Monkeying around

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Just 2 hours a week of this activity can slow brain aging, your dog may be listening to you, and a glimpse of Bowie’s childhood 😎

Let’s get into it!

According to a study published by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, helping others for two to four hours per week can slow brain aging by 15% to 20%.

Social scientist Sae Hwang Han and his team of researchers analyzed 20 years worth of data collected by the national Health and Retirement study in an effort to identify things that can keep us young beyond the known strategies of exercise, sleeping well, and adhering to the Mediterranean diet.

They looked at data for 30,000 adults over the age of 50, and found activities like regularly volunteering or simply helping their friends or family on a sporadic but regular basis slowed cognitive decline by 15% to 20%.

“Everyday acts of support — whether organized or personal — can have lasting cognitive impact,” said Han. “What stood out to me was that the cognitive benefits of helping others weren’t just short-term boosts but cumulative over time with sustained engagement, and these benefits were evident for both formal volunteering and informal helping.”

Previous research has identified “social contact” and “social purpose” as influential in keeping the mind sharp well into a person’s golden years, and helping out the community falls right under that umbrella.

Scientists at the Universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania have developed a robot the size of a grain of salt that can autonomously swim, change direction, and generally act on its own based on programmable actions stored in its microscopic computer.

The robot acts at the scale of a living cell, and its designers say it could have potential use in assisting other practically-invisible medical tools tasked with monitoring individual cells or other microscopic organisms.

“We’ve made autonomous robots 10,000 times smaller,” says Marc Miskin, Assistant Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn Engineering and the papers’ senior author. “That opens up an entirely new scale for programmable robots.”

He also notes the concept of an autonomous robot this tiny has been a pipe dream that’s evaded engineers for decades.

“Building robots that operate independently at sizes below one millimeter is incredibly difficult,” he says. “The field has essentially been stuck on this problem for 40 years.”

These robots are 200 by 300 by 50 micrometers and cost one cent to make. You can read on here for a deeper look.

Dogs are hilarious, because sometimes they’ll be poking or lurking around, curiously getting up to no good and thinking they’re getting away with it. In reality their humans aren’t only in the know, but they’re actively encouraging it.

According to a study conducted by researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and the University of Veterinary Medicine in Austria, it’s in exactly those situations that intelligently gifted dogs really flex that brain power.

Most dogs can remember one or two action commands, but when it comes to the names of things, they aren’t particularly wise. Gifted dogs, however (50 of which are known to scientists), can memorize over 100 words, and a lot of them do so by eavesdropping on their owners.

Unbeknownst to the little rascals, ten of these gifted pups were observed listening to their owners hold and discuss a new toy. The owners said the name of the toy several times and then placed it in another room in a pile of other toys.

When asked by their owners to retrieve the toy, seven of the 10 dogs did so correctly.

“This is the first time that we see a specific group of dogs that are able to learn labels from overhearing interactions,” said study author Shany Dror.

The Heritage Trust of London purchased the childhood home of David Bowie from a family that had owned it for over 50 years. Its intention is to renovate it and recreate the look and feel of the house from when a young Ziggy Stardust inhabited it.

The trust has tapped Geoffrey Marsh to oversee and manage the transformation, after he successfully curated the David Bowie Is exhibit in London’s V&A Museum 13 years ago. It will then open for the public to visit.

Located in 4 Plaistow, Bromley, Bowie lived there from 1955 until 1968, and reportedly spent most of his time in his 9×10 bedroom. Going by the name David Jones Jr. at the time to “affect an American spirit,” it’s believed that time was mostly spent ruminating, creating, and becoming the Starman.

“You think, someone who didn’t have any big advantages, who came from an ordinary family, went to an ordinary school – what was it that went on there which created this driving ambition to succeed, to want to be a star, and which took him right through to it?” Marsh told The Guardian.

“It’s not just aimed at being a memorial to David’s extraordinary creativity…Part of the project is to work with young people and show them the drivers that helped David succeed, which can hopefully help them succeed. It’s a platform for the future.”

Didn’t see that coming

If you remember some of those classic TV or movie moments when your jaw dropped and you gasped in disbelief, then we’ve got a great game for you with today’s trivia.

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