Bracelet Displays Text Messages on Your Wrist

So, here’s the scenario: you’re in a meeting and your phone vibrates in your pocket as it receives a text message. You’re really curious as to what the message is, but you know that it just “isn’t done” to pull your phone out in front of everyone to check, Gizmag wrote.
If you were wearing a LinkMe bracelet, however, you could just glance at your wrist, where the message would be crawling across an LED screen in big red or blue letters.
The LinkMe links with the user’s smartphone by Bluetooth, and only displays SMS, Facebook or Twitter messages from parties selected by the user. Even though that’s a bit of a safeguard, some rather embarrassing situations could still arise--imagine being in that same meeting, with your co-workers observing the words “You home rent has been delayed again!” glowing from your wrist.
Perhaps the risk of that happening would just make the LinkMe more exciting to wear.
When it isn’t showing text messages, the bracelet defaults to displaying the time of day. Its screen is made up of 125 LEDs, although buyers can upgrade to 203.
One charge of its lithium-ion battery is said to be good for two weeks, although that depends on how much action it sees. LinkMe is still in the prototype phase, with its designers currently raising production funds on Kickstarter.

Bike Helmet With Built-In Indicator Lights

For cyclists concerned about their safety, a new helmet could help them be more visible--thanks to built-in indicator lights.
The Dora headgear is controlled by a Bluetooth switch on the handlebars that allows the cyclist to signal before they turn, Daily Mail said.
The helmet has built in LED lights in the back and side panels of the helmet that light up in yellow for indicators and red for brake lights.
The helmet has been created by Hungarian designer Balazs Filczer who is now seeking funding for mass-production. He also answered critics who said the helmet would be too heavy.
“For recreational cyclists, weight is often a secondary concern,” he said.
“Racers and frequent riders, on the other hand, really appreciate the weight savings.”
Fliczer stressed that Dora was not designed for racers, but it was designed for everyday users, who prefer safety. The helmet’s lights are operated by rechargeable batteries and activated via Bluetooth. Last week, it emerged that Volvo had developed computer sensors to be built into some models, which can identify cyclists and make the car stop in emergencies. It comes as cycling in the UK undergoes an unprecedented growth forcing politicians like London Mayor Boris Johnson to develop a £913 million plan to revolutionize roads for bikes in the capital.

Iranian Helps Create Self-Healing Circuits

Imagine that the chips in your smartphone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure.
It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips, ScienceDaily reported.
The team, made up of members of the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science, has demonstrated this self-healing capability in tiny power amplifiers.

Very Small Amplifiers
The amplifiers are so small that 76 of the chips--including everything they need to self-heal--could fit on a single penny.
In perhaps the most dramatic of their experiments, the team destroyed various parts of their chips by zapping them multiple times with a high-power laser and then observed as the chips automatically developed a workaround in less than a second.
“It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself. It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits,” says Ali Hajimiri, the Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech.
“We had literally just blasted half the amplifier and vaporized many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able to recover to nearly its ideal performance.”
The team’s results appear in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.
Until now, even a single fault has often rendered an integrated-circuit chip completely useless.
The Caltech engineers wanted to give integrated-circuit chips a healing ability akin to that of our own immune system--something capable of detecting and quickly responding to any number of possible assaults in order to keep the larger system working optimally.
The power amplifier they devised employs a multitude of robust, on-chip sensors that monitor temperature, current, voltage, and power. The information from those sensors feeds into a custom-made application-specific integrated-circuit unit on the same chip, a central processor that acts as the ‘brain’ of the system.
The brain analyzes the amplifier’s overall performance and determines if it needs to adjust any of the system’s actuators--the changeable parts of the chip.
Interestingly, the chip’s brain does not operate based on algorithms that know how to respond to every possible scenario. Instead, it draws conclusions based on the aggregate response of the sensors.
“You tell the chip the results you want and let it figure out how to produce those results,” says Steven Bowers, a graduate student in Hajimiri’s lab and lead author of the new paper.
“The challenge is that there are more than 100,000 transistors on each chip. We don’t know all of the different things that might go wrong and we don’t need to. We have designed the system in a general enough way that it finds the optimum state for all of the actuators in any situation without external intervention.”

Low Power Use
Looking at 20 different chips, the team found that the amplifiers with the self-healing capability consumed about half as much power as those without, and their overall performance was much more predictable and reproducible.
“We have shown that self-healing addresses four very different classes of problems,” says Kaushik Dasgupta, another graduate student also working on the project.
The classes of problems include static variation that is a product of variation across components; long-term aging problems that arise gradually as repeated use changes the internal properties of the system; and short-term variations that are induced by environmental conditions such as changes in load, temperature, and differences in the supply voltage; and, finally, accidental or deliberate catastrophic destruction of parts of the circuits.
The Caltech team chose to demonstrate this self-healing capability first in a power amplifier for millimeter-wave frequencies. Such high-frequency integrated chips are at the cutting edge of research and are useful for next-generation communications, imaging, sensing, and radar applications.
By showing that the self-healing capability works well in such an advanced system, the researchers hope to show that the self-healing approach can be extended to virtually any other electronic system.
“Bringing this type of electronic immune system to integrated-circuit chips opens up a world of possibilities,” says Hajimiri. “It is truly a shift in the way we view circuits and their ability to operate independently. They can now both diagnose and fix their own problems without any human intervention, moving one step closer to indestructible circuits.”

How Daffodil Got Its Trumpet

The daffodil is one of the few plants with a ‘corona’, a crown-like structure also referred to as the ‘trumpet’.
According to Physorg, new research suggests that the corona is not an extension of the petals as previously thought, but is a distinct organ sharing more genetic identity with stamens, the pollen-producing reproductive organs.
The origin of the corona has long been a subject of debate in botany, and in the 1930s botanist Agnes Arber claimed that it was an extension from the petals. With its colorful petal-like appearance, it’s easy to see why this was believed for so long.
Yet by studying the corona’s development and genetic information, this new study has shown that it is in fact related to stamens.
Dr. Robert Scotland of the University of Oxford led the research, and was supported by colleagues at Harvard University, the United States Department of Agriculture and the University of Western Australia.
The researchers were funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and the United States National Science Foundation. The study is published online in The Plant Journal.
By studying the development of daffodil flowers, the researchers found that the corona only begins to form after the other parts of the flower are fully established.
“This shows that the corona could not be a straightforward modification of either petals or stamens,” explains Dr. Scotland. “Since it develops independently of both, it is more accurately described as a separate organ.”
The researchers analyzed genetic activity in all parts of the daffodil flower, and found that daffodil coronas were genetically similar to the stamens and hypanthium, but not the petals.

Internet for Robots Created

European computer scientists say they have created an “Internet for robots,” a cloud-computing system to aid in robotics tasks and robot learning.
According to UPI, researchers at five European universities said the system will allow robots connected to the Internet to directly access the powerful computational, storage and communications infrastructure of modern data centers like the giant server farms that power companies like Google and Amazon.
The RoboEarth Cloud Engine will allow robots to share knowledge with other robots via a Web-style database, greatly speeding up robot learning and adaptation in complex tasks, a release from the ETH Zurich technical research center said.
The cloud will enable robots to perform complex functions like mapping, navigation or processing of human voice commands in a fraction of the time required by robots’ on-board computers, researchers said.
“The RoboEarth Cloud Engine is particularly useful for mobile robots, such as drones or autonomous cars, which require lots of computation for navigation,” ETH Zurich researcher Mohanarajah Gajamohan said.
The new computing platform could help in developing lighter, cheaper, more intelligent robots, the researchers said.
“On-board computation reduces mobility and increases cost,” said Heico Sandee, RoboEarth’s Program Manager at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.
“With the rapid increase in wireless data rates caused by the booming demand of mobile communications devices, more and more of a robot’s computational tasks can be moved into the cloud.”

Cell Journal, IJFS In Winter 2013

Cell Journal (Yakhteh), owned by Royan Institute, is an international open access, peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes research papers on molecular biology, cell biology, stem cells, developmental biology, genetics and genomics, proteomics, cancer research, immunology, neuroscience, structural biology, microbiology, virology, physiology and biophysics.
The journal’s latest issue volume 14, Number 4 has been published, RoyanInstitute said.
International Journal of Fertility and Sterility (IJFS) is a quarterly international journal that publishes research papers across a broad range of disciplines related to fertility and sterility.
Areas covered include gynecology and female infertility, andrology, reproductive genetics, embryology, epidemiology, reproductive ethics, endocrinology and metabolism, pathology, psychology and psychiatric, radiology, imaging and immunology.
International Journal of Fertility and Sterility is an open access, peer-reviewed scientific journal whose last issue is Volume 6, Number 4 published for Jan.-March 2013.

Headphones Play Music Based on Your Mood

From the makers of the Necomimi cat ears and Tailly robotic tail comes ‘Mico,’ a new kind of headphones that are controlled using your brainwaves.
Unveiled at South By Southwest (SXSW), Neurowear’s Mico connects to an iPhone through Bluetooth and selects songs that have been ‘neuro-tagged’ using a special music app, Engadget wrote.
The Mico headphones are like a giant iPod shuffle--the app only has 100 tracks to pick from--except it chooses songs based on your mood.
Feeling sad? The Mico will play some blues. Feeling super hyper? Maybe the Mico will play some dance.
You can change the chosen song by shaking your iPhone, but that kind of defeats the purpose of letting your brain tell you what kind of music you should be listening to.
According to Neurowear:
“’Mico’ frees the user from having to select songs and artists and allows users to encounter new music just by wearing the device. The device detects brainwaves through the sensor on your forehead. Our app then automatically plays music that fits your mood.”
Engadget used the prototype headphones on and walked away feeling like the Mico was “kind of a crapshoot” as it believes their mood was always ‘focused’.
As with the company’s other products, it’s difficult to say if Mico has any real purpose aside from being a fun gimmick.
From our experiences with brain-controlled gadgets, they’re almost always wrong in predicting what we want or feel.
We’re not saying the Mico isn’t a fun little toy, we’re just saying the technology will have to get a lot more sophisticated before it truly understands how we’re feeling.

Baseball-Sized Snail Destroyed In Australia

A baseball-sized snail with an insatiable appetite for hundreds of plants, including cocoa and papaya, has been seized and destroyed by Australian officials, who said it posed a huge threat to local agriculture.
The animal was found creeping across a Brisbane shipping container yard and identified as a giant African snail, an East African pest capable of growing up to 30 cm (12 inches) long and one kg (2.2 lb) in weight, Reuters reported.
It is known to eat 500 different species of crops, fruits, native Australian plants and even other giant African snails, according to an Australian government website.
“Giant African snails are one of the world’s largest and most damaging land snails,” said Paul Nixon, acting regional manager at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, in a statement.
The snail can lay 1,200 eggs a year, tolerates extreme temperatures and has few natural enemies in Australia. It also carries parasites that can infect humans with the disease meningitis, which can in some cases be fatal.
The last major Australian outbreak of the snail was in 1977, when 300 giant snails were exterminated in Queensland in an intensive eight-month campaign of community education, baiting and snail collection.
The snail was destroyed and officials inspected the container yard and found no evidence of additional snails, eggs or snail trails. They will continue surveillance into next week.
“Australia’s strict biosecurity requirements and responsive system has so far kept these pests out of Australia, and we want to keep it that way,” Nixon said.

Higher Death Risk

Obese children hospitalized for certain serious illnesses may have a higher risk of dying than thinner patients, a new research review suggests.