Enable always continuous page display in Adobe Acrobat

If you are reading pdf files, you may have noticed the two different page display modes: single page display and continuous page display. In single page display, when you reach end of page, it automatically jumps to the next page. If you are like me, will feel this is disorienting at best. Even if you set default page display to continuous, at Preferences > Page Display > Default Page Layout, you will notice that not all pdf files will follow this and you will end up, manually changing the mode each time, resulting in diminishing respect for Acrobat. After exhaustive search (well mostly ) I have finally discovered an override setting.

To always enable continuous page display in Adobe Acrobat, go to:
Preferences > Accessibility  and check "Always use Page Layout Style" as "Single Page Continuous".
And enjoy your mind bending control over the pdf files...

Paralysed woman's thoughts control robotic arm

A new advanced control of a robotic arm has been achieved using a paralysed woman's thoughts. Jan Scheuermann, who is 53 and paralysed from the neck down, was able to deftly grasp and move a variety of objects just like a normal arm. Brain implants were used to control the robotic arm, in the study reported in the Lancet medical journal.

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Brain Implant Improves Thinking

Scientists have designed a brain implant that sharpened decision making and restored lost mental capacity in monkeys, providing the first demonstration in primates of the sort of brain prosthesis that could eventually help people with damage from dementia, strokes or other brain injuries.

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Scientists read dreams

Brain scans during sleep can decode visual content of dream.  Researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep. The researchers extracted key words from the participants’ verbal reports, and picked 20 categories that appeared most frequently in their dream reports.

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Brainwave training boosts brain network for cognitive control

Researchers at  University of Western Ontario and the Lawson Health Research Institute have found that functional changes within a key brain network occur directly after a 30-minute session of noninvasive, neurofeedback training.

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How a Vision Prosthetic Could Bypass the Visual System

Electrical stimulation of the visual cortex may one day give image perception to blind people. Work presented at the Society for Neuroscience 2012 meeting in New Orleans suggested a way to create a completely new kind of visual prosthetic—one that restores vision by directly activating the brain.

In a poster session, researchers presented results showing how electrical stimulation of the visual cortex can evoke the sensation of simple flashes of light—including spatial information about those flashes. 

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Brain Implant Detects, Responds to Epilepsy

Next year, medical researchers will test in patients a one-of-a-kind brain implant that can sense electrical activity in the brain while simultaneously emitting electric pulses, says device developer Medtronic.

Deep-brain stimulators are mainly used to regulate the movement problems associated with Parkinson's and other diseases, but they are also used in Europe and Canada to treat epilepsy and are being used experimentally to treat severe depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But doctors must use trial and error to determine the best parameters for the electrical stimulation programmed into each patient's chip.

The smarter brain stimulator is an improved version of Medtronic's existing deep-brain stimulator device, which has already been implanted in more than 80,000 people around the world. Medtronic has added an extra chip so that it can detect electrical activity and respond automatically to changes in the brain. 

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An Operating System for the Cyber War Era

Kaspersky thinks it can protect the control systems for power plants and other critical infrastructure. Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the Russian company Kaspersky, which has led discovery and analysis of state-backed malware such as Stuxnet, wrote in a blog post today that the project was needed to protect “defenseless” industrial control software.

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A wireless low-power, high-quality EEG headset

Imec, Holst Centre and Panasonic have developed a new prototype of a wireless EEG (electroencephalogram) headset designed to be a reliable, high-quality and wearable EEG monitoring system.

The system combines ease-of-use with ultra-low power electronics. Continuous impedance monitoring and the use of active electrodes increases the quality of EEG signal recording compared to former versions of the system.

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Brain scans may help personalize treatments

A new study indicates that brain scans of patients with social anxiety disorder can help predict whether they will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy.

Social anxiety is usually treated with either cognitive behavioral therapy or medications. However, it is currently impossible to predict which treatment will work best for a particular patient. The team of researchers from MIT, Boston University (BU) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) found that the effectiveness of therapy could be predicted by measuring patients’ brain activity as they looked at photos of faces, before the therapy sessions began.

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