fund the study, which will see students wearing special caps tracking their location and what they're looking at while cameras and microphones will record their activities. All the data gathered will be processed by a data-mining software package. [more inside]
posted on Aug 4, 2003 - View this thread

Has global warming been seriously undermined by new research? I read this interesting article about global warming on the telegraph. I generally believe that global warming is caused by man, though this article has given me food for thought. What do you think?
posted on Apr 8, 2003 - View this thread

There's One In Every Family: You know that uncle whose name can't be mentioned at table, without loud swallowing, dark looks and deathly silence ensuing? The shady New Orleans grandmother whose photographs have been hastily removed from the family album, though the red stain from one of her garters remains? Call them black sheep or family skeletons, the Internet keeps making it easier and easier to dig them up and out. Outing your forebears and close family members has become an up and coming thing. In other words: I'll show you my black sheep if you show me yours.
posted on Feb 23, 2003 - View this thread

Project 112 was a secret, cold-war era project to determine vulnerabilities of US warships to various chemical and biological attacks. While lots is known about what happened, there's still a lot of information that hasn't been released yet. In the early 1950s, the US Army sprayed the bacteria Serratia Marcesens over San Francisco. While the government thought that it was safe, many people ended up checking into the hospital. One elderly man even died as a result of the US testing chemical and biological agents against it's own citizens.
posted on Jan 22, 2003 - View this thread

Brains vs. bathing suits. University of Michigan researchers gathered men and women together and had them try on either a bathing suit or a sweater to see which they preferred for 20 minutes. Then they were asked to take a math test to "pass the time." The results? No appreciable difference for men while women scored considerably lower while in bathing suits. Could obsession with appearance be holding our girls back?
posted on Dec 20, 2002 - View this thread

According to scientists who study sex we can toss some common misconceptions: there is no battle of the sexes; the Mars and Venus book is misleading; extreme body builders are not sexy; breast size isnt always sexy; men and women cheat equally; the notion of man "spreading his seed" is a cultural invention; thin is not sexy. All thanks to our caveman brain.
posted on Aug 28, 2002 - View this thread

MIT's R&D for the US Army of the future appears to be based on a comic book.
posted on Aug 28, 2002 - View this thread

xrefer is billing itself as The Web's Reference Engine, and with 100 reference manuals cross-linked and indexed, it may have support for that claim. I found it last night while looking for a definition for the word eyot, which is where Frodo and Sam camp at one point near the end of the Fellowship of the Ring. The site is easy to use, and provides (at least in my mind) the feeling of browsing at the library, with all the related links that appear in a search context.
posted on Aug 22, 2002 - View this thread

ICKY!
Sometimes I think I made the right Career move. People complain about having to write papers, study, and do too much home work, but, how would you like to hold your hand in a cage full of mosquitoes to determine if they are ready to feed in order to get your degree (in entomology)?
Don't worry, the mosquitoes used in the tests are raised in captivity and do carry not any diseases suchas the West Nile Virus.
If you're like me, you asked yourself, What do entomologists do?
posted on Aug 9, 2002 - View this thread

"We think of an orange as a constant, but in reality it's not." Canadian study finds that fruits and vegetables have lost much of their nutritional value in the last decades--potatoes, for example, have lost 100% of their Vitamin A. The reason, it appears, is mass production and a market that values appearance over substance. Is this symptomatic of deeper problems within a system where produce travels so far before reaching the consumer? Here in B.C., for example, the stores are full of California produce, despite the fact that we grow much the same fruits and vegetables locally.
posted on Jul 6, 2002 - View this thread

Stanford links genius and manic depression... I feel SO much better now... (via FARK)
posted on May 23, 2002 - View this thread

Huge hydrogen stores found below Earth's crust. "Scientists have discovered vast quantities of hydrogen gas, widely regarded as the most promising alternative to today's dwindling stocks of fossil fuels, lying beneath the Earth's crust. The discovery has stunned energy experts, who believe that it could provide virtually limitless supplies of clean fuel for cars, homes and industry." This discovery sounds too good to be true (for us energy-hungry humans that is, bad news for the bacteria.)
posted on Apr 15, 2002 - View this thread

Understanding what makes America tick "The belief that America is exceptional, in the double sense that it is superior and that it is different...The United States had a mission, a manifest destiny, to change the world in its image. This conviction echoes down through American history....Other countries—France, Britain, Russia—have from time to time in their history felt a sense of mission, of carrying their civilisation to other peoples and territories. But in their cases it has been episodic and not deeply rooted—usually limited to when their power was at its zenith and usually clearly recognisable as a rationalisation for what they were doing for other reasons. In the case of the United States, it has been constant and central." [Centre of Independent Studies in Sydney via aldaily] American Exceptionalism. Mix it with sole super power status and massive military might. Should make it quite an intoxicating ride these next few years.
posted on Apr 4, 2002 - View this thread

In Canada, the creation of new stem cell lines from discarded embryos is now eligible for federal funding. And in the UK the first licenses to create new stem cell lines have been granted, as has governement approval to pursue therapeutic cloning. The chief executive of the UK's Medical Research Council predicts a "reverse brain drain" of stem cell scientists to the UK. If the US Senate votes to ban all human cloning this spring, even for research purposes, I suspect that America will lose a lot of great minds.
posted on Mar 4, 2002 - View this thread

Canadians figure out exactly how many nukes it would take. Using the software, researchers estimated it would take 124 weapons to destroy the U.S. and 51 to eliminate Russia as a country. The computer program mimics the U.S. military's SIOP, or Single Integrated Operational Plan, which outlines the targeting of America's nuclear weapons and the likely consequences of each attack. [via dailyrotten.com]
posted on Jan 4, 2002 - View this thread

Small World Research Project After all the work we've done training newbies not to use the Internet for their chain letters (via this New York Times article)
posted on Dec 20, 2001 - View this thread

MIT's Erotic Computation Group. "By developing advanced sexual appliances and techniques, we seek to broaden the range of human amative expression and heighten our potential for sexual gratification." Good to see that at least some people are doing research that will benefit all mankind.
posted on Nov 25, 2001 - View this thread

Marijuana's effects on the brain are reversible "It appears that cognitive impairment from marijuana use is temporary and related to the amount of marijuana that has been recently smoked rather than permanent and related to an entire lifetime consumption." Hmm, I suppose it's good to know I can go back to being smart after being stupid for a little while.
posted on Oct 18, 2001 - View this thread

Can the human mind affect random number generators? Sounds absurd (especially to a diehard skeptic like me), but this research is coming out of Princeton, not some fringe group. And here is an independent experiment which seems to confirm the effect. I've emailed CSICOP and The Skeptic Magazine about it, but haven't heard back yet. Anyone know anything about this stuff?
posted on Oct 2, 2001 - View this thread

Conformity rules in cyberspace ... countering expectations that near-anonymity would encourage actions outside social norms. An Australian research team entered chat rooms and staged situations (a somewhat skeptically viewed practice, though the article doesn't mention it). Now they're studying users' reactions to avatars of different races and genders -- and for control purposes, a chair: Initial results show that most people approach the female character first and that some of those approaching the chair ask for a sex specification or assume it is female.
posted on Aug 24, 2001 - View this thread

Playing computer games makes kids smarter? Although it reads like a headline from The Onion, a British study funded by the ESRC has come to that conclusion. "They seemed able to focus on what they were doing much better than other people and also had better general co-ordination. Overall there was a huge similarity with top-level athletes."

Gotta go and show this to my boss...
posted on Jul 22, 2001 - View this thread

Do Republicans dream of electric sheep? A new study concludes that Republicans have scarier and more frequent nightmares than Democrats. As usual, the explanation for this is split among party lines:

"What do you expect after eight years of William Jefferson Clinton?" -- Kevin Sheridan, Republican National Committee deputy press secretary.

"If George W. Bush were the leader of my party, I'd have trouble sleeping at night, too," -- Terry McAuliffe, Democratic National Committee chairman.

Wow... deja vu all over again.
posted on Jul 10, 2001 - View this thread

Americans less supportive of 1st amendment. Roughly four in 10 people (41%) said the media have too much freedom. Four in 10 respondents (39%) believed the First Amendment goes too far in guaranteeing rights. 71% said it was "very" or "somewhat" important for the government to hold the media in check.
posted on Jul 8, 2001 - View this thread

Scientist Says Mind Continues After Brain Dies. This articles raises an interesting new theory on how the mind works, suggesting that perhaps a person's consciousness exists independent of the brain, with the brain acting as a sort of receiver of thoughts. Interesting and scary.
posted on Jun 29, 2001 - View this thread

Jane Want Relationship, Tarzan Want Sex. A study seems to confirm what women have long suspected -- women seek security in relationships, while men stick around for the sex.

The study says that in most species, monogomy is the top choice when fertility is hidden. Wonder if they took into account the Pill? ;)
posted on Apr 26, 2001 - View this thread

The market-model university: '...by looking at research on the health impact of tobacco, the "science" behind global warming or breast implants, or the effectiveness of a drug, we can see that it is not unusual for sponsored academics to fudge the data, suppress unfavourable evidence, and otherwise "torture the numbers till they confess"...'
posted on Mar 15, 2001 - View this thread

Bill Joy thinks the world will end unless we stop doing certain kinds of research right now. I think Bill Joy is full of crap, but he has valid points. (More inside)
posted on Feb 17, 2001 - View this thread

Researchers say they have slowed light to a dead stop, stored it and then released it as if it were an ordinary material particle. Cool, huh?
posted on Jan 19, 2001 - View this thread

Lynn Conway is one of the major talents in the history of the development of computers, responsible for major advances without which computers we buy now would be much different. She's also a transsexual, born physically male. While working for IBM she had her sex-change operation, and IBM immediately fired her for it.
posted on Dec 10, 2000 - View this thread

Would you swallow poison for $1000? 100 people did. (Actually only half, but none of them know who the controls are.)
posted on Nov 28, 2000 - View this thread

Girls can't throw? They found that men had a better aim than women, but male and female monkeys were about equal
posted on Oct 13, 2000 - View this thread

Amazon.com apologizes for random price test... Yeah, but look how long it took them to do it. "Oh, um, now that we've covered our costs for R&D we can end the test and apologize. That's the ticket!"
posted on Sep 28, 2000 - View this thread

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,372067,00.html Thousands of South American indians were infected with measles, killing hundreds, in order to for US scientists to study the effects on primitive societies of natural selection.
posted on Sep 22, 2000 - View this thread

Texas Scientists achieved 20 minutes of invisibility on 10 mm of skin of a rat. I know this is a great advance in medicine and all that stuff, but what concerns me is this may be also a new generation of spies, terrorists and thieves...or am I just paranoid?
posted on Aug 23, 2000 - View this thread

Two independent research teams have successfully cloned pigs. The importance? Due to their comparable organ size, pigs are good candidates for farming transplant material. Pork bellies may be more than a commodity...
posted on Aug 16, 2000 - View this thread

It'll never work.
posted on Jul 7, 2000 - View this thread

Readers prefer text over graphics. In much more scientific news a new study by Stanford University indicates that visitors to your website are significantly more likely to read the text on your website (92%) than look at your photos (64%). What do you think? Will this change the way you design your site?
posted on May 8, 2000 - View this thread

Scientific American has an interesting article on brand loyalty on the web. Researchers at MIT are concluding that people stick with familiar commerce sites. Even though the web is supposed to enable shoppers to choose from any site, they instead stay with their favorite, even paying more for the security and familiarity. The researchers also concluded that $20 off coupons and bargain deals aren't going to bankrupt top sites, because it's a considerable investment (from a user's prospective) to shop at a new commerce site, and the offers offset that cost accordingly.
posted on Feb 21, 2000 - View this thread

We're not a bunch of internet-loners! We're vindicated - new study shows that people who become reclusives though using the internet are in a minority.
posted on Feb 18, 2000 - View this thread