well

New research out of North Carolina State University suggests a link between seniors who play video games and a healthier sense of well-being.

As reported this week in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, researchers surveyed 140 people ages 63 and older (the group's average age was 77) and placed them into one of three categories: regular gamers (at least once a week), occasional gamers (less than once a week), and non-gamers.

It turns out that those who were regular or occasional gamers reported higher levels of well-being and social functioning, while non-gamers reported higher levels of depression and … Read more

Whenever I attend a professional sporting event, two things seem certain: high prices and T-shirt cannons.

This basketball season, the chances of catching a flying T-shirt improved greatly for Philadelphia 76ers fans, with the debut of the world's largest T-shirt cannon.

The weapon of mass comfort, officially known as "Big Bella," weighs 600 pounds and can fire up to 100 shirts per minute. Judging by the startling straight-down-the-double-barrel picture supplied by the Sixers, the device appears somewhat similar to a jumbo Gatling gun. … Read more

Wells Fargo is the most recent mega-bank to be hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack. According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly 220 customers filed complaints of outages on its Web site today saying they had problems logging on.

"The amount of bandwidth that is flooding the websites is very large, much larger than in other attacks, and in a sense unprecedented," chief executive of private security firm CrowdStrike Dmitri Alperovitch told the Wall Street Journal.

Last week, similar attacks happened on J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America's Web sites. Users would try to log-on … Read more

Places like McDonald's, Cracker Barrel, IHOP, and Denny's are just a few of the restaurants you normally see when traveling the roads of the USA. While many of these places say they offer healthier choices, you probably know there are better options than chain restaurants. So if you're seeking some local cuisine, or you have special dietary needs, why not reference a guide made for just that?

The Eat Well Guide travel map is a useful Web site for finding more than 25,000 healthier places to eat. This guide doesn't just cover restaurants, it also … Read more

Space is already full of heavenly bodies, but apparently not enough of the kind to satisfy those at Playboy, which is taking matters into its own hands.

The adult magazine company has come up with a concept for a Playboy Club in space that includes a zero-gravity dance club and Playboy bunnies with jet packs. The "intergalactic entertainment destination" is featured in the March issue of Playboy, which is out on newsstands now, and is described as a cruise ship in space by the article's writers, A.J. Baime and Jason Harper.

Baime and Harper collaborated with various individuals on the project, including artist Thomas Tenery, Virgin Galactic head designer Adam Wells, and former NASA scientist Stan Kent, to figure out the design and features of the Playboy space club. Together, they dreamed up a wheel-shaped space station that has everything from a casino to a restaurant to "orbital pleasure domes." … Read more

Who are the people making decisions at the big labels? Do they bear any resemblance, in appearance or attitude, to the people listening to the songs they sell?

Or do they look like those men in the photograph of Ray Charles, the one taken in 1965 when he was negotiating a new contract with ABC Records? There's Ray, laughing and laid back, the image of cool. But down the long conference-room table is a group that is almost comically uncool: graying, balding, sober men all wearing dark suits.

But that was a long time ago, and that's not … Read more

What does it take to make it to 100 years old? The Archon Genomics X Prize hopes to find out.

As I've researched "extreme" aging in recent years--that is, the genes and lifestyles of centenarians (100 and older) and supercentenarians (110 and older)--a common refrain I hear from my younger peers is, "I don't want to get that old. It sounds miserable."

Whether or not that's true is something most of us will never find out. The reality is that those who make it past 100 are an exceedingly rare breed of … Read more

The lowly drinking fountain has been largely neglected as we fill up our wireless hydration-advice-giving water bottles and wear coats that catch and purify rain.

British design group Poietic Studio has given the drinking fountain a new lease on life with the Tropism Well. It senses when you're nearby, sucks water up a tube, fills up a carafe, and elegantly offers it to you.

You'll need to provide your own cup. Otherwise you'll have to kneel down and try to catch the water in your mouth, and nobody wants to see you do that.

The bowing motion is achieved simply by sending the water up the tube. The weight of the water does the rest. Isn't physics fun?… Read more

Despite the threat of another recessionary period, Wells Fargo Securities senior analyst Jason Maynard believes that IT budgets will hold up through 2011 and that the summer spending spottiness hasn't translated into meaningful expense cutting.

In today's e-mail newsletter, Maynard and team make the case for a positive call on IT spending despite the global macroeconomic fear permeating the market. This is based on first-hand qualitative feedback the team aggregated from CIOs and the 100 largest enterprise hardware and software vendors.

Obviously there is still a scenario where we have a repeat of the dramatic spending cutback of … Read more