"The Situation is Dismal"

Survey: 40 Pct. in Japan Not Having Sex
(AP) -- The secret behind Japan's plunging birth rate? A record 39.7 percent of Japanese citizens ages 16-49 have not had sex for over a month - up 5 percentage points from two years ago - according to a survey published this week by the Japan Family Planning Association.
Among married couples, the rate was only slightly lower, at 34.6 percent.
"This is very bad news for the country's birth rate, and something the government needs to look into urgently," said Dr. Kunio Kitamura, the family planning association's director.
The survey comes amid concerns over Japan's faltering birthrate, which fell in 2005 to a record low of 1.26 births in an average woman's lifetime. The decline has stoked fears of impeding tax revenue shortfalls and labor shortages.
"The situation is dismal," Kitamura said. "My research shows that if you don't have sex for a month, you probably won't for a year."
Kitamura partly blamed stress from busy working lives.
A decline in physical communication skills in an increasingly Web-based society was also a factor, he said.
The association said it handed out survey forms to 2,713 randomly selected people, and received responses from 636 men and 773 women in November 2006. It gave no margin of error. In a similar poll taken two years ago, 35 percent reported having no sex for a month.
Japan came last in a 29-country study of sexual satisfaction published by the University of Chicago last year, with a mere 25.7 percent of lovers expressing satisfaction in bed.
The country was also in last place among 41 nations in a 2005 poll by condom manufacturer Durex, with people having sex just 45 times a year compared to a global average of 103.

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Weekend Project: Make your own hood ornament - Lifehacker

Weekend Project: Make your own hood ornament - Lifehacker

I'll Take 160G, Please, And Can I Get Bluetooth with That?

KurzweilAI.net

The Memory Hacker

Popular Science, April 2007

USC's Center for Neural Engineering researchers have developed a chip that can communicate with brain cells, a first step toward an implantable machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.
The chip can receive analog signals from live brain tissue, convert them to digital signals, and then reconvert them to an analog signal relayed to healthy neurons on the other side.
Later this year, colleagues at Wake Forest will hook up a more complex version of the chip to live lab rats whose memories have been temporarily disabled by drugs. If the animals' brains react to the computer-supplied signals with the same regularity as the slice of rat brain in Wet Lab 412C does, it will, Berger says, be a "monumental" moment. "We'll prove we can replace a central part of the brain that has lost a higher cognitive function, such as memory, with a microchip," he says.
Within four years, the team aims to wire a chip beneath the skulls of monkeys, whose brains are even closer to humans. Berger predicts that human trials of a prosthetic device that can actually replace impaired memory cells are less than 15 years away.