Good News For Geeks, Caffeine May Reverse Alzheimers

Researchers at the Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center have published a study indicating that increased consumption of caffeine may mitigate or even reverse the effects of Alzheimer's. In their research they fed mice which were genetically predisposed to the disease with the caffeine equivalent of 5 cups of coffee per day and found that after 2 months, those that were given the caffeine performed much better on memory and thinking tests than a control group which was not given any caffeine. This may be the news that Starbucks was waiting for...

Source: CBC

Software Trained to Determine Meaning of Dogs Bark

Hungarian researcher Csaba Molnár from Eötvös Loránd University has developed software in an attempt to determine what a dog's bark means. According to Telegraph.co.uk "The software has learned the nuances of woofs, howls, yaps, snarls and growls in various situations and is now able to classify dog barks with reasonable accuracy, along with the identity of the animals themselves." Molnár says "If we could find the acoustic characteristics of barks which reflect to certain emotional states of dogs we could gain information about the dogs' "well-being" which would have several applications on the animal welfare field." but don't get too excited, the accuracy is only 43% in detecting six different states: 'stranger', 'fight', 'walk', 'alone', 'ball' and 'play' and the research has only been conducted on one breed. No word on when they'll try to figure out cats!

Chimps out perform humans in memory test!

Researchers in Japan have proven that young chimpanzees do amazingly well at short term memory tests. In an experiment, sort of a brain age for chimps, the researchers found that a 5 year old chimp out performed 9 university students by a 2 to 1 margin. "Our study shows that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection, better than that of human adults," reported Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Sana Inoue in the Dec. 4 issue of the journal Current Biology. The chimps however did not fare so well at the beer bong competition. ;-)

The CBC has more here.