Searching the Internet exercises the brains of older people by activating their neural circuitry, says UCLA’s Memory & Aging Research Center.

Internet searches activate regions in the brain that control complex reasoning and decision making, the Center found in a nine-month study of 24 neurologically normal volunteers, with similar education levels, ages 55 to 76.

The test subjects showed richer sensory experience and heightened attention when conducting Internet searches, as opposed to reading book-like text on computers, said Gary Small, the Center’s director, noting the brain activity was recorded in MRI results.

Not enough research yet exists to show whether Internet use can ward off dementia, The San Francisco Chronicle reported Sunday, noting Alzheimer’s cases in the United States are expected to quadruple by 2050.

Considering the simililarity in application and its sources, searching Newsgroups through Usenet is likely to cause the same reaction as well.

The Center’s findings are to be published next month in the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

A revolutionary laser which could fight cancer has been developed by British scientists.

The device, which has been compared to a Star Wars light sabre, could be routinely used on patients in NHS hospitals within the next five years, according to the researchers.

The machine - a couple of millimetres square - fires a laser beam so accurately that it can puncture a hole in an individual cell, allowing drugs to enter and do their work much more effectively.

Drug companies are often confounded by the problem that it can be easy to get a medicine into the body by injection or pill - but much harder to get the drug molecules into the cells themselves.

It could mean, for example, that the cells surrounding the spot where a tumour has been removed by surgery would be holed by the device.

This would allow chemotherapy drugs to enter and kill any remaining cancer cells.

It would be particularly useful for hard-to-reach cancers such as that of the pancreas.

The team from the University of St Andrews has managed to mount the ‘light sabre’ on an optical fibre.

The next step is to develop it for use on endoscopes, the tubes used by surgeons to pass miniature cameras through the body.

If you saw the new Bond movie this weekend, you probably saw the new trailer for next summer’s ‘Star Trek’ reboot. While a bootleg recording of it quickly made its way to the Web, Paramount today finally made a high-quality version available. Unfortunately, it’s hosted by Apple, which tends to not give out codes for embedding it on a page.

You can see the trailer at http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/startrek/. You want Trailer 2. (Trailer 1 was the one that was attached to ‘Cloverfield’ earlier this year.)

As Kirk and Spock, Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto respectively seem to fill their roles well, but the idea of assembling the Enterprise on Earth seems ludicrous. The ship isn’t meant to land on planets, so wouldn’t you want to assemble all the pieces in space and zero gravity?

Technorati Profile

Before and After?

Tanya Vlach a San Francisco artist who lost an eye in a 2005 car accident, wants a Web cam installed into her prosthesis. Vlach, who now wears a realistic acrylic prosthesis says she’s issued a challenge to engineers on her blog: build an “eye cam” for her prosthesis that can dilate with changes of light and allow her to blink to control its zoom, focus, and on/off switch.

“It is possible to build a wireless camera with the dimensions of the eyeball,” said Want, a senior principal engineer at Intel. “You can find spy cams or nanny cams designed to fit into inconspicuous places in the home.”

Want also saw the potential for a system like this to serve as a personal memory back-up saying, “You’d never lose anything. You could ask it, ‘Where was the last time I saw my keys?’”

Once she’s captured some content, Vlach wants the freedom to move it to a PC by Bluetooth, Firewire, USB or memory card. The eye would be powered with a wireless charger. Uploading the content to Newsgroups could be a great channel to share and communicate her content.

Vlach’s challenge, first reported by tech blogger Kevin Kelly, has inspired blog posts from around the world and e-mails to Vlach from dozens of eager engineers. We’ll be keeping an eye out for more details [sic].

Microsoft is taking another step into the world of Web-based computing with a new system it’s calling Windows Azure.

Microsoft says it’s joining Amazon.com and other rivals in selling information storage space and computing power “in the cloud,” distributed across massive data centers worldwide. That will let companies build Web-based programs without having to manage their own data centers.

Microsoft’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, described Azure to software developers at a conference in Los Angeles. Ozzie said that managing Microsoft’s own Web sites and Web-based programs has made the company adept at anticipating Web traffic spikes and knowing when to ramp up some computers and dial down others.

Want to know more about Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft news? Did you know that Microsoft has over 100 Newsgroups relating to every product they’ve released?  Check out just some of these Newsgroups as an example:

microsoft.public.test
microsoft.public.windows.vista.general
microsoft.public.greatplains
microsoft.public.outlook
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
microsoft.public.excel.misc
microsoft.public.access
microsoft.public.windowsupdate

To name a few.