Future cars will be driven by our minds

via MSNBC — What’s on your mind as you drive down the road? Cars of the future may tap into those thoughts in order to keep you and our roads safer.

The technology builds on brain-machine interface research pioneered at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland that allows wheelchairs users to get around using their minds.

Now, in collaboration with Nissan, the team has announced the car and driver is the next frontier.

“The idea is to blend driver and vehicle intelligence together in such a way that eliminates conflict between them, leading to a safer motoring environment,” Jose del Millan, who the EPFL researcher leading the project, said in a media statement.

Read full story at MSNBC.com.

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And then there were eight: Baseball’s post season

The Major League Baseball season starts in April with 30 teams and ends in September with the final eight. It takes five months and 162 games to decide who gets to the post-season.

While football has increased television ratings, over the last few years, and the Super Bowl has almost become a national holiday, there are still some hardcore baseball fans among us. We check our team’s schedules before accepting social invitations, we go to the ballparks when we can and we definitely own our favorite player’s jerseys.

Racial lines blurring in the US?

The latest snapshot of America shows a population that is quickly becoming much more multi-racial.

Latinos Have Arrived: Media projects that explore America’s emerging majority leave the community’s pathologies at the door

Guest contributor, Sandra Guzman

Minutes after Academy Award nominated actor Terrence Howard watched a screening of The Latino List, a film which debuted last night on HBO, he told me, feeling very inspired by the compelling documentary, “what I loved most (about the film) was that there were no victims! The stories were unfiltered, honest and unapologetically Latino.”

The documentary, by photographer and director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, is an assemblage of more than a dozen interviews – think talking portraits – that languorously come to life to tell their own stories in their own voices. Maria Hinojosa and myself, two Emmy award-winning journalists, conducted these intimate interviews over a year and a half long period. 

The importance of growing up bilingual

via Reach Hispanic — Like many first-generation Hispanics I grew up in a bilingual household. I had the benefit of learning English at school and Spanish at home. I never really understood how much of a benefit I received by growing up bilingual. I didn’t have to take any classes, buy any software or get a tutor to speak, read and write both languages, which leads me to think about how soon a parent should teach a foreign language to their child. 

New ways to get a job

via Life Hacker

Job boards and Craigslist are no longer great places to find jobs because everyone is already using them. It’s no longer enough to put your resume out into the world and wait for someone in HR to notice your resume that looks just like every other applicants. In order to find a job these days, you will need to approach your search in new ways, such as:

What’s your sex IQ?

via Salon.com

iStockphoto/alexskopje

Washington, D.C. will soon require children in public and public charter schools to take a standardized sex-ed test — the first of its kind in the U.S. The 50-question exam will test students’ knowledge on health and sex education and will include topics such as: nutrition, mental health, and drug use as well as sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy. Students in DC are set to take this test in April 2012. If you had to take this test now, would you be able to pass?

Hate crime alleged in attack on Latino man

via The Seattle Times

A 42-year-old Kent man was charged Monday with second-degree assault and malicious harassment for allegedly beating a Latino man last week in what prosecutors allege was a racially motivated attack. Kurt Randall Madsen was arrested early Thursday and is being held in the King County Jail in lieu of $250,000 bail, according to jail records. He is to be arraigned on Oct. 10.

Domestic violence hurts us all

by Jazmin Chavez

She wakes up slowly and tries to remember where she is and what just happened. She can feel a warmness trickle out her nose, down to the side of her cheek and into her ear. She raises her head slowly, but it’s too heavy to lift, so she places it back down. There’s a voice inside of her that whispers, “Levantate, todo esta bien.” She raises herself slowly off the floor and climbs to her feet. She can barely see the image in front of the bedroom mirror. Her left eye is swollen shut and bruised from a solid right hook. The mirror is shattered, like her self-esteem and spirit. But still she rises. She looks in the mirror and cringes at what her life has become.

PETA doesn’t care about humans

via Gizmodo

Charles Wickersham, a 21-year-old man, was fishing in the Bay Area when he was attacked and bitten by a shark. He’s currently still in intensive care on his way to recovery. While PETA’s expressed a little sympathy for Mr. Wickersham, their main concern seemed to be for the fish.