Video games can be fun, and they can be educational, and they can also help with rebuilding muscles and control of said muscles. I must admit that I have a Wii and that after a long session of playing my arms can get pretty tired.
CNN has a video report on how the Wii is being used to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, CNN doesn’t let me embed the video so you’ll have to go to their site to watch it.
100 things we didn’t know last year is a year-end list put together by the BBC, and it’s a fun list. I read all 100!
Some selections from the list:
1. Coach travel is the safest form of road transport in the country.
6. Dishcloths are purged of 99% of their bacteria during two minutes in a microwave.
26. Harvesting rhubarb in candlelight helps preserve its flavour.
35. Denmark is the happiest country in Europe; Italy the unhappiest. (The UK was 9th out of 15.)
54. The Australian town of Eucla has its own time zone.
74. Sheffield FC is the world’s oldest football club.
91. In Iceland, 96% of women go to university.
Berlin, Cologne, and Hanover have all decided to implement a neat way to make sure that their air is cleaner than other cities by using stickers. Drivers will have to buy stickers that denote how much pollution their cars emit and will be charge accordingly when driving in designated environmental zones. This is such a neat and simple idea.
Drivers now have to display a coloured sticker on their vehicle to enter the inner city zones. The colour depends on the pollutants the vehicle emits.
The cities are gradually phasing in fines of 40 euros (£29;$58) for anyone caught driving without a sticker.
Other German cities – but not all – plan to have such zones later in 2008.
The stickers – green, red or yellow – are mandatory not only for locals but also for foreign drivers, including tourists.
There is a one-off charge of five to 10 euros for the stickers, issued by Germany’s vehicle registration authority and authorised garages.
I couldn’t resist that headline, but it’s close enough. The UK has decided to ban ads that sell junk food to young teens and children.
A total ban on adverts for unhealthy food and drink products around TV programmes for under-16s has come into force.
It extends similar restrictions already in place for shows aimed at children under 10 years old.
The new curbs affect commercials for food and drink products high in fat, salt and sugar.
Adverts around youth-oriented and adult programmes which attract a significantly higher than average proportion of viewers under-16 will also be affected, Ofcom said.
Bike couriers in Cambridge, UK have been given tricked-out cellphones that monitor the air pollution around them and ten report that information to a research team. What a clever way to gather this information.
The technique is made possible by small wireless pollution sensors and custom software that allows the phones to report levels of air pollutants wherever they happen to be around town.
“Mobiles are everywhere, and now have a lot of computing power,” says Eiman Kanjo, the computer scientist at Cambridge University, UK, leading technical development of the project. “They can provide an alternative to expensive custom hardware and report from places that otherwise aren’t monitored.”
Kanjo and colleagues gave local cycle couriers air-pollution sensors and GPS units that connect to their cellphones via Bluetooth. Custom software lets the phone constantly report the current air quality and location to servers back in the lab.
“They cycle around the city as usual and we receive the data over the cellphone network,” says Kanjo. “We can find out what pollutants people are exposed to and where.”