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...

Even today's best rechargeable lithium batteries do lose their ability to hold a charge after a while, and are considered toxic waste once discarded. In just a few years, however, they may be replaced by batteries that are refillable and biodegradable, and that will also have a higher energy density yet a lower price ... and they'll run on sugar. "Sugar is a perfect energy storage compound in nature," says Virginia Tech's Prof. Y.H. Percival Zhang, who is leading the research. "So it's only logical that we try to harness this natural power in an environmentally friendly way to produce a battery." Zhang's isn't the first experimental  sugar battery , although he claims that its energy density is "an order of magnitude higher than others." It's actually a type of enzymatic fuel cell. For fuel, it utilizes maltodextrin, which is a polysaccharide made from the hydrolysis of starch (polysaccharides are chains of sugars). ...

Whenever the topic of  plant-derived biofuels  is raised, the issue of turning valuable arable land over to the task of growing feedstock is generally not far behind. A discovery by the Sustainable Bioenergy Research Consortium (SRBC) that desert plants fed by seawater can produce biofuel more efficiently than other well-known feedstocks could help alleviate such concerns. The SRBC, which is affiliated with the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, is receiving funding from Boeing, Etihad Airways and Honeywell UOP to develop and commercialize a sustainable biofuel that emits 50 to 80 percent less carbon through its lifecycle than fossil fuels. Plants called halophytes, which are highly salt tolerant, could be the answer. SRBC researchers found that halophyte seeds contain oil suitable for biofuel production and that the entire shrub-like plant can be turned into biofuel more effectively than many other feedstocks. To test their findings, the SRBC...

Every now and then we get demonstrations of really innovative new technologies and concepts that almost no one has any chance of being able to own anytime soon. The best place to undergo this particular form of torture is at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This year at  CES , a really fantastic "smart mirror" concept from Toshiba fit the bill. There was little information available on this novel idea, which brings the tech from countless late 1990s and early 2000s era science-fiction films to life. Simply called "Multi Display in Black Mirror," the concept combines the functionality of something like a tablet alongside your reflection. The mirror was shown in two different environments: In a bathroom, where the reflective screen presents information to help you start your day such as the weather alongside data from connected devices like a personal fitness monitor; and in the kitchen, where the system can assist in finding, adjustin...

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