Stress
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Researchers create 'programmable' stem cells through stress
Making stem cells in the lab is typically a complicated process, and there isn't much variety in the results without resorting to foreign DNA. However, researchers at both Brigham and Women's Hospital and Japan's RIKEN may have found a way to easily create most any stem cell a doctor would need. Their new technique subjects adult cells to extreme stress, such as oxygen deprivation. The victims that survive the process retreat into a state much like that of an embryonic stem cell; after that, scientists just have to grow the cells in the right environment to get the stem cells they want. It will be a while before the team tests this process with humans, but it could lead to stem cells tailor-made for specific patients -- you'd only have to provide a blood sample to get replacement tissues.
The Daily Grind: How do you relax in-game?
It's no secret that I'm kind of big on roleplaying. So you might think that when I log in to Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft or whatever I'm playing on a given day that roleplaying is how I chill out... but you'd be wrong. Roleplaying is just as high-intensity for me as challenging content. How do I relax? Dailies. Repeatable quests. Just slowly working up to better gear or more money or otherwise zoning out and enjoying myself. Yes, it's all automatic and a little boring, but it's the equivalent of sitting in front of the television and spacing out. I'm not forced to think about it too much, and next thing I know it's time for something else and I've got a pile of money and stuff. Everyone has their own ways of relaxing. For some people, roleplaying is that way. Some people find high-level dungeon relaxing. Some people craft or just chat with others. So how do you relax in-game? What's your low-stress way of just derping around? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Summoner's Guidebook: Performing under pressure in League of Legends
"Clutch" is one of those universal skills that I never really developed. In ranked or tournament play or any time when the outcome of a League of Legends match "matters," the ability to perform under fire can make a huge difference. But I am not one of those people who can claim mastery in this skill. I mostly rely on improving my overall play level, which naturally improves my ability to play under stress. However, coping with stress in tough situations is important. If I'm in a bad situation and my play gets worse, that's no good even if my skill level is high. I want to step up when the chips are down, not struggle.
The Summoner's Guidebook: Dealing with emotional stress in League of Legends
League of Legends is a frustrating game. As much as I portray myself as an unfeeling robot in the Summoner's Guidebook, I am not a paragon of precise execution and flawless decision-making. I've mentioned that I experience rage at my fellow players just as much as the next person. In fact, I probably get upset when I play more frequently than a typical player does. As many of you have probably noticed, I take League of Legends pretty seriously. I don't screw around or play oddball characters. I don't like the idea of "playing for fun," even though I like to have fun as much as the next person. Saying "I play for fun" is just an excuse to dodge responsibility for my failures, and I don't like to play that way. I like to think that my contribution in a game matters, and two to four other people are counting on me to play my best. Even though that responsibility is hard to carry sometimes, it's better to shoulder it than to mindlessly mash my face on the keyboard and expect a win. The problem is that sometimes it wears on me. I will frequently play only one game in a day if that one game ends up causing me a lot of frustration. It isn't about winning or losing; it's about dealing with the emotional frustration that comes from a game outside my control.
US Navy taps iPad to help with PTSD
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) in conjunction with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is sponsoring development of an iPad app designed to teach US sailors and marines to understand their responses to stress and manage me them using biofeedback techniques. The system will be tested at the Naval Center for Combat and Operational Stress Control in San Diego next month. Using only an iPad and a heart rate monitor clipped to an earlobe, the person using the setup will play some games specially designed to help personnel learn to reduce stress. It's hoped that the training will reduce the incidence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and help service members cope with the challenges of deployment. An article in Medical Xpress says the program is based on applying past research teaching warfighters stress management techniques. Figures provided by the miliatary say about 21 percent of miltary personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD, which in turn leads to costs of more than a billion dollars in lost productivity and treatment expenses.
CES: HeartMath's Inner Balance helps you find your center
HeartMath is a company that's been dealing with emotional health and stress relief for several years. While I don't go in for measuring one's emotional state with a gadget, I have to say that visiting HeartMath's booth here at CES 2013 was very disarming. They sat me down, and plugged a clip on my ear that was connected to an iPhone. This is HeartMath's new Inner Balance device, an iPhone-enabled heart rate variability detector that works in conjunction with HeartMath's app to try and reach some sort of emotional center. There is some science here. The ear clip does monitor heart rate information (although accuracy can't really be expected from a measurement like that). When you begin a "session," you're asked to choose your current mood from a wheel of smiley faces. The app then goes into a "breathing" mode and displays a graphic meant to help you breathe easier and relax. As time goes on, the app tracks a few status figures from your body, and fills in a circle with red, blue or green segments, depending on how much more relaxed your body is getting. My circle started red, and then went blue and green pretty quickly, as I focused on my breathing the iPhone's display. I must admit, despite what seemed a lot like pseudoscience to me (though HeartMath's rep shrugged off any suggestions that this was anything but legit), the breathing did seem to help calm me, even on the noisy floor of CES. Once I was calm, the display stayed green, showing that I was making progress. At the end of the session, I was asked to choose from another wheel of smilies, and I choose a face slightly more smiley, indicating that the device had worked. You can log a journal entry for each session, describing how you felt and how it worked. You can also track your progress over time, seeing if the device makes you feel calmer from point to point and session to session. Obviously, there are no guarantees here. Like so many other stress relief products, Inner Balance's effectiveness depends, more or less, on your belief in it. Personally, I get just as much stress relief out of a great iPhone game as I would an app like this, I think. But for the right person, Inner Balance could indeed help you to achieve the state it's named after. The device should be available in February, according to HeartMath, for a price of US$99.
The Soapbox: Using MMOs to relax and unwind
Every now and then, everyone needs to take a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life to relax and unwind. The outside world can be loud, and the stresses of work and home life can add up quickly, so it helps to be able to switch off for a while. Some of us find relaxation in sitting down in front of the TV, others in zoning out to their favourite music, and an increasing number of people now wind down with computer games. I've personally found MMOs to be incredibly effective refuges from stress and anxiety, but until now I've never really thought about why that might be. Any game can provide a few hours of escape from the daily grind, but there's something special about MMOs that seems to make them more comforting places to be. Certainly MMOs are manufactured to give a sense of solid progress as you play, a fairness that the unpredictability of real life often can't deliver, but there has to be more to it. Do the music and ambient sounds in EverQuest II's virtual forests and glens produce the same reaction as walking through a real life wood? Likewise, does EVE Online trick us into slowing down, and is spending time in a virtual world just more appealing than slogging along in the real one? In this opinion piece, I look at some of the most relaxing areas and activities I've found in MMOs and try to figure out what makes them tick.
Zensorium launches Tinké cardiorespiratory health and stress monitor for iOS devices (video)
Planning a gluttonous holiday season and then a health kick in the New Year to balance it out? Well, when you start on the latter, you might want one of Zensorium's Tinké cardiorespiratory monitors to track your progress. The sensor is compatible with any of your old-fashioned 30-pin iOS devices (it'll work with the Lightning adapter, too), and with the press of a thumb, it can measure heart rate, blood oxygenation and respiratory rate using light. All this data is fed into the free companion app, which generates an overall fitness score called the "Vita Index" and logs it for later comparison. Stress levels can also be assessed, using fluctuations in your heart rate to score the "Zen Index." Sharing how unfit and stressed you are can be done via Facebook or Tinké's own network, which also allows you to compare results with other users worldwide. The monitor will set you back $119 and is available now from Zensorium (link below) in a choice of four colors. If you'd like to start improving your Zen Index right now, then check out the soothing acoustic sounds in the product walkthrough video below the fold.
Beaten, twisted, sprayed and sat on: how Samsung stress tests its phones (video)
Just treated yourself to a new Samsung Galaxy S III or a Note II but wondering how the plastic body will stand up to the rigors of daily life? The manufacturer's showing off a smorgasbord of tests its smartphones go through in the labs while being prepped for prime time. These experiments are engineered to see how sample and prototype devices fare when subjected to use and abuse -- including having their buttons mashed thousands of times, being twisted, splashed with water, and tossed in a churning pot of killer corn to gauge scratch resistance. One test even plonks a fake, denim-clad posterior onto unsuspecting phones, attempting to bend them out of shape. Sammy's hardly going to smash things in its own marketing, but you may still glean some sadistic pleasure from the video after the break -- and understanding Korean is optional.
Guild Wars 2 stress test today
It's a day that ends with a Y, which means it must be time for another Guild Wars 2 stress test. OK, we're half kidding; it only seems like there have been 65,000 stress tests over the past few weeks. In any event, the latest round kicks off today at 4:00 p.m. EDT. It lasts for only an hour, though, so if you absolutely, positively cannot wait until launch (or early release) to log into Tyria, enjoy.
Raid Rx: How to stop worrying about healing
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. Annnd the BlizzCon hangover continues. I think we should have two BlizzCons a year. Perhaps one out in the east (or maybe a separate one in Europe)? I think it'd be neat! But alas, I'm digressing. This week in how to maintain your healing sanity, I wanted to discuss a problem that most healers have experienced at some point in their healing careers. Ever go to bed sweating stressing about your healing? Felt particularly bad about your performance because you just kept dropping the ball? Have that sinking feeling in your stomach after a particularly bad night? If this happens to you consistently, then you just might be suffering from worry!
Compact Stress Meter provides checkups from the comfort of your cubicle (video)
Chances are you don't need a machine to know that the office stresses you out, but if you've ever felt an urge to actually quantify the toll your boss takes on your body, the Compact Stress Meter could be your new best buddy. Developed by researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University, this system uses a pulse wave sensor and infrared reflective probe to measure the blood flowing through a user's fingertips, which serves as a relatively accurate stress index. All you have to do is place your finger on the sensor for ten seconds, and an accompanying computer program will automatically display your stress levels in real-time by analyzing variations in blood flow. At this point, the software and sensor are still separate, though the meter's developers have already completed a new prototype with the sensor built in to a mouse, allowing users to continuously gauge their stress while diligently working in front of their computers, or while furiously searching for a new job. Click past the break to see the meter in action for yourself.
NC State builds self-healing structural stress sensor, moves on to other alliterative projects
"Sensor, heal thyself," goes an old saying, and North Carolina State University researchers have given it a new spin. Structural stress monitors can break during, say, an earthquake or explosion: just when you most need information about a building's integrity. So the NCSU crew added a reservoir of ultraviolet-curable resin; if their sensor cracks, the resin flows into the gap, where a UV light hardens it. An infrared light, which does the actual monitoring, then has a complete circuit through which to pass, and voila: stress data flows once more, aiding decision-makers. Obviously we never tire of UV-reactive gadgetry, especially for making safer buildings, and we're doubly glad to see self-healing that doesn't involve the phrase "he's just not that into you." To see the self-repair in action, check the picture after the break, and hit the source link for more info.
Gadgets convicted of making us miserable, dodgy stats used as evidence
Gadgets need to be rounded up and thrown in a cell right alongside meat glue, child pageants and other notorious public enemies. The crime? Stressing people out, according to researchers at Ipsos Mendelsohn. The evidence? A survey of affluent Americans with a household income over $100,000 who moaned that their lives are more "complicated" than they were a decade ago. Damningly, the vast majority of these respondents also admitted that their lives are more "technology-infused" than a decade ago. The researchers also highlighted evidence from a separate poll of affluents, showing the growing prevalence of certain gadgets that add to the "complex calculus" of our lives: E-reader ownership has doubled over the last eight months, smartphone ownership is up to 52 per cent, and a third of affluents either own a tablet or expect to buy one soon. Sufficient proof, it seems, to send these poor devices down for life -- especially if we disregard all the other things that have stressed out rich Americans over the past decade (recessions, deficits, bad TV serials) and the possibility that busier people might actually need more technology to help them cope.
Officers' Quarters: Burnout already?
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. In the emails that I've been receiving lately, I've noticed a disturbing trend: Many guild leaders are finding themselves burned out right now. On the surface, it doesn't make much sense. After all, the expansion is only a few months old. Many guilds are still progressing through tier 11, earning new perks every week, and looking forward to all the great new content that future patches will bring. How can so many guild leaders already be burned out? A few factors are feeding this trend. The first is the insanely long gap between the release of Icecrown Citadel in patch 3.3 and Cataclysm. The Ruby Sanctum was hardly any help to keep raiders interested during this time. Most of the guild leaders who survived that period did so by constant recruiting, merging with other guilds, or working diligently to keep players interested in raiding; all of these are high-stress situations. Then Cataclysm released, and rather than breathing a sigh of relief, these guild leaders now had a whole new ball game to contend with. They have had to ensure their raiders or PvPers were prepared for endgame content in which the gear curve was suddenly much steeper than it had been since the early days of The Burning Crusade. Raiding guilds have had to make tough choices about the size of the raids they would coordinate and how they would deal with gear in the new loot paradigm. Once those guilds made it into raid zones, they found themselves up against bosses much tougher than those in Wrath's first tier and completely unfamiliar to most players -- unlike those in the endless Icecrown runs we knew by heart.
Free for All: The healing ability of instant access
Recently I received a diagnosis from my doctor that did not make me happy. While it was far from a death sentence, it was still pretty heavy news. Immediately I went into information-gathering mode, scouring the internet for other people's stories and possible outcomes. If any of you have gone through this sort of thing before, you know how this type of research can actually have the opposite effect on you, only making you feel worse. So, I decided to stop it. I had my medicine, I knew what I had to do, and I decided to concentrate on ending the speculative thinking. Worse case scenarios are just that, and life is filled with them. Worrying about what might happen in 40, 20 or even five years is sort of a waste of time. Yes, you must be prepared and need to make plans to cover any possibilities, but thinking about all those possibilities can cause stresses of their own, making the situation worse. I had enough of it pretty quickly. I'm not a down person most of the time. I wanted to forget about it for a while, so I sat down and loaded up a game that I had been missing lately. Click past the cut and see what I discovered.
Officers' Quarters: Be kind to your tanks and healers
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. If you've queued as a DPS for the dungeon finder lately, you've probably marveled at the estimated time and wondered what happened to all the tanks and healers. Maybe fewer players want to tank when crowd control is necessary; maybe fewer players want to heal when mana must be managed. Maybe it's the fact that gear is more critical at this point in an expansion, so people are shy about signing up for those roles. Or maybe all the tanks and healers are skipping the unpredictable dungeon finder crowd altogether and looking for guilds to join. Whatever the cause, dungeon finder queues for DPS are absolutely brutal at the moment. If you don't want to wait 30-plus minutes for every run, you're going to need tanks and healers in your guild who are willing to run heroics. You may wonder, why wouldn't they be willing to run heroics? After all, the content is fresh, the upgrades are flowing, and most people still need justice and/or valor points. The question isn't so much whether they want to run heroics; the question is whether they want to run heroics with you, right now. This week, I'm going to focus on what players and officers can do to avoid stressing out your tanks and healers and help them to enjoy the game along with everyone else.
Biofeedback anti-stress pen: a great idea that's not so great at reducing stress
We've all known for quite some time that the pen is mightier than the sword, and now science has given us a pen that is mightier (sort of) than the stress of that TPS report your boss needs right now. A student at Delft University in The Netherlands will receive his PhD this week for research that led him to create just such a pen. Based upon the obvious premise that people play with their writing utensils when anxious, the pen uses motion sensors instead of more conventional means of stress detection. When the pen detects stressful movements, internal electromagnets provide corresponding counter-motion feedback to stop your nervous tics. During experiments, the pen did diminish test subjects' heart rates around five percent, but according to feedback none of them actually "felt" less stressed. The pen isn't yet commercially available, and given its dubious value as an actual stress reliever, we would look to more satisfying methods to aid the relaxation process.
Breakfast Topic: Healers, are you anxious about Cataclysm content?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. I'm a healer. Just a healer. My guildmates have two characters, three, four or more. I've got an addon that does nothing but tell me who someone is when they sign in so I don't have to tax myself connecting one druid to another paladin. Me, I've just got a priest with a full set of healing gear and a solid set of DPS gear, if the need arises. Like many other healers out there, I've gone through heroics and raids; even ICC doesn't pose all that much of a challenge anymore. When you know what's coming and when, it's just a matter of hitting your marks. Now the whole world is changing for all of us. The banal, practiced and frankly monotonous task of keeping guildmates and PUGs alive is going to go the way of the dodo, for at least a good long while. Challenge will be in the air again, and maintaining resources will be an issue for the first time in memory since my guild first cleared Iron Council. For some of us, and I imagine this includes myself, this is going to be quite a shock. Unless we're in heroic or hard mode raiding content, we've been able to put tape over our mana bars. Now the tape's coming off, and I'm about to be pressured into a triage mentality I don't remember ever having to maintain. Either someone was topped off or dead. Only two possibilities, only two states. I'm very much looking forward to the pressure to maintain an even shade of gray, to keep everyone between those two absolutes. I'd love to know how the rest of the healers are feeling about the cataclysmic shift in technique that is about to be gifted to us. %Poll-56811%
Affectiva's Q Sensor wristband monitors and logs stress levels, might bring back the snap bracelet
Credit to Affectiva -- for a medical bracelet, the Q Sensor looks delightful. The item you're peering at here has been developed by the aforesaid Massachusetts-based startup in order to give a voice to those who may not have one, and in theory, it can provide vital information to caregivers long before a breakdown takes place. Particularly with autistic children, who often cannot communicate their stress levels effectively, the Q Sensor is able to "detect and record physiological signs of stress and excitement by measuring slight electrical changes in the skin." From there, it can send signals to doctors, parents or caregivers, and those folks can react accordingly to information that they would otherwise not be privy to. Put simply, the band works by detecting subtle moisture changes under the skin when the "flight or fight" mode is initiated, and while even the creators admit that such a response isn't absolutely indicative of stress, it's generally a signal worth paying attention to for one reason or another. Purportedly, a beta version is set to go on sale to researchers and educators later this month for $2,000, and there's a video just after the break if you're still struggling to grok the purpose.
