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IoT-Enabled Mailbox Lets You Check Your Mail Without Leaving Your House

Whether you live in an apartment downtown or in a detached house in the suburbs, if your mailbox is not built into your home you’ll have to go outside to see if anything’s there. But how do you prevent that dreadful feeling of disappointment when you find your mailbox empty? Well, we’re living in 2022, so today your mailbox is just another Thing to connect to the Internet of Things. And that’s exactly what [fhuable] did when he made a solar powered IoT mailbox.

The basic idea was to equip a mailbox with a camera and have it send over pictures of its contents. An ESP32-Cam module could do just that: with a 1,600 × 1,200 camera sensor, a 160 MHz CPU and an integrated WiFi adapter, [fhuable] just needed to write an Arduino sketch to have it take a picture every few hours and upload it to an FTP server.

But since running a long cable all the way from the house was not an attractive option, the whole module had to be completely wireless. [fhuable] decided to power it using a single 18,650 lithium ion cell, which gets topped up continuously thanks to a 1.5 W solar panel mounted on the roof of the mailbox. The other parts are housed in a 3D-printed enclosure that’s completely sealed to keep out moisture.

Touch Sensitive Brain Cells Controlled by Micromagnets

Summary: A newly developed technique allows researchers to remotely active neurons with the aid of microscopic magnetic particles.

Source: UCL

Scientists at UCL have developed a new technique that uses microscopic magnetic particles to remotely activate brain cells; researchers say the discovery in rats could potentially lead to the development of a new class of non-invasive therapies for neurological disorders.

While War In Ukraine Rages Below, Astronauts Cooperate Above

Astronauts representing countries in direct armed conflict have never worked on the space station. Right now, the International Space Station crew consists of U.S. astronauts Raja Chari, Mark Vande Hei, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron; Matthias Maurer, a German from the European Space Agency; and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov.

Economic sanctions may affect the space programs on Earth, Mastracchio says, but the space-station crews never saw the impact of anything. “The programs themselves still get along,” he says. “It was really just, we were friends before we went up to space, and you’re working up there relying on each other and you continue to do that.” Chamitoff says he wishes the world would take more notice of cooperative operations in space, which could be a better model for how to do things geopolitically. “The space station has been an amazing project that’s brought 15 countries together for 30 years,” he says. “When things like this happen and there’s these kind of tensions, you kind of wonder, ‘Does anybody notice that we’re working together and it’s going great?’”

Full Story:

The world is on a knife’s edge, but astronauts who’ve worked on the International Space Station during times of crisis say they experienced nothing but friendship.

Our Anxiety Level Should Decrease As The Day Goes On. For Some People, It Doesn’t

“At healthy levels, worry can help us anticipate threats and prepare for the future,” says Rebecca C. Cox, the lead author of the research from the Department of Integrative Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder. “Worry can become a cause for concern if the frequency or intensity of the worry is disproportionate to the source of the worry. If I’m so worried about an upcoming test that I can’t focus on studying, or I’m so frequently worried about storms that I don’t leave my house, then worry has crossed into a problematic range.”

According to previous research, in those with generalized anxiety disorder, worry may function to keep anxiety at a high but predictable level to avoid experiencing an unexpected shift in emotion.

To** **investigate this on a day-to-day level, Cox and her team asked participants to respond to daily survey prompts in the morning, afternoon, and evening to indicate how anxious they felt in that moment. This method, called ecological momentary assessment, is often employed by psychologists to measure emotions in real-time.

Full Story:

New research suggests excessive worrying does more harm than good.

Russian forces seize control of Chernobyl nuclear plant, Ukrainian official says

Russian forces have seized control of the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, according to the agency that manages the area.

Troops overran the plant on the first day of Russia’s multi-pronged invasion of Ukraine, a spokesperson for the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management, Yevgeniya Kuznetsovа, told CNN.

“When I came to the office today in the morning (in Kyiv), it turned out that the (Chernobyl nuclear power plant) management had left. So there was no one to give instructions or defend,” she said.