Getting your office workspace to bite less.

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Ten Fun Office Toys and Gadgets

Your office fun doesn't have to be this archaic.
Sean De Burca/Riser/Getty Images

Your office workspace bites. Sure, the pet photos are very humanizing, and your assorted action figures really let us know you're a kid at heart. But don't you think it's time you took office toys seriously? If you're ready to inject a little high-tech fun into your work life, this list should get you off to the right start.
Go ahead and trash those stress balls and return your company-issued swag back to the PR department from which it came. Human civilization has risen to dizzying heights of scientific discovery, venturing into the stars and even glimpsing the fundamental building blocks of life itself. We've also created the most sophisticated farting novelty toys the world has ever seen. First up, let's kick things off with some office warfare.

Who will be blasted first?
Image courtesy Amazon.com

10: Office Warfare Just Got Real
The average workplace is a hotbed of repressed aggression. If left to fester, these emotions are bound to explode in a highly inappropriate manner. Fortunately, there's a way to relieve these tensions. It's called office warfare, and it's as simple as blasting your co-worker with a Nerf cannon during a conference call.
Sure, today's Nerf guns are crazy sophisticated, but we're living in the computer age, so get with the arms race already. If you're in the market for a USB-powered desktop missile launcher, you can actually choose between a handful of different products priced between $15 and $50. Install the launcher's software on your work computer and you can actually aim and fire the foam projectiles without lifting a finger from your mouse and keyboard. Some models even boast laser sighting.
Speaking of lasers, you probably need more of them at your desk. Heck, you probably need a keyboard made out of lasers

Spill coffee on your keyboard all day without consequences.
Image courtesy Amazon.com

9: My Keyboard Is Made of Lasers
Why do you still waste your time with a physical computer keyboard? It's the 21st century! User interface devices like that should be either in a museum or nailed to the walls of a funky New York coffee shop. Get it off your desk now and replace it with lasers already.
What's that? You don't think we can build a keyboard out of light particles that amplify a stimulated emission of radiation? Brace yourself, grandpa, because here comes a shocker: The Cube Laser Virtual Keyboard is already on the market. For roughly $170, you can fire up this wireless, palm-sized device and let it project a full-size laser keyboard onto any flat surface. A built-in sensor picks up on your finger movements as you type, and a tiny speaker even belts out some clacking noises to make everything feel authentic.

Fun with magnets!
Image courtesy Amazon.com

8: Buckyballs to the Walls
Not to be confused with nanotechnology's molecule-sized carbon "buckyballs," Buckyballs magnetic building spheres exist on a scale that makes sense for office stress release. Available in packs of 125 for around $25 or 216 for around $35, these tiny magnetic pellets can be clustered and molded into varying shapes, from spheres to wearable jewelry. You can form them into patterns and tubes. You can buy them in silver, gold, chrome, black or various other colors, and there's even a Buckycube product for the square-minded among you.
Building with Buckyballs provides all the tactile stress release of your old squeeze ball, only with more creative freedom and the power of magnetism.

Let this guy boss you around.
Image courtesy Gizmag

7: Posture Kings Rule
Sure, posture is important -- we all learned about it in grade school -- but who has time for it in the modern workplace? We all have deadlines to meet and schedules to keep, and optimal spinal alignment has a way of falling down the priority list. What if there were an office gadget to keep track of our posture for us?
Enter the USB Posture Alert Reminder, a palm-size monitor that plugs into your computer and sits atop the screen in front of you. Using ultrasonic waves, the device senses your position in relation to the screen and audibly berates you should you hunch too close to the monitor or recline too far away. If you start to dip too far in either direction, an LED light on the unit will give you a good flashing, so keep it straight! All of this can be yours for roughly $20.

Blob and Flow are ready to play good cop/bad cop with your productivity.
Image courtesy Mathmos

6: Not Your Grandpa's Lava Lamp
Face it: You want a lava lamp. You might think you're past that stage. You may disparage everything the hippie movement ever stood for, but there's no denying the appeal of glowing blobs of floating wax. Sure, you can buy a lava lamp for your desk at work. You can even buy one that plugs into your computer's USB port. Or you can take your need for groovy light toys one step further and buy Mathmos' Blob and Flow.
Mathmos is a British company founded in 1963 by Edward Craven Walker, the inventor of the lava lamp. The company still manufactures the lamps to this day, but it also offers a pair of touch-sensitive light pets by the name of Blob and Flow. Each pair of pets runs between $75 and $100 and consists of a silver lump that vaguely resembles a lump of lava lamp wax. Oh yeah, and they have glowing eyes. Plug one of the pets into your USB or a wall outlet, and you'll feel its tiny heart beating. Touch its "skin," and its eyes will come to life as well. Additional touches will induce winks, slumber or a "moment of madness." Oh, for cute's sake!

Nanotechnology at work!
Image courtesy Japan Trend Shop

5: Better Time Wasting with Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology! It enables us to build superstrong materials and design life-saving medications. Thanks to the Japanese company Bandai, it also allows us to kill time at our desks.
Yes, the product is called Aqua Dance Game, and it's a lot like those little hand-held games that require you to roll tiny metal balls through a hole-riddled maze. Only instead of metal balls, Aqua Dance uses hyper-beading water. See, the interior of the water game features a patented nanomaterial called "Adesso WR," the microscopic, low-friction structure of which causes water molecules to bead together and slide along at faster-than-normal speeds.
You just pump the water through by hand and watch the strange beads race around like crazy all for the low, low cost of $40. What's that you say? You think the games on your iPad and iPhone rock harder? Then quit pussyfooting around and turn your desk into a gaming zone already.

Transform your iPad into a primitive form
Image courtesy Amazon.com

4: The Gaming Zone
Sure, the games on your iPhone and iPad are fun, but don't you feel a little dirty playing them secretly at your desk? Don't game like a mouse; game like a lion by turning your workspace into a Vegas-style gaming zone.
For starters, the Slot Machine iPhone Dock ($40) features a little lever to increase the realism on your one-armed bandit apps. Slide your iPad into an arcade cabinet-shaped iCade ($80), and any game becomes a retro celebration of gaming history. Finally, you can stick your iPhone into the Appgun ($28), a plastic toy gun that allows you to play gyroscopic first-person shooter games in augmented reality.

Seriously, there's not much to this one.
Image courtesy ThinkGeek

3: Pet Rock USB
If you're old enough to remember the 1970s pet rock fad, then congratulations on being really, really old. But don't fret! Instead, why not update this fad and prove your youthful vigor to the entire office with a modern take on the pet rock that plugs into your computer's USB port?
The classic pet rock just sat there on your desk, a testament to marketing and human gullibility. The modern version does exactly the same thing for $10, while also tying up one of your USB ports. When co-workers ask about your new pet, just make something up. Ask if they can feel the USB-generated heat or hear its barely audible laughter when you shake it. Have fun with it. Tell them it's made out of nanomaterials. 

Image courtesy UberGizmo

2: Robotic Desk Lamp
Sure, the office toys of today are awesome, but 10 years from now they'll be even better. Just consider MIT student Nathan Linder's amazing LuminAR robotic lamp.
Boasting the computerized powers of a lamp, pico projector (a hand-held projector) and webcam, the LuminAR watches your every movement on the desk and moves itself into a complementary position with a robotic arm, projecting your computer screen or even a usable keyboard directly onto your workspace. It will even work around your desk clutter. You won't find this technology in the store just yet, but rest assured that your future office will be fantastic - or even holographic.

Is this the future of office work?
C. Anderson/Photographer's Choice/Getty Images

1: The Holographic Desk
What if everything on your desk was a hologram, from the photo of your spouse and your keyboard to the tiny Princess Leia who insists on calling you "Obi Wan." Imagine your entire workspace as interactive illusion. Much of the necessary technology already exists, such as the motion-sensing Kinect interface for Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming system. In fact, Microsoft is already developing this technology into tomorrow's HoloDesk.
Microsoft's OmniTouch technology will allow future cube farmers to use projected touch screens on any flat surface and the HoloDesk system, not unlike the laser keyboard and LuminAR lamp discussed earlier. But as illustrated in videos released by Microsoft's Research department in October 2011, HoloDesk technology allows users to manipulate holographic 3-D images as if they were real. In other words, the workspace of the future will be amazing - and so will the pet rocks.

Via How Stuff Works

Image via I Love to Laugh

Download Knowledge Directly to Your Brain, Matrix-Style

By Rebecca Boyle

MRI Machine Wikimedia Commons

For the first time, researchers have been able to hack into the process of learning in the brain, using induced brain patterns to create a learned behavior. It’s not quite as advanced as an instant kung-fu download, and it’s not as sleek as cognitive inception, but it’s still an important finding that could lead to new teaching and rehabilitation techniques.
Future therapies could decode the brain activity patterns of an athlete or a musician, and use them as a benchmark for teaching another person a new activity, according to the researchers.

Scientists from Boston University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the learning process. They were examining the adult brain’s aptitude for visual perceptual learning, or VPL, in which repetitive training improves a person’s performance on a particular task. Whether adults can do this as well as young people has been an ongoing debate in neuroscience.
Led by BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe, researchers used a method called decoded fMRI neurofeedback to stimulate the visual cortex. First they showed participants circles at different orientations. Then they used fMRI to watch the participants’ brain activity. The researchers were then able to train the participants to recreate this visual cortex activity.
The volunteers were again placed in MRI machines and asked to visualize shapes of certain colors. The participants were asked to “somehow regulate activity in the posterior part of the brain” to make a solid green disc as large as they could. They were told they would get a paid bonus proportional to the size of this disc, but they weren’t told anything about what the disc meant. The researchers watched the participants’ brain activity and monitored the activation patterns in their visual cortices.
“Participants can be trained to control the overall mean activation of an entire brain region,” the study authors write, “or the activation in one region relative to that in another region.”
This worked even when test subjects were not aware of what they were learning, the researchers said.
“The most surprising thing in this study is that mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specific visual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature, without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned,” Watanabe said in a statement.
Watanabe and colleagues said this method can be a powerful tool. “It can ‘incept’ a person to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized,” they write.
The paper appears in the journal Science.

Text via PopSci 

Translation:

Even worse than Matrix 3

Image via PuntoMag

Woolly Mammoth to be Cloned

 Analysis by Jennifer Viegas

Within five years, a woolly mammoth will likely be cloned, according to scientists who have just recovered well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Japan's Kyodo News first reported the find. You can see photos of the thigh bone at this Kyodo page.
Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues are now analyzing the marrow, which they extracted from the mammoth's femur, found in Siberian permafrost soil.

NEWS: All About the Ice Age

Grigoriev and his team, along with colleagues from Japan's Kinki University, have announced that they will launch a joint research project next year aimed at re-creating the enormous mammal, which went extinct around 10,000 years ago.
Mammoths used to be a common sight on the landscape of North America and Eurasia. One of my favorite papers of recent months concerned the earliest-known depiction of an animal from the Americas. It was a mammoth engraved on a mammoth bone. Many of our distant ancestors probably had regular face-to-face encounters with the elephant-like giants.
The key to cloning the woolly mammoth is to replace the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those extracted from the mammoth's bone marrow cells. Doing this, according to the researchers, can result in embryos with mammoth DNA. That's actually been known for a while.

NEWS:  

Prehistoric Dog Found With Mammoth Bone in Mouth

What's been missing is woolly mammoth nuclei with undamaged genes. Scientists have been on a Holy Grail-type search for such pristine nuclei since the late 1990s. Now it seems like the missing genes may have been found.
In an odd twist, global warming may be responsible for the breakthrough. Warmer temperatures tied to global warming have thawed ground in eastern Russia that is almost always permanently frozen. As a result, researchers have found a fair number of well-preserved frozen mammoths there, including the one that yielded the bone marrow.
Is it such a good idea, however, to clone animals that have long been extinct? For a while there's been some discussion of a real-life Jurassic Park setup containing such animals. Introducing these beasts into existing ecosystems could be like bringing in a potentially invasive species that would try to fill some space presently held by other animals. Even if the cloned animals were contained in special parks, there could still be a risk of spreading.
So if the woolly mammoth is successfully cloned sooner rather than later, we'd probably be left with more questions and controversy than answers, at least in the short term.

Image: Woolly mammoth. (Credit: WolfmanSF/Wikimedia Commons.)

Text via Discovery News

Hmmmm... 

Neanderthals aren't extinct 

after all.

Image via I Love to Laugh

What lies beneath...

Damn  Spooooky Reading...

 

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