Tech Today w/ Ken May

The Verge has some screenshots of Office 15′s interface taken from the Technical Preview released in January. Though Microsoft is extending the Metro styling to many of its products , Office 15 will still use the ribbon interface first introduced in Office 2007. But that ribbon interface has been given a Metro twist. The Office 15 applications have an interface that has been substantially pared down. The ribbon itself will now default to being collapsed, and the gradients, panels, and dividing lines that are a major feature of the current Office interface have for the most part been removed. Getting rid of this clutter is a major feature of the Metro aesthetic. So too is the greater dependence on typography and words, rather than icons; as another nod to Metro ideals, the ribbon’s tabs now use upper-case type, and instead of using icons to switch between mail, contacts (renamed “people” in Office 15, aligning it with the terminology used in Windows Phone and Windows 8), calendars, and tasks, Outlook 15 will use Metroesque words . Overall, the visual refresh shows how Metro’s ideas can still feature in complex, feature-rich applications. The interface will be familiar to existing Office users, but the new look means that Office 15 will feel comfortable on Metro systems—including the ARM tablets that will come with some Office applications. Read the comments on this post

Georgia Tech has developed the Tongue Drive System, in which a stud in the tongue acts as a mouse against a pad attached to the roof of one’s mouth. The device gives unprecedented control to paralyzed computer users. The new dental appliance contains magnetic field sensors mounted on its four corners that detect movement of a tiny magnet attached to the tongue. It also includes a rechargeable lithium-ion battery and an induction coil to charge the battery. The circuitry fits in the space available on the retainer, which sits against the roof of the mouth and is covered with an insulating, water-resistant material and vacuum-molded inside standard dental acrylic. “One of the problems we encountered with the earlier headset was that it could shift on a user’s head and the system would need to be recalibrated,” explained Ghovanloo. “Because the dental appliance is worn inside the mouth and molded from dental impressions to fit tightly around an individual’s teeth with clasps, it is protected from these types of disturbances.” Link -via The Daily What Geek

Did you get your 8 hours of shuteye last night or did you spend the better part of the night wondering why conventional wisdom says you need 8 hours of sleep? Stephanie Hegarty over at BBC News Magazine explores the concept of the eight-hour sleep, which is actually not how humans have been sleeping, historically speaking: In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep. “It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says. During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps. Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society. By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. Link

Julie188 writes “Last summer the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged to spend millions to reinvent the toilet. That investment has born fruit with teams from around the world coming up with many different ways to turn human waste into energy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Testing has begun on a new class of WiFi hotspots that will log mobile users in automatically with their SIM cards, potentially alleviating cellular network congestion and helping users stay within the limits of their data plans. The Wireless Broadband Alliance announced today that it has completed trials with a long list network operators, mobile device makers, and network equipment manufacturers. Participants included AT&T, BT, China Mobile, Swisscom, LG, Intel, Aruba Networks, BelAir Networks, and Cisco. Further trials testing “the most advanced technology features” will occur in the second half of 2012 with the first deployments of “Next Generation Hotspots” to take place in the next 12 months. Although some names are missing (such as Verizon), the Alliance said its member operators serve more than 1 billion subscribers and operate more than 1 million hotspots worldwide. “Next Generation Hotspots are vastly easier for users to find and use because, like the cellular network, devices can securely automatically connect with no need for users manually entering usernames or passwords,” the Wireless Broadband Alliance explained. “This overcomes the issue of users knowing which hotspots they can access or how to connect. It also allows mobile operators, who increasingly have their own or partner hotspot networks, to ‘offload’ many more users from their busy mobile broadband networks. The new hotspots feature similar levels of security to the cellular network including end-to-end radio link encryption and SIM authentication.” According to GigaOm , Next Generation Hotspots will support “complex roaming arrangements,” allowing operators to share capacity and letting devices connect to multiple networks. The just-completed trials tested requirements for network discovery and selection, security, and automatic authentication. The Wireless Broadband Alliance program is complementary to a project from the Wi-Fi Alliance , whose Wi-Fi Certified PassPoint program will make it easier for owners of smartphones and other WiFi-equipped devices to access hotspots without entering usernames or passwords. Certification tests for PassPoint will begin in July, with the goal of promoting interoperability between access points and user-owned devices, Computerworld reports . Ultimately, the groups want to make switching from one WiFi hotspot to another a process that’s invisible to the user, much as moving from one cell tower to another already is. Read the comments on this post

These are the first photos of some of the countless treasures found in the extraordinary 298-million-year-old forest discovered under coal mine in Wuda, Inner Mongolia, China. More »

Almost 5,000 eBooks have been pulled from the the Kindle Store because of a change made to Independent Publishers Group’s contract with the online seller. The move is a result of Amazon’s demand for upfront payment from publishers, required to host their books on the store. [ Paid Content ] More »