Month: November 2011

These are the leather gloves that enable complete control of touchscreen devices while keeping the hands warm. Ideal for use with smartphones, ATMs, or GPS devices, the gloves employ carbon fiber conductive threads woven into the index fingers and thumbs that maintain the conductivity necessary for nuanced, tactile control of a touchscreen device, inhibited by traditional gloves. The gloves allow accurate typing and enable any touchscreen command, such as zooming in or out via pinch gestures or scrolling through pictures with finger swipes.

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This is the version of Scrabble that provides only 75 seconds for players to form as many anagrams as possible using letter tiles that automatically recognize words. Speedy placement ensures success–the five 2″ sq. electronic tiles sense their relative positions when placed next to one another, beeping and flashing when an approved three-, four-, or five-letter word is assembled. Two games challenge a solitary player to form as many five-letter words from the same letters or random letters and a third requires the tiles be passed from player to player to form words in a limited time to avoid elimination.

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Ever wonder why you may look prettier in some photos and uglier in others, even with the same smile and the same lighting? It’s all about the camera lens. These portraits—taken by Stephen Eastwood—show how this works.

If you have ever used a dating site and thought “damn, he/she looked so hot in those pictures! What happened?” or “wow! He/she looks a lot better in person!” you know exactly what I’m talking about.

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Every so often, you’re struck with brilliance. But moments later, it’s gone. The solution to this: Don’t leave the room. BPS Research Digest reported that memory performance decreases when you walk through an open doorway, compared with walking the same distance within a room.

“Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one’s event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]” the researchers said.

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Just a few months into a clinical trial, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have made “swift progress” using pig cells to regrow sizable chunks of missing human flesh. The first soldier to enroll in the trial lost 70 percent of his right quadricep in an attack — but now the missing flesh is back. “What would have been an amputation is now somebody with a limb that works,” says Dr. Stephen Badylak. The Pentagon is pouring $250 million into regenerative medicine research, and Badylak’s pig-protein procedure could become standard practice after the trial wraps in two years.

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This is the world’s smallest digital camera, measuring just over one inch in all dimensions and weighing only half an ounce. Reminiscent of devices employed by Cold War-era operatives for intelligence gathering, the camera appears to require Lilliputian agility, yet its one-button operation provides easy picture taking. Providing automatic focus, it uses a 2 MP image sensor that takes still images at 1600 x 1200 resolution and captures video at 30 fps at 640 x 480 resolution. Images are taken as JPEGs and videos as AVIs, both saved onto an included 2 GB microSD card (supports up to 32 GB cards).

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