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Medicine

3D Displays May Be Hazardous To Young Children 386

SchlimpyChicken writes "Turns out 3D television can be inherently dangerous to developing children, and perhaps to adults as well. There's a malaise in children that can prevent full stereopsis (depth perception) from developing, called strabismus or lazy-eye. It is an abnormal alignment of the eyes in which the eyes do not focus on the same object — kind of like when you watch a 3D movie. As a result, depth perception is compromised. Acting on a hunch, the guys over at Audioholics contacted Mark Pesce, who worked with Sega on its VR Headset over 15 years ago — you know, the headset that never made it to market. As it turns out, back then Sega uncovered serious health risks involved with children consuming 3D and quickly buried the reports, and the project. Unfortunately, the same dangers exist in today's 3D, and the electronics, movie, and gaming industries seem to be ignoring the issue. If fully realized, 3D just might affect the vision of millions of children and, according to the latest research, many adults, across the country." The Audioholics article is a good candidate for perusing with Readability — the pseudo-link popups are blinding.

Comment Re:No surprise there. (Score 2, Informative) 358

There is data available at http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/country_reports/en/index.html which contains PDFs split by country.

Here is some badly formatted data form the Japan PDF (at http://www.who.int/entity/mental_health/media/japa.pdf )

Number of suicides by age group and gender. JAPAN, 2004.

Age 5-14 15-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65-74 75+ All
Males 27 1233 2677 3248 4807 5232 2659 1876 21955
Females 22 579 1088 935 1108 1592 1348 1595 8292
Total 49 1812 3765 4183 5915 6824 4007 3471 30247
The age distribution is interesting with the rate increasing and then falling after reaching the age of 65+. I'm not qualified to make any assumptions based on the data, so I'm leaving that somebody else.
Power

Buckyballs Can Store Concentrated Hydrogen 193

Pickens brings news that researchers from Rice University have discovered that it's possible to store hydrogen inside buckyballs. Hydrogen can be an excellent power source, but it is notoriously difficult to store. The buckyballs can contain up to 8% of their weight in hydrogen, and they are strong enough to hold it at a density that rivals the center of Jupiter. "Using a computer model, Yakobson's research team has tracked the strength of each atomic bond in a buckyball and simulated what happened to the bonds as more hydrogen atoms were packed inside. Yakobson said the model promises to be particularly useful because it is scalable, that is it can calculate exactly how much hydrogen a buckyball of any given size can hold, and it can also tell scientists how overstuffed buckyballs burst open and release their cargo."

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All your files have been destroyed (sorry). Paul.

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