Things that matter: Bilingual Brain Bodybuilders, Adolescent Adults, and US Ponce gets a laser induced make-over.

Things that matter today...

Brain Bodybuilders

Only speak one language? Maybe you should get out and purchase a copy of Rosetta Stone and learn another...it might make you a brain bodybuilder according to Live Science.

Brain bodybuilders In previous studies of people's eye movements, Marian and her colleagues found that when bilingual people heard a word in one language, they often looked at objects whose names sounded similar to that word in their second language. In the new study, the researchers looked at how the ability to filter information manifests itself in the brain.  

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 35 people from the University of Houston, including 17 who were fluent in both Spanish and English and 18 who spoke only English.  

During the experiment, volunteers heard the name of an object and simultaneously were shown a picture of that object, as well as an object with a similar-sounding name, and two unrelated objects. For example, they might hear the word "cloud," and see pictures of a cloud, a clown and two other things. As fast as they could, the volunteers had to pick the picture that showed the word they heard.

Adult-Children...4 Tips to help you not to become one.

The advice featured in this linked article is more geared towards college kids...but it is unarguably VERY applicable to those of us over thirty as well. Heed its advice if  you ever wanna become a cultured rube.

You know that conversation in the cafeteria flows better when you mention a tweet by Katy Perry, not the morning’s Wall Street Journal book review. The trivial social-media culture of your classmates seems to drown out their interest in politics and times of prayer. In high school, your intellectual interests earned you more ridicule than respect. You live a new counter-culture without any of the libertine pleasures of the old counter-culture. 

Some of you have written to me and some have spoken, expressing concern and dismay, requesting a way out of the hyper-social circuit and into the civic and ideological contests of our moment. You sense the juvenility of media habits. You realize that leadership requires different exposures. You’re sick of selfies and tired of Twitter, because you draw a disconnection between what you observe in your friends, and what you think a nation needs from its rising generations. You want more and better, but everything in youth culture conspires against that escape, the media, marketing, games, and devices, combined with the desire not to be alone, yielding a coercive climate that urges, “Send more texts, get more tweets, make more calls, check Facebook, take and share pictures, chat, comment,” etc.

U.S. Navy goes Laser

With all the hubbub about the Chinese trying to close the technological gap with the United States in weapons systems, the U.S. Navy just upped the ante by deploying its first shipborne laser on the USS Ponce.

The U.S. Navy has deployed on a command ship in the Persian Gulf its first laser weapon capable of destroying a target. 

The amphibious transport ship USS Ponce has been patrolling with a prototype 30-kilowatt-class Laser Weapon System since late August, according to officials. The laser is mounted facing the bow, and can be fired in several modes -- from a dazzling warning flash to a destructive beam -- and can set a drone or small boat on fire. 

The Ponce “provides a unique platform” to deploy the new capability “in an operationally relevant region,” Vice Admiral John Miller, the 5th Fleet commander, said in an e-mailed statement. The ship is the 5th Fleet’s primary command and control afloat staging base for operations 

Since 2011, the Navy has boosted its presence in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil flows. Equipped with naval mines and small vessels that practice swarming tactics to attack larger warships, Iranian officials have periodically threatened to close the waterway.

Pretty cool!