NASA announces their first voice skill for Amazon’s Alexa at the AWS re: invent conference tonight. You’ll be able to ask Alexa questions about Mars.
Read more
Fossilised bacteria have been uncovered in two separate locations in South Africa, and they’ve been dated to 2.52 billion years ago — long before oxygen started to saturate Earth’s atmosphere.
Instead of thriving in oxygen, like the trees and multicellular organisms that came after them did, these bacteria oxidised sulphur to survive, suggesting that life could be sustained on a planet with less than one-thousandth of a percent of Earth’s current oxygen levels.
The fossils were uncovered in a layer of hard, silica-rich rock in the Kaapvaal Craton of the Limpopo Province in South Africa — one of the two remaining areas in the world where Earth’s crust from 3.6 to 2.5 million years ago is still accessible.
Read more
There is a worldwide scientific experiment today aiming to test the laws of quantum physics via a video game – and you’re invited!
The BIG Bell Test: worldwide quantum experiments powered by human randomness aims to conduct a series of quantum experiments in labs around the world that, for the first time, will be controlled by human decisions made by volunteers (aka Bellsters). Here’s how you can take part.
Coordinated by ICFO, the Institute of Photonic Sciences, the experiments will test Albert Einstein’s idea of “local realism,” a phenomenon at the very core of the mysteries of the quantum world.
Read more
Depression Treatment
Posted in biotech/medical, neuroscience, wearables
The Happy Headband. Take my money.
The Fisher Wallace Stimulator® is a wearable neurostimulation device that is cleared by the FDA to treat depression and anxiety. During each 20-minute treatment session, the device gently stimulates the brain to produce serotonin and other neurochemicals that reduce depression and anxiety (and support healthy mood and sleep). The device has been proven to be safe and effective in multiple published studies conducted at top institutions such as Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital.
Over 6,000 healthcare practitioners, including 2,000 board-certified psychiatrists, have used the device to treat over 20,000 patients since 2009. Most patients experience results within the first two weeks of daily use.
I could live with e-paper everything. I’m talking billboards, monitors, keyboards, remotes, watches, phones, and wallets. Yes, we now have an e-paper wallet called the Wonder Wallet. It just launched on Kickstarter. Why an e-paper wallet, you ask? Because e-paper looks cool and because on Kickstarter, anything can maybe become reality with your blind trust.
I don’t have many details on Wonder Wallet, but I do know that users can display an image on their wallet and that it connects to phones through Bluetooth. Do you really want to keep your phone connected to your wallet all day? That sounds like a battery drain to me. Oh yeah, you also have to charge the wallet, although it should last for around three days.
Read more
A team of scientists from London and Canada is set to challenge one of Albert Einstein’s accepted theories regarding the classification of the speed of light as constant, which means that light in a vacuum will have the same numerical value under any conditions.
The new theory of the scientists, described in a paper published in the journal Physical Review, hypothesizes that the speed of light might actually be a variable.
Einstein has long claimed that the speed of light is constant and it would be impossible for anything to travel faster than light because it would violate the rules of physics. The speed of light was then treated to be a constant with a numerical value of 299,792,458 meters per second.
Read more
“Microsoft patches configuration hole that allowed hackers to upload software packages to its Azure update infrastructure.”
