Tech Point

For elderly gamers, this could be the biggest hit since Wii Sports : a new video game helped older people with hearing loss get better at tracking speech in noisy environments, new research says. The game had players complete a puzzle by listening for clues as background noise steadily got louder. After two months of playing, elderly adults with hearing loss could hear 25 percent more words spoken under noisy conditions than they could before, according to the study published in the journal Current Biology . It won’t replace hearing aids, but it could boost their effectiveness. “That was a holy shit moment.” There’s a growing interest in using video games as digital medicine to treat disorders like ADHD or lazy eye , but the idea is somewhat controversial . Playing a game might make you better at winning it, but there’s less evidence that it could boost your performance in real-world situations. Still, researchers led by Daniel Polley at Massachusetts Eye and E

This week, a bipartisan group of US senators took the first steps toward regulating online political advertising in a manner similar to the way the government already regulates these ads in traditional media. Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Mark Warner (VA), joined by Republican Sen. John McCain (AZ), say their Honest Ads Act will protect against foreign interference in elections by requiring platforms like Facebook to make details about ads’ buyers, pricing, and targeting publicly available. Advocates cheered the move, which they said represented a long-overdue step to apply the same standards of transparency and fairness to online ads that have long been the norm for print, radio, and television. At the same time, the bill’s passage is far from certain: so far, it has just one Republican supporter in Congress, and the tech companies that would be affected have deployed a phalanx of lobbyists. “It goes a long way,” said Alex Howard, deputy director of th