Sleep tracker apps are, well, apps that track your sleep pattern. By using the microphone on your smartphone, the sleep tracker app can record when you’re tossing and turning, or when you’re snoring or talking in your sleep, or when you get up to get a glass of water. The app then uses its data gathered to wake you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle. Aside from that: it also records your farts.
When Brett Hereford was out fishing on a lake in Montana along with his family earlier this month, he wasn’t expecting to make a catch of a lifetime. The catch, however, wasn’t a fish at all — it was a bobcat.
Rather than leave the animal to try and make it back to dry land on his own, the Herefords stepped in — Brett scooping up the exhausted bobcat in a fishing net.
Banksy has now launched his own online store, a few weeks after setting up a showroom for “display purposes only” in South London. The shop is titled “Gross Domestic Product”, or “GDP”, and it features limited edition products like a jacket worn by Stormzy at Glastonbury Festival, branded t-shirts tagged by the artist, a clutch bag, and many more. There’s a catch to his store, however.
...the shop is not first come, first served. As many of the items for sale are limited edition pieces, a system has been set up to allow anyone to register their interest before october 28, 2019. Potential buyers are allowed to pick one item only, and are prompted to answer the following tie-breaker question: ‘ ̶w̶h̶y̶ ̶ does art matter?’ An independent judge will examine the answers and select the ‘most apt and original’ applications.
Check out this installation made by DAKU, an anonymous artist from India. The installation, which is a quote from William Shakespeare, is activated by the sun; as the latter casts light on the installation, shadows are cast, and the quote appears.
The somewhat decontextualized phrase could reflect on time in general, or perhaps life itself. As the sun shifts throughout the day and casts its shifting shadows, the message appears and disappears, with the physical white letters blending into the building.
This is only one of the many time and light-activated installations of DAKU, which he refers to, collectively, as “Time Changes Everything.”
There’s something mysteriously captivating to Tokyo’s storefronts that have inspired many artists and designers. In fact, even artists not from Japan are inspired by these stores. Such is the case of Stockholm-based designer Christopher Robin (yes, he was named after one of Winnie the Pooh’s best friends).
...that inspiration came when he had the opportunity to visit Tokyo for the first time last year. Upon returning, he began a side-project called TokyoBuild.
Christopher Robin begins each project by going on Google Street View and clicking down the side streets of Tokyo until he finds a storefront that he likes. However, the replication stops here. Working largely from his imagination, Robin draws up plans for the storefront, but at a miniature scale of 1:20. Working with a combination of materials and techniques, the designer meticulously fabricates and assembles his creations with the utmost attention to detail. From rusting corrugated steel facades to manhole covers out front, nothing gets overlooked.
The eRosary, which is connected to a smartphone app, can be activated by making the sign of the cross, Engadget reported. Made up of 10 black agate and hematite rosary beads and a “smart cross” that stores data, the wearable device can be worn as a bracelet and enables individuals to pray on the go.
Once you activate the device by making the sign of the cross, you can then choose which of the three different rosaries you will pray. There is the standard rosary, the contemplative rosary, and the thematic rosary.
The eRosary, which retails for $110, is available for pre-order at Amazon and Acer’s online store.
Contrary to popular belief, cartilage can restore itself in a process much like what salamanders and zebrafish to regenerate limbs.
The researchers at Duke Health, in their study, which was published online on October 9 in the journal Science Advances, identified a mechanism for repairing cartilage, which seems to be “more robust in ankle joints and less so in hips.” This finding could be helpful in treating osteoarthritis, the most common joint disorder in the world.
"We believe that an understanding of this 'salamander-like' regenerative capacity in humans, and the critically missing components of this regulatory circuit, could provide the foundation for new approaches to repair joint tissues and possibly whole human limbs," said senior author Virginia Byers Kraus, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the departments of Medicine, Pathology and Orthopedic Surgery at Duke.
How are binary stars made? To investigate, ESO's Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), captured one of the highest resolution images yet taken. The image is of a binary star system in formation.
Most stars are not alone -- they typically form as part of a multiple star systems where star each orbits a common center of gravity. The two bright spots in the featured image are small disks that surround the forming proto-stars in [BHB2007] 11, while the surrounding pretzel-shaped filaments are gas and dust that have been gravitationally pulled from a larger disk. The circumstellar filaments span roughly the radius of the orbit of Neptune. The BHB2007 system is a small part of the Pipe Nebula (also known as Barnard 59), a photogenic network of dust and gas that protrudes from Milky Way's spiral disk in the constellation of Ophiuchus.
In our daily life, we are exposed to various stimuli. For example, when we walk to a town, we see lots of things: colorful clothes, shop windows, and expressive faces. As we get bombarded by the different information that we receive, we can only process so much. Thus, we filter this information into what we consider as relevant, which will then be reacted upon. Of all this information, our attention inevitably shifts from one thing to another.
“This shift in attention is often accompanied by a movement of the eyes,” says Kulke, a researcher in the Department of Affective Neuroscience and Psychophysiology at the University of Göttingen. In the current study, she combined two methods to investigate what happens in the brain during this attention shift: eye-tracking and EEG. With the Eye-Tracker, research volunteers sat in front of a device that records eye movements. Kulke then showed them standardised faces with different emotional expressions. At the same time, EEG measured brain waves via electrodes placed on their head.
What did she find out in this study, and what questions can be asked based on these findings? The answer is at Neuroscience News.
Solar panels only work when the sun’s out, while wind turbines only work when there’s wind. Without a means to store the energy generated from these devices, they can’t work to produce energy forever. Energy storage is an increasingly large problem with renewable energy, and this is why the said topic is so crucial to talk about.
Check out this company’s idea of storing energy by using stacked concrete blocks.
The Earth is changing rapidly, faster than anyone could comprehend. As the days pass by, more forests are burned, and more glaciers melt. As a result, the evidence of the world’s ancient cultures disappear quickly.
Change of some kind is, of course, inevitable — but it is happening more quickly and more severely because of the effects of human-caused climate change. And that has some scientists worried: The quicker Earth changes,the less time there is to learn from its past and understand its mysteries.
In hopes to preserve a record of our planet in its present state, two researchers proposed that lasers be used to create a high-resolution, 3D map of the entire world. In other words, we would need a lot of lasers.
Pigs are one of the most intelligent animals on the planet, along with the elephants, crows, and dolphins. The pigs, however, are not recorded to have used tools like the latter animals mentioned, until now.
A team of scientists has recently released the first known video of pigs using tools.
The ecologist behind the video, Meredith Root-Bernstein, told National Geographic she was watching a family of Visayan warty pigs at a zoo in Paris when she noticed one the animals picking up a piece of bark in its mouth and using the wood to dig around in the soil.
“I said, ‘Whoa, that’s pretty cool,'” she recalled to National Geographic. “When I looked up tool use in pigs, there was nothing.”
Back in 2017, a biophysicist tried to edit his genome live onstage at a conference. Using the gene-editing tool CRISPR to modify his DNA, the man pulled out a syringe and injected it into his arm. The whole event was livestreamed on Facebook, and the man made headlines that year. The man was Josiah Zayner.
This wasn’t the first time that Zayner did something really crazy. A year before that, in 2016, in a California hotel with Reset host Arielle Duhaime-Ross, Zayner performed a “full-body microbiome transplant”, with goals to fix gut issues and take control of his own medical care, as he found traditional methods very frustrating.
“He set about killing the collection of microbes that live on and inside his body, and replacing them with microbes he’d collected from a friend. The first step was getting that friend to give up his microbes — via skin swabs and poop,” Duhaime-Ross explains on the first episode of Reset.
To launch Reset, a new podcast from Recode and Vox in association with Stitcher about how tech is changing our lives, Duhaime-Ross revisited her 2016 story and interviewed Zayner once again. This time, as she explains below, they discussed what it means to be a biohacker in 2019 and where it might lead in the future.
In the past decade, psychologists, in their desire to include people from all over the world, have expanded their narrow focus away from just North America, Europe, and Australia. This has given them a greater insight on global distribution of cultural features such as the society-level differences in psychological phenomena like individualism and happiness. This greater knowledge can help us better understand the various roots of cultural similarities and differences.
Powerful cases in point are studies demonstrating that countries differ substantially in terms of mean happiness and the additional finding that this pattern is anything but random. In both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, happiness is higher in countries farther away from the equator (such as Denmark or New Zealand) than those closer to it (such as Vietnam or Cambodia).
Even more intriguing, we have uncovered the same pattern for individualism and creativity. Like happiness, these cultural features trend higher as one moves away from the equator. When we looked at aggressiveness, we found the opposite pattern: the closer you live to the equator, the more likely you are to exhibit aggressive behavior. To explain these robust links between latitude and culture—from happiness to aggressiveness and beyond—science needs a new field. Latitudinal psychology seeks to explain why societies differ so much and why location on the north-south axis of the earth is so critical.
What is latitude psychology? And why are the people near the equator more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior? Find out the answers over at the Scientific American.
In reality, Brady didn't have any legitimate claim to the material, YouTube charged in an August lawsuit. YouTube said that Brady targeted at least three well-known Minecraft streamers with a series of takedown requests.
Under YouTube's rules, a series of three takedown requests in a short period of time can lead to the loss of a YouTube account—a serious penalty for someone who has built up a large following on the platform. According to YouTube, Brady would submit two bogus takedown requests against a target's videos. Then he would send the victim a message demanding payments—$150 in one case, $300 in another—to prevent the submission of a third request. For some reason, Brady allegedly offered victims a discount if they paid with bitcoin.
[...]
"This settlement highlights the very real consequences for those that misuse our copyright system," a YouTube spokesman told Ars. "We'll continue our work to prevent abuse of our systems."
Perhaps this is one of the great disadvantages of being a content creator on YouTube: anyone can abuse their copyright system.
