tingilinde

rings and the emergency room

Titanium is sometimes too strong to remove from a swelling finger.  The BMJ offers a simple method.

a tip of the hat to Sean

 

can you train your brain to counter hearing loss?

Just how plastic is your brain?  

perhaps...

snip

...

The idea that the brain is behind this kind of hearing loss opens up a whole new way of treating it. Instead of cranking up the volume with a hearing aid, why not train the brain to process the ear’s signals better? A number of computer programs now promise to enhance the brain’s auditory machinery from the comfort of your home. Curious and a little sceptical, I had to try it.

To understand how such an idea might work, let’s start with what happens to our hearing as we age. We are born with about 11,000 hair cells in each ear. These delicate cells convert sound waves to electrical signals, but they are easily damaged by ageing and excessive noise. Hearing aids and cochlear implants are designed to treat this kind of impairment, and they can be very successful.

But in recent years, Liberman and his colleagues have turned their attention to the next step in sound processing – the auditory nerve fibres that pass the hair cells’ signals to the brain. Their work has revealed that loud noises can cause a shocking amount of damage to these nerves (see “Silent epidemic“). More specifically, it’s the connections, or synapses, between the hair cells and the auditory nerves that are destroyed, a problem known as synaptopathy. The hair cells themselves remain.

Synaptopathy doesn’t show up in audiograms because these only test the effect of hair-cell loss. “The whole domain of hearing assessment has systematically ignored the fact that the brain is a participant,” says Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist and creator of a brain-training program called BrainHQ. Perversely, the nerve fibres that are most damaged by noise are those we rely on to understand speech in a noisy environment – up to 90 per cent of these synapses can be damaged, yet you can still perform normally in a hearing test.

...

 

flying lawn chairs

There have been more than a dozen flying lawnchairs since Larry Walters soared into the Southern California sky and the imagination in 1982 ...   The 1998 New Yorker piece is a classic.

Here's a new one.

a reasonably accurate pendulum clock

Coupling a mechanical pendulum to a high frequency reference...

If the first sentence managed to get you excited, here's the video

a tip of the hat to Steve

embarrass your cat and save birds

Make use of the facts that most birds have great color vision and you can put an embarrassing color on the cat... a commercial product is mentioned, but etsy could go wild

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

cow art

a cattle farm, a feed truck and a drone

a tip of the hat to Sukie

advertising before tv took off

A well known company uses bird seed to arrange some pigeons at the Piazza San Marco in Venice.

a homemade ferret wheelchair

We have one from years ago that was made for a ferret who lost the use of her rear legs.  Sukie points to an instructables how-to article on an inexpensive homemade version.

A lot of variation is possible and much will depend on the type of surface the critter tries to walk on.  Here's ours from years ago.  I have no idea if they are still made, but it shows some of the possible variation.

 

a portable standing desk for laptops

Sitting all day has been shown to be unhealthy.  Standing desks have become increasingly popular, but most tend towards the expensive.  Travis notes a simple portable standing attachment for laptops that is much less expensive...

It should probably also be noted that just standing in one place for very long periods is also unhealthy - you need to move around a bit.

He also noted something for the desk at work that adjusts allowing you to spend time sitting as well as standing ..  the Varidesk.

 

 

a homemade medium format camera

Made using scanner parts.  

Not exactly the thing you'd want for fleeting images.  Normal exposures take two to five minutes.