Black wetsuit? Shark bait
"Researchers discovered that the eyes of sharks, including bull and tiger sharks, are not designed to distinguish different colours and so they see the world in black and white," The Daily Telegraph reports. "That means against the light blue of the sea, it would be better to wear light-coloured swimwear in order to reduce the contrast with the water. The study backs up statistics from the International Shark Attack File which shows that the vast majority of attacks happen to divers and surfers wearing black wetsuits."
How to change minds?
"Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that they could increase the use of the left hand among right-handed individuals by applying magnetic stimulation to the left side of the parietal cortex (which governs the processing of spatial relationships and planning)," The Futurist reports. "Beyond the clinical applications for helping patients with brain injuries, the researchers believe that magnetic stimulation could potentially be used to influence other decision-making processes."
How to do well at school
"A study of more than 2,300 [U.S.]undergraduates found 45 per cent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years," Associated Press reports. The findings are published in a new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. As well as prompting dialogue, "[t]e findings also will likely spark a debate over what helps and hurts students learn. To sum up, it's good to lead a monk's existence: Students who study alone and have heavier reading and writing loads do well."
Mars needs women
"With the price tag on a mission to Mars estimated around $145-billion [U.S.] one scientist thinks he's found a magic bullet for funding," Amy Rolph blogs for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Why not get advertisers to pay for the mission? Rhawn Joseph of the Brain Research Laboratory in northern California … is proposing corporations sponsor the nation's efforts to send humans to Mars. What's more, he says, preparations for the mission could be marketed as a reality-style television competition." Mr. Joseph writes: "From a marketing perspective it is important to target traditional female interests: love, romance and the prospect of a Martian marriage and the first baby to be born on Mars. Mars' fashions, Mars' styles, magazine and books featuring the lives and loves of the astronauts with all income going to support and pay for the Human Mission to Mars."
Obese horses
In Britain, at least one in five horses used for leisure is overweight or obese, according to a study by Nottingham University's school of veterinary medicine and science. Obesity in horses is likely to be just as common as among people, The Independent reports.
A crowded, fat world
"Weight gain is usually blamed on poor diet and a lack of exercise," Scientific American says. "But the marmosets and macaques living at a Madison, Wis., laboratory have followed the same diet and exercise regimens since 1982. Still, they grew heavier with each passing decade, leading David B. Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to believe that environmental factors may be at play. He and his colleagues studied weight changes in 20,000 animals, including primates and rodents used for research, domestic cats and dogs and urban feral cats. They tracked the animals' percentage weight gain per decade, as well as their odds of being obese. Both showed a strong upward tendency." Dr. Allison speculates that toxins in the water supply or increasingly crowded housing conditions, affecting both humans and animals, might be to blame.
You'll eat what you are?
"Dinner planning: It's the bane of every five o'clock shopper who can't bear to serve up frozen pizza one more night," Fast Company says. "Now, with the help of some spooky video analytics, Intel and Kraft aim to help harried shoppers come up with better - or at least different - solutions, right in their grocery aisles." The Meal Planning Solution is a sort of kiosk. When a shopper passes by, "the digital signage, equipped with a freaky sort of Anonymous Video Analytics technology, zooms in on his or her face and instantly determines gender and age group to guess what products might exert some allure (hopefully it won't scan your second chin and suggest half a [meal-replacement bar]… [and]nothing else."
Thought du jour
"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."
George Santayana (1863-1952), Philosopher