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Medicine

Dye Used In Blue M&Ms Can Lessen Spinal Injury 324

SydShamino writes "Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center have found that the dye used in blue M&Ms and other foods can, when given intravenously to a lab rat shortly after a spinal injury, minimize secondary damage caused by the body when it kills off nearby healthy cells. The dye is called BBG or Brilliant Blue G. Given that 85% of spinal injury patients are currently untreated (and some doctors don't trust the treatment given to the other 15%), a relatively safe treatment like this could help preserve some function for thousands of patients. The best part is that in lab rats the subjects given the treatment turn blue." The researchers are "pulling together an application to be lodged with the FDA to stage the first clinical trials of BBG on human patients."

Comment Re:Ever looked at your password? (Score 1) 849

I also type (most) passwords purely by muscle memory (and have had to type a couple of shared passwords into wordpad so I can actually say what it is I've been typing (mostly for where shift is and isn't toggled)... but having said that, I've gotten multiple accounts locked out due to the following reasons:
    Gorram cap lock (as annoying as the popup is, that's something MS got right imho)
    Pseudo-cap lock... not sure if MS would have detected it (it was through a web interface), but somehow the KVM I was using stopped detecting shift/control and there was no feedback that this was a problem as my username is all lower case
    Shitty dell keyboard on one laptop only detects one letter (which of course appears several times in the passphrase) about 30% of the time... yeah, I can count *'s, but that's a pita given the muscle memory above
    Probably also, a long time ago, at least got the password wrong once when switching between old school apple and IBM keyboards (f and j have dots on PC, d and k have dots on MAC, put my hands in wrong spot)

There's also the story about the guy who could type his password sitting but not standing... the story goes that while sitting, he touch typed, while standing he hunted and pecked and someone had swapped a couple of keys on the keyboard that wouldn't be noticed while touch typing but would when looking at the keyboard

As far as shoulder surfing goes, if someone is going to be hunting and pecking the password anyways, it would seem to be almost as easy for a shoulder surfer to watch your fingers hit keys as it would be to read the password off the screen... especially if you use leetspelling for passwords.

Comment Re:Yes (Score 3, Insightful) 481

I could be wrong, but I think the good news is that if they embed the graphics, they've basically embedded it such that your browser doesn't go back to a server to get the image (at some point, they added the ability to embed an image as base64 encoded data, theoretically targetting a page with small images that would take longer (due to having to setup multiple http connections after decoding the html) to pull down separately))...I'd say they're doing it more to get around filters than to do web bugs.

Medicine

Cold Sore Virus May Be Alzheimer's Smoking Gun 285

Science Daily is reporting that the virus behind cold sores has been found to be a major cause of the insoluble protein plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's disease sufferers. Researchers believe the herpes simplex virus is a significant factor in developing the debilitating disease and could be treated by antiviral agents such as acyclovir, which is already used to treat cold sores and other diseases caused by the herpes virus. Another future possibility is vaccination against the virus to prevent the development of Alzheimer's in the first place. The research was just published in the Journal of Pathology (abstract).
Classic Games (Games)

Anatomy of the First Video Game, Born 1958 137

afabbro writes "Fifty years ago, before 'Pong' and 'Space Invaders,' a nuclear physicist created 'Tennis for Two,' a 2-D tennis game that some say was the first video game ever. Built in 1958, it was 'gynormous.' 'In addition to the oscilloscope screen and the controller, the guts of the original game were contained in an analog computer, which is "about as big as a microwave oven."' 'We have to load it into the back of a station wagon to move it. It's not a Game Boy that you put in your pocket.'"

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