Positive Thoughts

XPS 13 by Dell has been announced

Dell has launched its new Ultrabook XPS 13 with extra slim body and longer battery life.

From SayPeople,

XPS 13 is 18mm thin, i.e. 0.77 inches, while 6 mm at it’s thinnest with dimensions of 12.4 x 8.1 x 0.7 in. It has three pounds of weight which can goes up to reasonable 3.6 pound after addition of the AC adapter. It has a 13.3 inch of display, in a footprint similar to an 11 inch laptop, with 1366x768 pixels. It has 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD with a 1.6 GHz Intel core i7 processor. It has a battery life of up to 8 hours and 53 minutes.

It will be available from $999.

Further Reading:
SayPeople

Canon's new EOS 5D Mark III camera

Canon has revealed new EOS 5D Mark III camera on March 2. This new camera comes with an update to full-frame 5D Mark II dSLR.

The camera has 22.3 MP CMOS sensor. It supports high ISO ranging from 100 to 25600 (expandable to 102400). This camera features wireless file transfer and Speedlite 600EX-RT is the Canon’s first flash unit.

The Camera will be available in the later part of this month at $3,499 body-only.

Further Reading:
SayPeople

Sleep gets better with age

Article first published as Older Adults Get Better Sleep on Technorati.

Researchers have found that sleep gets better with age. Although, people in their 40's feel some difficulty in sleeping, sleep actually improves, when people pass their 50's.

"This flies in the face of popular belief," says Dr. Michael Grandner, lead author of the study. "These results force us to re-think what we know about sleep in older people — men and women."

Researchers from Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed more than 150,000 older people on telephone. They have asked them about their sleep. They have also asked them about the education, depressed mood, race, income and general health.

Researchers have observed that sleep may be affected by poor health but old age is not the single factor affecting the sleep. They found in the survey that sleep problems decrease with age and the least complaints about sleep were found in the people with more than 70 years of age.

Researchers have concluded that advancing age was not associated with increased self-reported sleep disturbance or self-reported tiredness/lack of energy. These results suggest that the often-reported increase in sleep problems with age is a nonlinear phenomenon, mediated by factors other than physiologic aging.

Flu medicine is found to be helpful in serious brain injury

Article first published as Severe Brain Injury Can Be Rapidly Treated With a Flu Medicine on Technorati.

Researchers have successfully confirmed that a flu medicine, amantadine, is efficient in treating the brain injury.

Their findings are consistent with observational reports suggesting the acceleration of recovery in patients who are receiving amantadine and the deceleration or loss of function after treatment is discontinued.

Researchers worked on 184 patients, who were in minimal conscious state for 4-16 weeks after severe brain injury. They divided the patients in two groups, one receiving the drug, amantadine, while the other received the dummy medicine i.e. placebo, for 4 weeks. Researchers have found that the group, which received the flu drug showed rapid improvement. They were better able to follow commands and reliably saying yes or no. They were also better able to use a spoon or hairbrush.

Researchers have discovered that very few, i.e. 17% of, patients of amantadine group remain in the “vegetative state” as compared to the other group, in which 32% remain in “vegetative state”.

Researchers have also given directions for future studies. Future research should focus on determining the pathophysiological characteristics of patients who have a response to amantadine, the most effective dosage and duration of treatment and timing of its initiation, and the effectiveness of amantadine in patients with nontraumatic brain injuries.

This research has been published online in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Zynga has rolled out on a new platform

Article first published as Zynga’s New Individual Platform for Social Gaming on Technorati.

Zynga, the leading provider of social games on Facebook, has announced a separate platform for the social gaming.

The new platform is Zynga.com, which according to the company will allow “new ways to play and more people to play with”. The new platform will also allow the third party developers to make the games to be played by the players of Zynga.

“We built Zynga.com to give our players more ways to connect with each other and play great social games whether built by Zynga or other talented developers,” said Mark Pincus, founder and CEO, Zynga. “Together with our platform partners, we look forward to bringing more play to the world on our platform.”

Although, Zynga gets 96% of its revenue from the world No. 1 social networking site through the sale of virtual goods to its customers on games such as CityVille, FarmVille and MafiaWars, but now it has planned to develop a separate identity.

Zynga will allow the players to login through Facebook ID and play games with not only their existing friends but also with other players, i.e. zFriends.

“Zynga.com was created based on listening to players and understanding what they want and need to make their play time more fun and meaningful,” said Manuel Bronstein, general manager of Zynga.com. “We are excited to give players a way to connect with other people who love to play the same games in a destination that is all and only about games. We will continue to listen to player feedback and provide even better ways for them to connect and play together.”

Further Reading:

Zynga

Arctic sea ice is removing rapidly

Researchers from different countries including Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., U.S. have found that the rapid removal of prennial Arctic Sea Ice is the result of mercury accumulation in  fish.

Researchers have found that the removal of perennial sea ice leads to accumulation of saltier ice, leading to bromine reaction resulting in the change of gaseous mercury to a toxic pollutant.

"Shrinking summer sea ice has drawn much attention to exploiting Arctic resources and improving maritime trading routes," Nghiem said.

"But the change in sea ice composition also has impacts on the environment," he said. "Changing conditions in the Arctic might increase bromine explosions in the future.”

From SayPeople,

Researchers are trying to find out the reason of the Arctic’s loss of one million square kilometers of perennial sea ice over the past decade. It has been suggested that this is due to the changing wind patterns over that time period. 

It has been found that in March 2008, there was a 50 year low record of year-round perennial sea ice, shrinking by an area equivalent to the combined size of Arizona and Texas. 

Ngheim said that the bromine explosion could be increased, “if sea ice continues to be dominated by younger saltier ice, and Arctic extreme cold spells occur more often”.

Further Reading:
SayPeople