Daily Tech News

Future of health and fitness Everyone wants to live better, healthier lives. Angel was designed to make this possible. It's a  wristband that monitors pulse, temperature, activity and blood oxygen level. Angel can send  this vital information to apps on your smartphone, laptop and pretty soon even your treadmill. Angel is the first device designed with developers in mind.  Currently most trackers for fitness and health are built for use by a single proprietary app. We want to change that. We are opening up every protocol, API and sensor data stream. Ultimately, this means more apps to choose from. For more details  http://igg.me/at/angel/x/4171526

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) have been selected by ARPA-E, the US government's Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, to carry out a one year project aimed at developing a low cost method to obtain titanium metal from its ore. It is thought that the process could lower the cost of the metal by up to 60 percent. Titanium can be made into structural materials that are extremely strong for their weight and show excellent resistance to corrosion. It is used in a number of high-value applications in aerospace, defense, medicine, and transportation. Although titanium and its alloys could be used in many other applications, titanium metal is notoriously difficult to refine and purify from its various ores. The cost of titanium metal is currently about six US dollars per kilogram, compared to steel at under a dollar per kilogram, and aluminum alloy at under two dollars per kilogram. About half of this is the cost of magnesium metal that is used up in t

A team of scientists at the CIDETEC Centre for Electrochemical Technologies have successfully created the first self-healing polymer that can heal by itself at room temperature, without the need for external catalysts. The material could be used as an industrial adhesive or to replace similar compounds in cars, houses and electrical components to make them more fault-tolerant. Polymers stick together thanks to so-called "cross-links" – chemical bonds that glue different polymer chains to one another. Under normal circumstances, these bonds need a source of energy such as  light ,  pressure or a  change in pH  in order to form (or heal once they have been severed). The polymer created by Ibon Odriozola and colleagues sports a key difference. Their material, a soft poly(urea-urethane) network, leverages the metathesis reaction in aromatic disulphides. This chemical reaction is naturally able to create covalent bonds at room temperature, allowing the polymer to autonomou

The lighter, the better. The thinner, the more appealing. These seem to be the trends in consumer electronics, something that we observe in the latest gadgets released. From laptops to monitors to tablets to mobile phones – what catches the eye of consumers are those units that are sleek and sexy. And speaking of sleek and sexy, flexible displays are well on their way . Talk about flexible gadgets has been going around for quite some time, with Samsung leading the pack – well, initially. Samsung has taken the point position in talking about development of flexible displays, but recent rumors indicate that another brand might get there before Samsung. Apple has also been rumored to be looking at flexible displays . With the announcement that LG flexible OLED phones are coming out by the end of the year being made, Samsung and all other manufacturers need to up their pace. The announcement about LG flexible OLED phones  was made during a call which was mainly focuse

Researchers at Hong Kong's Chinese University have found what might be the safest way to store data: not in a safe, not in the cloud, but in bacteria . Biostorage, the term for storing and encrypting information in organisms, has only existed for close to a decade, but scientists say the method could soon allow for text, images, music, or even video to be "recorded" in E. Coli, according to Discovery . By encoding data in bacterial DNA, the information has a virtually limitless lifespan. As each bacteria reproduces, the data could be copied thousands of times. By mapping E. Coli's DNA, that data can be easily found and isolated. Perhaps more importantly however, bacteria isn't susceptible to intrusion. "Bacteria can't be hacked," Allen Yu, a student instructor, told Discovery . "All kinds of computers are vulnerable to electrical failures or data theft. But bacteria are immune from cyber attacks. You can safeguard the i

Tech giant Samsung is looking to ditch not only the keyboard but the touch screen in favor of mind control. The technology, which Samsung stresses is in its infancy, would allow users to control a computing device with their thoughts alone. A project at the company's Emerging Technology Lab in partnership with Roozbeh Jafari , an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, the research has already enabled test subjects to launch apps on a tablet, pick a song on a playlist or a contact from an address book and power up or power down the device. However, according to the MIT Technology Review , which first reported on the project, don't expect to see these features rolling out as part of Samsung's 2014 product line-up. In order to control the tablet with their minds alone, users needs to wear a cap full of EEG monitoring electrodes which only work when wet, meaning that a gel needs to be applied to the head. As Jafari says: "Depen

PicapiCamera, developed by Casio, is the world's first iPhone app which uses visible light communication technology. To send and receive data via the app, the message to be sent is encoded using red, green and blue flashing lights and shown on the display. The receiver points their iPhone at the flashing lights and the data is transferred. "There are two approaches to communication using visible light. One is to embed data in the light from illumination sources, by turning it on and off at high speed, as a natural way of communicating information. With that approach, devices use photodiodes. The other approach involves image sensors. A device that captures light is a camera, so the idea is to relate light obtained by a camera to information. We're using the camera approach - visible light communication through image sensors." "When exchanging addresses, this system can send addresses to up to five people, rather than just one-to-one." "If yo

Along with facial expressions, tell-tale variations in facial blood flow that causes reddening and whitening of the skin can also give an indication of people's emotions. To take advantage of this, 2AI Labs developed a special pair of glasses designed to enhance a person's color vision to better enable them to perceive the oxygenation and hemoglobin variations in another person's face, and thus their emotional state. The glasses are now finding a variety of applications, from medical to security. Evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi believes that color vision in primates evolved in order for us to detect social cues, emotions and the states of our friends or enemies. When conversing with a person, blushing indicates he/she is embarrassed and if the blood drains from the face, it indicates the person is scared or apprehensive. Changizi says the human eye is specifically tuned to see blood, and the amount of oxygen in blood, right through the skin. “We can often