An elderly couple had been experiencing declining memories, so they decided to take a power memory class where one is taught to remember things by association.
A few days after the class, the old man was outside talking with his neighbor about how much the class helped him.
“What was the name of the Instructor?” asked the neighbor.
“Oh, ummmm, let’s see,” the old man pondered. “You know that flower, you know, the one that smells really nice but has those prickly thorns, what’s that flower’s name?”
“A rose?” asked the neighbor.
“Yes, that’s it,” …

To many of us, the @ symbol is second nature. Used for email addresses and tweets alike, we’ve grown so accustomed to it that its nature isn’t generally of interest – unless you work for The New York Times.
According to the Times, the “at sign” (or, a “snail” if you’re Italian and a “monkey” if you’re a southern Slav) is a fairly recent invention, dating back 473 years. Reports state that a Florentine merchant that went by the name Francesco Lapi used the @ symbol in a letter he wrote …

All of you PSP users will want to know that Sony has issued another firmware update for your handheld today. The company released firmware version 5.03, coupling almost no actual news on what the update entails. Vague statements about stability improvements are mentioned, with no actual specifics or a list of any bug fixes being present. This is in contrast to a few months ago, when the PSP firmware 5.0 update came with a host of fixes and quite a bit of fanfare for the release.

That’s perhaps a good thing, …

In addition to releasing the PSP 5.03 firmware today, Sony also made an announcement regarding the next firmware release for the PlayStation 3 console. While not available just yet, the 2.60 firmware update for the PS3 will have several big updates included in it, such as playback support for DivX 3.11 encoded files. They’ve also added “guest” access to the PlayStation store, which will let people who don’t have a PSN account browse what is available on the store. The biggest update is the inclusion of a photo gallery …

Dell has confirmed the existence of their new luxury laptop brand, Adamo, at CES in Las Vegas. But beyond briefly showing off its skinny build and promising a launch sometime in the first half of 2009, the company gave no further details as to what we can expect to see under the hood.
Alex Gruzen, a senior vice president in Dell’s consumer product group, would not say approximately how much the new machine would cost either, but emphasized that it would be a high-end “no compromise” laptop. Looking at some …

The ubiquitous USB interface was officially updated to version 3.0, with developers delivering the final “SuperSpeed” USB specification and a comprehensive review of the technology at a conference today. The new standard will provide a maximum bandwidth of 5.0 Gbps, which is more than ten times what is offered by USB 2.0, while also being more power-efficient than its predecessor.
To put things into perspective, developers said the new spec can handle 25GB transfers in a mere 70 seconds, whereas the same transfer would take 13.9 minutes with the current USB …

Microsoft will be sharing details on Windows 7 next week, but there will also be news around Vista, with the company planning to distribute a beta of Service Pack 2 to a small group of Technology Adoption Program members. Some of the features to be included with SP2 are native Blu-ray recording in Vista, a revised search feature, Bluetooth 2.1 support and more.
This should be the last service pack for Vista, with Microsoft now shifting its focus to Windows 7 and its planned release date either in the first half …

If you’re itching for Fallout 3 but don’t feel like standing in line for hours or would rather download it than get a hard copy, you can now officially get the game as a pre-purchase through Steam, for the same price tag that the PC version has in stores.
Digital distribution will definitely boost sales, as we’ve already seen how well Steam has been received. There isn’t any mention on how DRM or copy protection will be different from the DVD version sold in stores compared to the version on Steam, …

In addition to Intel planning to shortly discontinue several of their processors, the company is also preparing to make several new low-power Core 2 Duo CPUs available before the end of this year.
Five new models, including the T9800, Q9000, P9600, T9550 and the T8700 are planned, all of which will have a TDP of only 35W, fairly low as far as desktop processors go. All the units are dual-core. It’s unlikely that these CPUs are intended specifically to be paired with the upcoming P55 chipsets, as the release date is …

Earlier this week Google announced it had detected a problem that prevented Gmail users from accessing their accounts. Although Google said the bug affected only “a small number of users,” that was little comfort for Google Apps administrators who were fielding angry complaints from business users who actually pay for Google’s email system.
The outage lasted about 30 hours and has since been fixed, but the company offered no explanation as to what caused the problem nor as to why it took them so long to repair. This is just the …