Going gluten-free is all the rage these days. It’s the diet of choice for Hollywood starlets and health nuts alike; supermarket aisles are packed full of products touting their lack of the stretchy protein. But for a lot of people, the gluten-free lifestyle may do more harm than good. Read more…
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Why You Might Want to Rethink Going Gluten-Free
We can only dream of soaring above the clouds, the way so many birds do. They swoop over our heads, taunting us with the freedom we’ll never have. But at least there are tons of bird-cam videos, which give you a birds-eye view of the world below. Read more…
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Fly with eagles in these breathtaking bird-cam videos
Forget smartwatches —smartrings are the new thing now. An Indiegogo campaign for a product called the “Smarty Ring” has hit its funding goal. Smarty Ring is a 13mm-wide stainless steel ring with an LED screen, Bluetooth 4.0, and an accompanying smartphone app. The ring pairs with a smartphone and acts as a remote control and notification receiver. The ring can display the time, accept or reject calls, control music, trigger the smartphone’s camera, and initiate speed-dial calls. It will also alert the wearer with light-up icons for texts, e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, Google Hangouts, and Skype. It supports dual time zones and comes with a countdown timer, a stopwatch, and an alarm. It can work as a tracker for your phone, too—if your smartphone is more than 30 feet away from the ring, Smarty Ring will trigger an alarm. The ring supports Android and iOS—as long as your device has Bluetooth 4.0, it should be compatible. The creators are promising 24 hours of battery life from the whopping 22 mAh battery, and charging happens via a wireless induction pad. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The first smartring has an LED screen, tells time, and accepts calls
In Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data , the ACLU’s Jay Stanley presents a slide deck from the near future in which a government intelligence service presents a glowing account of how it convicted “Jack R Benjamin” of DUI pre-crime, by watching all the places he went, all the people he interacted with, and using an algorithm to predict that he would commit a DUI, and, on that basis, to peer into every corner of his personal life. The use of the slide deck is inspired here, echoing as it does the Snowden leaks (Snowden had been tasked with consolidating training documents from across the NSA, which is why he had access to such a wide variety of documents, and why they’re all in powerpoint form). And the kind of data-mining here is not only plausible, it’s likely — it’s hard to imagine cops not availing themselves of this capability. Just out of curiosity, who else has been visiting Mary Smith’s house? Looks like Mary has a few close friends. Wonder if Mr. Benjamin is aware of this Bill Montgomery character who spent a few nights with her? Going back to the main screen, looks like Mr. Benjamin is quite a union activist. Perhaps we should notify George over at BigCorp (he serves at the Fusion Center with us). Just in case our man has been involved in the trouble they’ve been having over there. Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data [Jay Stanley/ACLU] ( via MeFi )
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Life from the near future of location surveillance
There may be an answer for people suffering from traumatic brain injuries. It’s a device called a brain-machine-brain interface — and it has the potential to revolutionize the way brain damage is treated in humans. Read more…
This ancient Peruvian telephone was unearthed in the 1930s by by Baron Walram V. Von Schoeler, “a shadowy Indiana Jones-type adventurer.” The gourd-and-twine device, created 1,200 to 1,400 years ago, remains tantalizingly functional — and too fragile to test out. “This is unique,” NMAI curator Ramiro Matos, an anthropologist and archaeologist who specializes in the study of the central Andes, tells me. “Only one was ever discovered. It comes from the consciousness of an indigenous society with no written language.” We’ll never know the trial and error that went into its creation. The marvel of acoustic engineering — cunningly constructed of two resin -coated gourd receivers, each three-and-one-half inches long; stretched-hide membranes stitched around the bases of the receivers; and cotton-twine cord extending 75 feet when pulled taut—arose out of the Chimu empire at its height. There’s a 1,200-year-old Phone in the Smithsonian Collections (Via Daily Grail )
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1,200 year old telephone
As winter settles in, many of us are getting an up-close look at more snowflakes than we might care to. Let’s take a moment to look at just what forces are shaping (literally) our winter weather. Read more…
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How snowflakes get their shape
Apple’s donning the Santa suit again this year to dole out digital freebies, and for the first time, iOS users in the US make it to the “nice” list. Today, the company has launched the annual 12 Days of Gifts for 2013, offering one complimentary song, app, book or movie every day between December 26th and January 6th. In previous years, US iOS users could only look on as folks from Canada, some parts of Europe and other countries worldwide unwrapped downloaded their presents from Cupertino. Now that the event has arrived stateside, make sure to install the 12 Days app, linked as a source below, and fire it up under your tree the day after Christmas. Filed under: Mobile , Apple Comments Via: 9to5mac Source: iTunes
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Apple’s 12 Days of digital gifts comes to the US for the first time
Microsoft were forced to make some come compromises to their original vision for Windows 8 come the recent update , reinstating the Start Button due to popular demand. Now, rumors suggest that the 8.2 update could take that one step further. Read more…
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Rumor: The Full Start Menu Might Be Coming Back to Windows 8, Too
jfruh writes “Remember how social networks were going to transform the advertising industry because they’d tailor ads not to context or to your web browsing history, but to the innate preferences you express through interactions and relationships with friends? Well, that didn’t work with Facebook, and it turns out it’s not working with Twitter either. The microblogging site has announced that it’s getting into the ad retargeting game: you’ll soon start seeing promoted tweets that are chosen based on websites you’ve visited in the past. The innovation, if you can call it that, is that the retargeting will work across devices, so you can be looking at a website on your phone and see promoted tweets on your laptop’s browser, or vice versa.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Twitter Will Track Your Browsing To Sell Ads