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 ...