I have to admit there are days when I wonder why continue to write six blog entries a week. There have been days when I’ve thought if not for the regular attendance of a troupe of dedicated Baboons, there would be little reason to keep the thread going.

Until now, that is.

A new neurological study indicates that keeping a brain active is one way to significantly impede the progress of dementia. Published in the scientific journal Neurology, this investigation found that a group of people who read regularly and were in the habit of writing letters had fewer of the physical changes (lesions, brain plaques, tangles) that go along with dementia.

And yes, they had to wait until the people the were studying had died. Then they took out their brains and examined them. Ugh. I wonder how it effects longevity to know that when you die they’re going to cut open your skull and put your brain in a jar? For me, that would be a huge incentive to stay alive.

Maybe I could get funding to study that.

Anyway, in the articles I saw on this topic, reading and writing were the only specific brain activities mentioned that could slow the advance of dementia, although the brain is such a multi-purpose instrument I’m sure there must be other ways to keep it “active”. Doing long division, for example. Or playing the piano or learning another language. How about rebuilding carburetors or memorizing state capitals? Suppose all you do is watch TV. Even trying to understand the activities of the Kardashians has to demand some neurological wattage. I would think knowing the names of all the current reality-TV stars is a remarkable achievement in the field of memory. At least I know it’s a mental workout I wouldn’t be able to do.

I’d be OK if reading and writing were the only sure things, brain-freshening-wise. I’m fortunate that I happen to like doing both, and blogging six days a week gives me a well regulated daily dose of each of these medicinal activities. Perhaps I should claim blogging-related expenses as physical therapy to prevent the build up of various bits of clutter and debris that can disable brains.

And maybe I should charge guest bloggers a surprisingly hefty fee for partaking of this brain therapy along with me, just like a clinic or a hospital would. But I can’t – I’m too kind-hearted.

Plus, I’m planning to take a couple of weeks off and I need the help.

So if you have an idea for a guest post, please send me a note and let me know what you want to write. I’ll write back to confirm the assignment, and you’ll feel better instantly. The deadline for finished pieces is July 15th – one week from today.

Write to me at connelly.dale@gmail.com, and give your melon the workout it deserves. A post a day keeps dementia at bay!

Would you donate your dead body to science? Why or why not?

Until now,

NASA has issued an “all hands on deck” call for assistance in finding possibly threatening asteroids and developing plans to confront them. This “Grand Challenge” acknowledges the power of crowd sourcing to solve difficult problems. If two heads working on a conundrum are better than one, two billion heads applied to the same stumper are a great marketing opportunity for your brand.

The deadline to respond to NASA’s Request for Information is July 18th.

That’s coming up fast – almost as fast as a careening out-of-control asteroid bent on Earth’s destruction! So you’d better get started on your schematics. Get out a sharp pencil and a big piece of paper. All you have to do is design a system that will …

“… capture and de-spin an asteroid with the following characteristics:

• a. Asteroid size: 5 m < mean diameter < 13 m; aspect ratio < 2/1
• b. Asteroid mass: up to 1,000 metric tons
• c. Asteroid rotation rate: up to 2 revolutions per minute about any axis or all axes.
• d. Asteroid composition, internal structure, and physical integrity will likely be unknown until after rendezvous and capture.

Simple, eh? Maybe so.

The beauty of crowdsourcing is that there are brains out there that will see this problem from just enough of a skewed angle to come up with an approach that no one else could think of.

The ugly of crowdsourcing is that millions of others will mimic each other with the same obvious but impractical and flat-out dumb idea.

NASA has given us a head start, releasing this image of one possible approach to creating a super-sophisticated space vehicle that could capture and transport a speeding space rock.

The idea has its roots in childhood play. It can’t be a coincidence that it looks so much like this extremely simple ball-in-cup game. Who didn’t play this as a kid? Or as an adult?

My problem with this approach is that I hated the ball-in-cup game. I found it incredibly frustrating and ultimately (because I couldn’t do it), boring.

I would never go this way with the Grand Asteroid Challenge. I’d go back to the solutions we tried on the hot, muggy, buggy nights of my youth and launch a giant sheet of super-sticky double-sided Asteroid Fly Paper. NASA could partner with 3M on this one. Building a thin but tough, mobile, super-sticky landing strip and putting it in the path of an onrushing asteroid wouldn’t be simple, but I believe it would be extremely satisfying. And the larger you make your sheet of Asteroid Fly Paper, the greater the chance you’ll get the asteroid you don’t expect – the one that wasn’t on your radar.

Once they’re trapped in the goo, we can examine freshly humbled space rocks to our heart’s content.

And no, I don’t know how we’ll get them off the paper, or even get close to them without getting stuck ourselves. That would be a DIFFERENT Grand Challenge.

How would you capture and control dangerous asteroids in space?