10 Ways to Keep Your Mind Sharp

Tease your brain

Whether crossword puzzles, sudokus and other brain teasers actually keep your brain in shape, has not been well-established. However, lack of education is a strong predictor of cognitive decline. The more you've tried to learn, the better you'll be at mental sit-ups in old age. The key may be tackling something new; the challenge of the unknown is likely more beneficial than putting together the same jigsaw puzzle over and over again.

Skip the supplements

Supplements have been getting a bad rap recently, with even the familiar multivitamin now looking like a waste of money -- or worse. Brain pills, such as ginkgo and melatonin, likely belong in the trash as well. Despite their "natural" origins, they are not free of potential side effects, such as high blood pressure, digestion trouble, fertility problems and depression. And among healthy individuals, ginkgo offers no brain benefits beyond that of a placebo. (In some cases, the placebo worked better.)

Chill out

Stress takes a toll on the brain by washing harmful chemicals over the hippocampus and other brain areas involved in memory. Some scientists suspect that living a balanced lifestyle and pursuing relaxing activities such as yoga, socializing and crafting may delay memory impairment by reducing stress.

Eat fish

Some theories credit the introduction of fish into the human diet with the evolution of our tremendous cognitive prowess. Essential fatty acids, such as Omega 3s, are critical to brain function and are proving beneficial for treating such brain-sapping ailments as depression. Studies on the efficacy of Omega 3 supplements, however, have had mixed results, so get doses from food sources, such as flax seeds, fatty fish and grass-fed animals.

Enjoy your coffee

Growing evidence suggests a caffeine habit may protect the brain. According to large longitudinal studies, two to four perk-me-ups a day may stave off normal cognitive decline and decrease the incidence of Alzheimer's by 30 to 60 percent. It is unclear whether the benefits come from caffeine or theantioxidants found in coffee and tea, but that latte may improve cognition this afternoon and several decades from now.

Get your beauty rest

When we rest and dream, memories are sifted through, some discarded, others consolidated and saved. When we don't sleep, a recent study found, proteins build up on synapses, possibly making it hard to think and learn new things. Furthermore, chronically sleeping poorly (in contrast to not enough) is linked to cognitive decline in old age, although the relationship may not be causal.

Take care of your body

Largely preventable diseases -- such as Type II diabetes, obesity and hypertension -- all affect your brain, too. System-wide health concerns have been linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline and memory impairments. Keeping your circulatory system in working order, by, say, avoiding cigarettes and saturated fat, lessens the onslaught of age-related damage to the brain.

Watch that diet

While overindulging can make the brain sluggish and lead to long-term detriments to your brain, too few calories can also impair brain function. Extreme dieting can cause some diehards to feel stretches of calm -- a feeling that may underlie the addiction of anorexia -- but many studies have also linked dieting with distraction, confusion and memory impairment.

Eat, eat, eat

Too much or too little energy throws a kink in the brain's delicate machinery. A low glycemic diet -- high fiber, with moderate amounts of fat and protein -- is broken down more slowly in the body than high glycemic foods, such as sweets and white starches. A steady pace of digestion in the gut gives a more reliable flow of energy to the brain, likely optimizing the organ's long-term health and performance.

Do something!

Scientists are starting to think that regular aerobic exercise may be the single most important thing you can do for the long-term health of your brain. While the heart and lungs respond loudly to a sprint on the treadmill, the brain is quietly getting fitter with each step, too. For mental fitness, aim for at least 30 minutes of physical activity every other day.

Tease your brain

Whether crossword puzzles, sudokus and other brain teasers actually keep your brain in shape, has not been well-established. However, lack of education is 

Tease your brain

Whether crossword puzzles, sudokus and other brain teasers actually keep your brain in shape, has not been well-established. However, lack of education is 

New search engines aspire to supplement Google

We may be coming upon a new era for the Internet search.

Google dominates the search world, but some sites are trying to expand the possibilities.

And, despite what you may think, Google is not the only player.

New search engines that are popping up across the Web strive to make searches faster, smarter, more personal and more visually interesting.

Some sites, like Twine and hakia, will try to personalize searches, separating out results you would find interesting, based on your Web use. Others, like Searchme, offer iTunes-like interfaces that let users shuffle through photos and images instead of the standard list of hyperlinks. Kosmixbundles information by type -- from Twitter, from Facebook, from blogs, from the government -- to make it easier to consume.

Wolfram Alpha, set to launch Monday, is more of an enormous calculator than a search: It crunches data to come up with query answers that may not exist online until you search for them. And sites likeTwitter are trying to capitalize on the warp-speed pace of online news today by offering real-time searches of online chatter -- something Google's computers have yet to replicate.

Google, of course, remains the search king. Recent efforts to revolutionize Web searching have failed to unseat the dominant California company, which captures nearly 64 percent of U.S. online searches, according to comScore. Tech start-ups like Cuil, which billed itself as more powerful than Google, and Wikia, which relied on a community to rank search results rather than a math formula, have largely faded away after some initial buzz.

"The general trend has been relatively clear and consistent for the past five years: Google is growing its market share at the expense of every other engine," said Graham Mudd, vice president for search and social media at comScore, a company that tracks industry trends.

The new class of search engines and data calculators enters the fray with those failures in mind, though. Instead of trying to be Google killers, these sites have more humble aspirations: to be alternatives to the industry giants.

Real-time searches offer the most promise, Mudd said.

If you search Google news, the results will be recent, but not live. That's where Twitter's search comes in. It searches the site's micro-blog posts by the second, allowing users to see what's buzzing on the Web at any instant.

Facebook and FriendFeed also are experimenting with real-time searches, according to news reports. But each of these searches operates only within its own social network. Scoopler is another real-time site that's trying to aggregate info from all of these sites.

Nova Spivack, a technology developer who writes about search engines, said sites that forecast trendy topics will become more prominent. Knowing what will be trendy tomorrow is becoming valuable to more people, he said. Search trend predictions will be valuable to people interested in news in much the same way as stock forecasts are valuable to financial industry workers.

"The topography of the Web is shifting much faster. Instead of happening kind of glacially, you're on the beach right where the water is coming in and it's constantly changing the way the sand is laid out," he said.

Other search sites are just trying to get smarter, with some acting as giant data crunchers.

The much-talked about Wolfram Alpha, or Alpha for short, harnesses massive computing power to answer users' questions, even if they're never been answered on the Web before.

"It's not a new Google. It's not supposed to be. It's a new thing. It's very complimentary, in a way, to what search engines do," said Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research, which created Alpha.

People need to get away from the idea that every 3-inch-long search bar online acts just like Google and Yahoo!, he said.

If you ask Google a question, the search engine's computers scan the Web for matching search terms and come up with answers that make the most sense statistically. Alpha, by contrast, pulls information from existing data sets that have been approved by the site's math-minded staff. The site then computes an answer to your question.

An example will help this make sense.

Say you wanted to find out nutritional information for your favorite recipe. On Google, you would have to search each ingredient individually and then add the calories and fat grams together yourself. With Alpha, you can type in the full recipe and the site produces a completed graphic that looks like it came right off the side of a cereal box. Find examples and the site's faults on the SciTech Blog

Some search sites are trying to get better at understanding what their users want.

Twine, a social site created by Spivack, soon will start incorporating information about its users into a search function, he said. Some of the information comes through a user's search history. The site also will ask users to rank search results by their relevance to your interests.

"Right now, one of the problems with search is that it's really one-size-fits-all. It's not very personalized," Spivack said. "The fact is when I'm searching for certain kinds of things, the way that the results should be ranked might quite be different than if someone with a very different background or interests was searching for those same things."

So if you're someone who is into heavy science, a search about evolution might yield more academic papers. If you're a person whose Web interests lean more toward pop culture, an evolution search might turn up photos and more basic information.

Helping computers understand the information that's online is the next step in making searches more personal, Spivack said.

It's unclear which companies, if any, will be able to accomplish this, but Google appears to be working on the problem.

"Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant," Google co-founder Sergey Brin writes in a staff letter published last week on Google's blog. "However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that 'understands' more of the queries and documents than we do today.

"Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google's systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be."

Speed camera boss is caught speeding

LONDON, England -- A speed camera boss had a taste of his own medicine on Wednesday when he was banned from the road for driving at more than 100 mph (165 km/h) on a 70mph highway.

Serco has installed about 5,000 traffic cameras in UK.

Tom Riall, a chief executive of Serco, which supplies many of Britain's traffic enforcement cameras, was caught by a police patrol car in Newmarket, in the eastern English county of Suffolk.

Riall was recorded driving at 102.92 mph in a Volvo car, Sudbury Magistrates Court heard.

He was fined £300 ($450) and banned from driving for six months.

The father of three made a statement outside the court in which he apologized for his actions.

"I accept the decision of the court. I recognize that speeding is not acceptable and regret what I did.

"My speeding was excssive and have made a full apology to the court."

A company spokesman said Riall would not lose his job, and had pledged to provide his own driver to transport him for work.

The court heard he had two previous motoring convictions, including a past speeding offense, from 2006 and 2007, the Press Association reported.

Since 1992 Serco has installed more than 5,000 traffic enforcement cameras around the United Kingdom.

The company says on its Web site that its cameras had helped to save 100 lives a year "by deterring excessive speed and improving compliance with traffic signals."

Riall, the chief executive of Serco's civil government division, has responsibility for installing and maintaining speed cameras, the court heard.

Say no to Bangalore, yes to New York: Obama

'Say no to Bangalore and yes to Buffalo,' seems to be the latest mantra of US President Barack Obama as he struggles to bring the ailing American economy back on track.
Meeting one of his major election promises, Obama announced end to years of tax incentives to those US companies which create jobs overseas in places like Bangalore.
Instead, the incentives would now go to those creating jobs inside the US, in places like the Buffalo city - bordering Canada in upstate New York.
"We will stop letting American companies that create jobs overseas take deductions on their expenses when they do not pay any American taxes on their profits," Obama said at White House announcing the international tax policy reform.
"We will use the savings to give tax cuts to companies that are investing in research and development here at home so that we can jump start job creation, foster innovation, and enhance America's competitiveness," Obama said.
The new tax laws are expected to majorly hit countries like India, China and Philippines, where US companies have been outsourcing their work.
Hitting hard at the current taxation system, to which he had been very critical since his election days and as a Senator, Obama said: "It's a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore,
India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York."
Reiterating his campaign rhetoric, the US President said: "The way we make our businesses competitive is not to reward American companies operating overseas with a roughly two per cent tax rate on foreign profits; a rate that costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year."
Obama said he wants US companies to remain most competitive in the world. "But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores or transferring profits to overseas tax havens," he argued.
Announcing a set of proposals to crack down on illegal overseas tax evasion, close loopholes, and make it more profitable for companies to create jobs here in the US, Obama said his series of tax reforms would save USD 210 billion in the next 10 years.
Under new measures, American companies would also have to disclose before the IRS details of the income American citizens are generating in overseas accounts. "For years, we've talked about stopping Americans from illegally hiding their money overseas, and getting tough with the financial institutions that let them get away with it," he said.

Japanese scientist claims breakthrough with organ grown in sheep

Huddled at the back of her shed, bleating under a magnificent winter coat and tearing cheerfully at a bale of hay, she is possibly the answer to Japan’s chronic national shortage of organ donors: a sheep with a revolutionary secret.
Guided by one of the animal’s lab-coated creators, the visitor’s hand is led to the creature’s underbelly and towards a spot in the middle under eight inches of greasy wool. Lurking there is a spare pancreas.
If the science that put it there can be pushed further forward, Japan may be spared an ethical and practical crisis that has split medical and political opinion.
As the sheep-based chimera organ technology stands at the moment, says the man who is pioneering it, the only viable destination for the pancreas underneath his sheep would be a diabetic chimpanzee.
The organ growing on the sheep was generated from monkey stem cells but the man behind the science, Yutaka Hanazono, believes that the technology could be developed eventually to make sheep into walking organ banks for human livers, hearts, pancreases and skin.
It could happen within a decade, he guesses, perhaps two.
“We have made some very big advances here. There has historically been work on the potential of sheep as producers of human blood, but we are only slowly coming closer to the point where we can harvest sheep for human organs,” Professor Hanazono told The Times.
“We have shown that in vivo (in a living animal) creation of organs is more efficient than making them in vitro (in a test tube) but now we really need to hurry.”
The reason for Professor Hanazono’s sense of urgency — and for the entire organ harvest project being undertaken at the Jichi Medical University — lies many miles away in Tokyo and with a historical peculiarity of the Japanese legal system.
Japan defines death as the point when the heart permanently stops. The concept of brain death — the phase at which organs can most effectively be harvested from donors — does exist, but organs cannot be extracted at that point.
The long-term effect of the legal definition has been striking: organ donation in Japan is virtually nonexistent, forcing many people to travel abroad in search of transplants. In the United States, the rate of organ donors per million people is about 27; in Japan it is under 0.8.
The effect, say paediatricians, has been especially severe for children. The same law that discounts brain death as suitable circumstances for organ donation broadly prevents children under 15 from allowing their organs to be harvested.
To make matters worse, international restrictions on transplant tourism are becoming ever tougher, making Japan’s position even more untenable. To avert disaster, say doctors, Japan either needs the science of synthetic organ generation to advance faster than seems possible, or it needs a complete rethink on the Japanese definition of death.
In response to the impending crisis, and with Professor Hanazono’s sheep still very much at the experimental stage, a series of revisions to the transplant law have been proposed, but the debate has been divisive.
Taro Nakayama, the MP behind the most liberal revision — a change that would allow organs to be harvested from the brain-dead — is a former paediatrician. “Organ tourism is finished and Japan has to change its ways very quickly,” he said.
Gene genies
— In 1997 US scientist Dr Jay Vacanti grew a human ear from cartilage cells on the back of a mouse. He said he believed that it might be possible to grow knee cartilage and even a human liver
— In 2007 two scientists at the University of Nevada created a sheep with 15 per cent human cells as part of research into farming human organs from animals. Human cells were injected into a sheep’s foetus
— Last month Stelios Arcadiou, an Australian artist, unveiled an ear implanted on his arm. He planned to broadcast the sounds it would “hear” on the internet
— Last week Korean scientists said they had cloned beagles that glowed in the dark. Four puppies were created from cells injected with a gene that made them glow red under UV light
Source: Times archive

Conficker.E to self-destruct on May 5th

The evolution of the multi-faceted Conficker worm is expected to take another turn this May 5th when the latest version, Conficker.E, will simply self-destruct on infected machines, say a number of security researchers.

F-Secure, Trend Micro and SecureWorks are among those that believe Conficker.E--first spotted just this April and probably created by the same attackers that since last fall let loose the Conficker.A through Conficker.C Variants--has been designed to simply self-detonate on May 5th.

"It will simply self-destruct," says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, pointing out that researchers, who had been arguing over name for variants, agreed to skip past the name "Conficker.D" entirely to settle on the name "Conficker.E."

But even if Conficker.E does simply self-destruct as expected, that still leaves millions of Windows-based computers around the work infected with Conficker.C, which has become active this month in terms of beginning to try and lure victims to fake anti-virus sites--some dub it "fraudware"--to get victims to pay US$50 or so to get rid of Conficker.C.

"We're starting to see some revenue generation," said Phillip Porras, program director in the computer sciences laboratory at SRI International, in a presentation he gave today at the RSA Conference here concerning Conficker. "We're starting to see some business models come out of it."

Security researchers in industry and government are using various means to monitor Conficker.C behavior (which can block over 114 legitimate anti-virus sites and now works in conjunction with the botnet Waledec).

Porras said Conficker.C is involved in an elaborate process to sell fake anti-malware software. When it gets into infected machines, it can direct victims toward Web sites believed to be selling fraudware.

One of those sites appears to be registered in the Ukraine selling the SpywareProtect portfolio, associated with "Ukraine Bastion Trade Group," for example, he said. But Conficker was not necessarily created by this group and researchers are still in the dark about who originates and controls the complex Conficker command-and-control system.

Despite the efforts of the Conficker Working Group, a group which now has 300 experts from industry and government dedicated to do what they can to identity the source of Conficker and stop it, efforts so far have not been successful.

"They've gotten around blocks to shut it down," said Porras, noting the complexity of the Conficker effort suggests a gang, rather than one individual, sharing expertise.

As for the anticipated self-destruction of the Conficker.E variant, researchers say there are strange aspects of it.

"Conficker.E has two parts of it," says Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, describing it basically as breaking up what were earlier combined functions of scanning/spreading and getting downloads, such as through peer-to-peer rendezvous.

But Conficker.E, seen only since mid-April, never seemed to work that well--which was a surprise to researchers since the upgrade path so far for Conficker has been quite impressive technically.

"Some of the functionality in .E doesn't work," says Stewart. Conficker.E, he says, may be a new anti-malware attempt that simply wasn't good enough, or it may be a deliberate "distraction" by attackers to throw a little dust in the eyes of researchers. "They may be working on a more advanced version," says Stewart.

No one besides the Conficker attackers seems to know what will come next, but most researchers see financial gain to clearly be its use at present.