Daily Tech News

Rightly or wrongly, the French are known for clothing designs that are often less than practical. Now, however, French company Cityzen Sciences has won the CES 2014 Inclusive Innovation in Everyday Health award for its development of a Smart Sensing fabric woven with integral micro-sensors – these add the practical benefit of monitoring the health and fatigue levels of the wearer. The Smart Sensing fabric reads body heat, respiration rate, heart rate, and motion through location via GPS. "The fabric can be made into any clothing; gloves, shirts, pants, you name it," said Gilbert Reveillon, Cityzen's international managing director. The new  smart fabric  combines sensors, fabric, distributed computation, and a small battery-powered transmitter into a unit that links in real time to a smartphone. The phone runs an app that stores and analyzes data from the fabric, showing if the person wearing the garment is tired, stressed, or in the path of an imminent heart atta...

Snacking on a freshly-made pizza in outer space just got a whole lot closer thanks to Anjan Contractor's 3D pizza printer. Contractor, who won NASA's US$125,000 grant last year to create a 3D printer that could print food for astronauts on missions, has come out with a functional prototype. The prototype prints the blocky pizza out in layers, as demonstrated in the video at the bottom of the page. While it's a tad messy, the end product, when cooked, looks fairly appetizing. Contractor plans to equip the 3D printer with food cartridges that last for 30 years. Such a long shelf life is pretty much a necessity, since long-distance space missions could take several years. To make the pizza ingredients last, Contractor is investigating ways to remove all the moisture from them and reduce the proteins, carbs and nutrients into a powder form. Contractor says that it only took 70 seconds to cook the pizza once it was printed out, in a comment on his Youtube page. If NASA...

In the not too distant future, we could see cyborg plants that tell us when they need more water, what chemicals they've been exposed to, and what parasites are eating their roots. These part-organic, part-electronic creations may even tell us how much pollution is in the air. And yes, they'll plug into the network.  That's right: We're on our way to the Internet of Plants. That's the message from Andrea Vitaletti, the head of a blue-sky research group working on this very thing at a lab in Italy. The project is called Pleased , short for "Plants Employed As Sensing Devices". Though the project is still in the early stages, Vitaletti believes plants could serve as ideal sensors, monitoring so many aspects of our environment. Plants are cheap and resilient, he argues, and they could potentially monitor many different things simultaneously. "Plants have millions of years of evolution. They are robust. They want to survive," Vitaletti says...