From the Labs...
by Josh Desmarais

Welcome again to this road less traveled – a path winding and twisting along the forays of science and technology in this day and age. All overly dramatic prose as an introduction aside, there have been some at least marginally interesting developments in the world.
Products of note: Microsoft’s Origami, the Mac mini, and, on a non-hardware note, Bethesda’s Oblivion title. Origami is a small, ultra-portable computer with a variety of features for it – showings have been rather promising. The Mac mini is rather self-explanatory, following the tradition of Apple’s bizarre desire to make everything it already makes smaller. Oblivion is just a sequel of sorts to a previously wildly popular RPG, coming out for PCs and the Xbox 360 – it will likely be more of the same, only done much better and deeper. Advances in AI programming as well as improved graphics should logically lead to a much better, more believable world.
On a less commercial note, recently Sandia National Laboratories’ rather magnificent Z machine has created astronomical temperatures, hotter than the interior of the sun. It has successfully been used to create a plasma that reached 2,000,000 degrees Kelvin – over 200 times hotter than the interior of the sun. In more common terms, the plasma reached 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit – compared against the 15 million degrees Fahrenheit of the sun’s interior, that’s 240 times the heat. This isn’t merely a fluke of the machine, either – in-house testing at Sandia has revealed the results to be constant, and other laboratories’ tests concur with the extreme heat. Given that the reaction gave out four times as much energy in gamma rays than kinetic energy was put into it, once the true cause of the temperature jump can be figured out, mankind is much closer to harnessing the fabled power of fusion. Heating up hotter than the sun itself isn’t the first nature-breaking feat of the machine, either – it has been used in the past to move metal discs at 34 meters per second - 4 meters per second faster than the earth orbits the sun!
Google has recently made forays into space with Google Mars – it’s currently nothing at all like its similarly-named, more local counterpart, Google Earth, though. Where Google Earth is a rather nice-looking program with multiple features, Google Mars is merely a collection of various special images of Mars the planet. It also includes facts about its physical makeup, “pins” denoting its physical features and small bits of information on various attempts at getting to Mars, both the failures and successes, what they did and how long they ran.
An upcoming “cure” to the puzzling problem of ADHD may well be found in playing video games. Henry Owens, a clinical psychologist, has begun offering treatments for the disorder using a patented video game system. Basically, if an ADHD sufferer plays a video game alone, then they begin to zone out and lose their concentration. The game works against them on this by not responding anymore if they zone out – thus, concentration is forced. Owens warns against playing for a very long period of time, though – for younger children, he recommends a maximum of 20 minutes per day, while for anybody older, a maximum of 30 minutes. The subject itself is still rather controversial – results from neuro-feedback-based systems have been dubious in the past, sometimes offering little to no benefit for cost. Owens’s system, however, is markedly less expensive than previous similar treatments – it is also a bit more intense in its treatment and offers a generally likeable reward: video games are fun to play.