Connectivity
Billion-tweet study proves we write happier messages when the weather is good.
Everyone’s mood improves when the weather is good, right? Actually, the large-scale evidence to prove this has never been gathered—until now.
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Scientists have struggled to develop a single substance that can both speed up wound healing and reduce the formation of scars. Scar reduction medications tend to interfere with the natural process of healing, but now a team of researchers has created a novel skin patch that can reduce scarring and increase the pace of wound healing.
The team from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore discovered a key protein called Angiopoietin-like 4 (ANGPTL4) plays several roles over different phases of healing. ANGPTL4 not only reduces inflammation and induces new cell growth, but in later stages of healing it produces molecules that interfere with a key protein that induces scar tissue.
Excessive collagen production is a key factor in the scarring we are familiar with when a wound heals. The key to the new innovation was developing a way to modulate collagen production without turning it off completely, as it is fundamentally necessary for wound repair.
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Apple updated the security and privacy information on its website on Wednesday, revealing new details about how its new facial-recognition technology works.
The new details come about a month before Apple’s most advanced iPhone, the iPhone X, goes on sale. The banner feature of the iPhone X is a facial-recognition tool called Face ID that unlocks the phone, replacing the fingerprint sensor.
Since Face ID and its corresponding 3D camera, called TrueDepth, were announced earlier this month, the technology has attracted a lot of attention and speculation from privacy advocates and security experts. Sen. Al Franken even wrote an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook with 10 questions about the technology.
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It’s not every day scientists say a new kind of renewable energy could satisfy the majority of our power needs, so when they do, it’s worth leaning in close.
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have found that energy harvested from the evaporation of water in US lakes and reservoirs could power nearly 70 percent of the nation’s electricity demands, generating a whopping 325 gigawatts of electricity.
Alongside the great strides being made in solar and wind, biophysicist Ozgur Sahin from Columbia University says natural evaporation represents a massive unexplored resource of environmentally clean power generation, just waiting to be tapped.
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Windows Phone has been dead for a good year now, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has decided it’s also time to move on. In an interview with Fox News Sunday (spotted by On MSFT), Gates reveals he’s now using an Android phone. While Gates doesn’t reveal the exact model, he does note that it has “a lot of Microsoft software” on it, which could suggest it’s a special Microsoft Edition Samsung Galaxy S8 handset with bundled software.
Microsoft started selling the Samsung Galaxy S8 handset in its retail stores earlier this year, and it includes apps like Office, OneDrive, Cortana, and Outlook. Any Android phone also supports these apps, but Microsoft’s customized S8 does suggest the company might continue to offer this for other Android devices in the future.
While Gates is switching to Android, he’s still not interested in an iPhone. Gates famously banned iPhones and iPods at home in the past, but he does admit that Steve Jobs was a “genius” in the Fox interview. Gates is still using Windows-based PCs, but he’s still not switching over to an iPhone, despite the Steve Jobs praise.
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