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Turning the Apple Watch into a seizure detector

http://www.fb122.com/mob/detail.php?arch_id=8513&ref_id=40527&depth=1&_ts=1445395024&domain=www.fb122.com&date=2015-10-20&is_user=yes&umk=15984a9eb843a04453fbbdb69d7b7305&amk=bb003192acae11469d30d287940efe93

The Apple Watch has Siri, vibrating notifications and can even tell time. In the future, it might also be able to detect epileptic seizures.

When someone with epilepsy has a seizure, the new EpiWatch app will use Apple Watch's sensors to measure its duration and severity. Right now, the basic app gathers information and provides educational materials, but the researchers at Johns Hopkins University who made the app have bigger plans.

"We think in about a year we'll have enough data collected where we'll be able to form a seizure detector," said Dr. Gregory Krauss, who led the team.
EpiWatch is one of three new ResearchKit apps released this week and the first for the Apple Watch. All are exploring whether the iPhone and Apple Watch can be used as medical diagnostic devices.
Launched six months ago with just a handful of apps, ResearchKit is an open-source tool for creating app-based medical studies. It includes a number of key features, like electronic consent, in-app questionnaires and HIPPA compliance.
Gallery: The 21 coolest inventions of 2015
For researchers, the biggest draw is access to Apple's (AAPL, Tech30) giant pool of users.
"Typically, you'd be lucky to study a couple hundred patients," said Krauss. He hopes to get thousands of people with epilepsy to use the free EpiWatch app and be part of the study.
The watch's heart rate sensor can pick up one of the biggest signs of an oncoming seizure: a racing heart. The accelerometer can track convulsions, the gyroscope can tell if someone has collapsed, and the Watch can send a notification to a doctor or family member.
The other two new ResearchKit studies are also laying the groundwork for future diagnostic apps.
The Melanoma app uses photographs taken with the iPhone to track moles over time. Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University hope to eventually create an algorithm that can screen photos for signs of skin cancer.
Researchers at Duke University think they might eventually be able to tell if a child is autistic or suffers from anxiety. The first step is their new Autism & Beyond app, which films children while they watch videos on the phone, logging their reactions. Eventually they hope to write software that detects specific emotions.

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Wooden Frame or Aluminum Frame ?

Recently been found in many residential buildings, shopping malls or shopping mall using the aluminum frame in some part or almost the whole. In the past using aluminum frames for houses would make it looked like an office so that rare people who use it for houses. Currently it is no longer that way because aluminum is increasingly popular for house use, because besides looking neat and durable, it is also strong. Aluminum frames are also suitable for use on outdoor windows. Previously, wood is the main material for the manufacture of frames, as the more expensive the price of timber and illegal logging and timber production falls, aluminum has become an alternative choice of door and windows frame material.

Currently many developed materials to be an alternative wood substitutes such as aluminum, concrete sills, gypsum, sills UPVC which approximates the shape and appearance of wood for door frames and shutters. Actually timber has advantages compared with other material that is favored by natural look of wood, wood materials much stronger by type, such as teak, capers, or ironwood, through a process good ovening. Wood is flexible enough to change shape according to design, such as straight or curved shapes, and can retain heat or cold from outside the room. While the loss of timber, among others, is easy to be eaten by termites, regular treatment with paint or coatings must be done to keep it preserved. Wood also absorbs water, causing the volume of wood can be fickle. As a result the door or window may difficult to open because one of its corners expands. Similarly, when used for roofing it may experience 'twist' to the timber which are less qualified.

Aluminum has become the main alternative to timber, because aluminum is more durable, anti-termite, and does not shrink like wood. Aluminum frames can be painted or covered with wood color even wood motif so as to resemble wood. Because of similarity people would think it was made of wood. The design can be made according to the order. Aluminum frame advantage is its light weight and strong, so easily moved. Maintenance is simple to attract buyers as well as quality of aluminum. Comparison of wood prices and increasingly costly process, processing, and wood treatment is more expensive that aluminum has a plus in the aspects of care that in fact free from termites and rust resistant.

The negative side of the aluminum frames is it is easily scratched and the material is not easy to be formed into curves. When compared with the frames of popular materials such as Meranti wood, aluminum remain more expensive. Timber frame for house designs can be applied to anything, while the aluminum because it is difficult shaped so often used to design the 'modern' house or 'minimalist'.

Installation of aluminum frame relies on the strength of paired screws attached to the wall, making it must be fitted with precision and neatly taped to prevent leakage and other errors. Do not choose low-quality aluminum frame, because it can easily expands as the temperature changes drastically causing framed glass can be easily separated. The most common problem is poor connection at the edges or glass which can cause rain water to enter, that is why 'sealant' or rubber insulation between the glass and aluminum must be of high quality and durable materials so that water does not easily fit into the frame or into the room. Basically it is not a problem for the material aluminum itself because aluminum is not affected by water.

http://pmaluminiumbandung.blogspot.co.id

Samsung told to stop copying iPhone

Technology

Look similar?

After a years-long court battle, Apple finally got what it wanted: A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Samsung smartphones can no longer copy certain iPhone features.

In a 2-1 decision, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that Samsung has to update its smartphones' software to remove slide-to-unlock, autocorrect and quick link software that directly mimic Apple's similar features on the iPhone.

But the ruling comes long after Samsung has changed the way those features work on its smartphones. For example, you no longer need to slide a button to unlock Galaxy phones -- you can just swipe your finger anywhere on the screen. Samsung's keyboard has also been updated several times since the ruling.

Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web

news Technology

Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web

So let's talk about ad blocking.

You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we're really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of collateral damage.

(Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web)

iOS 9 came out yesterday (in fits and starts) and with it, support for content blockers in iOS 9. There

How to prepare your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch for iOS 9

Technology

How to prepare your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch for iOS 9

Apple first announced iOS 9, the mobile operating system that runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad lineups. The update refines Apple's vision of a mobile computing experience, adding features such as running two apps at the same time on the iPad or markup features for signing documents in the Mail app. The list of new features is long.

You can learn the ins and outs of the new OS by visiting our complete guide to iOS 9.

Stuck on the iPhone “S” cycle? It’s cheaper than ever to break out.

Technology

This may the most ridiculous first-world problem I've ever written about. But I'm not writing this only for me. I'm writing this for you, my friends. I know you're out there. I'm one of you.

I, too, am an S-person.

What am I talking about? There are basically two types of iPhone users: Numbered-release people and S-release people. For years, Apple has alternated between the two types of release -- iPhone 3, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, etc. But in nearly all cases, the big "wow!" changes come on the

Facebook offers free education software in US

Technology

Facebook offers free education software in US

Much of the traditional learning is done online

Facebook has taken its first steps into the education market with software that it claims allows children to learn at their own pace.

It is working with non-profit Summit Public Schools which has pioneered a teaching method that allows students to learn online and be mentored in class.

Facebook said that he project was completely separate from its social network.

There has been some scepticism about the technology firm's move.

In a blog post, Facebook's chief product officer Chris Cox said that the firm wanted to create a classroom "centred around students' ambitions". (Read more... )

Evidence that Earth's first mass extinction was caused by critters not catastrophe

Technology

Evidence that Earth's first mass extinction was caused by critters not catastrophe

Fossil of frond-like Ediacaran species found in Namibia.

But the world's first known mass extinction, which took place about 540 million years ago, now appears to have had a more subtle cause: evolution itself.

"People have been slow to recognize that biological organisms can also drive mass extinction," said Simon Darroch, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University. "But our comparative study of several communities of Ediacarans, the world's first multicellular organisms, strongly supports the hypothesis that it was the appearance of complex animals capable of altering their environments, which we define as 'ecosystem engineers,' that resulted in the Ediacaran's disappearance."

The study is described in the paper "Biotic replacement and mass extinction of the Ediacara biota" published Sept. 2 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"There is a powerful analogy between the Earth's first mass extinction and what is happening today," Darroch observed. "The end-Ediacaran extinction shows that the evolution of new behaviors can fundamentally change the entire planet, and we are the most powerful 'ecosystem engineers' ever known."

The earliest life on Earth consisted of microbes - various types of single-celled microorganisms. They ruled the Earth for more than 3 billion years. Then some of these microorganisms discovered how to capture the energy in sunlight. The photosynthetic process that they developed had a toxic byproduct: oxygen. Oxygen was poisonous to most microbes that had evolved in an oxygen-free environment, making it the world's first pollutant.

But for the microorganisms that developed methods for protecting themselves, oxygen served as a powerful new energy source. Among a number of other things, it gave them the added energy they needed to adopt multicellular forms. Thus, the Ediacarans arose about 600 million years ago during a warm period following a long interval of extensive glaciation.

Ediacaran fossil found in the Swartput Farm site.

"We don't know very much about the Ediacarans because they did not produce shells or skeletons. As a result, almost all we know about them comes from imprints of their shapes preserved in sand or ash," said Darroch.

What scientists do know is that, in their heyday, Ediacarans spread throughout the planet. They were a largely immobile form of marine life shaped like discs and tubes, fronds and quilted mattresses. The majority were extremely passive, remaining attached in one spot for their entire lives. Many fed by absorbing chemicals from the water through their outer membranes, rather than actively gathering nutrients.

Paleontologists have coined the term "Garden of Ediacara" to convey the peace and tranquility that must have prevailed during this period. But there was a lot of churning going on beneath that apparently serene surface.

After 60 million years, evolution gave birth to another major innovation: animals. All animals share the characteristics that they can move spontaneously and independently, at least during some point in their lives, and sustain themselves by eating other organisms or what they produce. Animals burst onto the scene in a frenzy of diversification that paleontologists have labeled the Cambrian explosion, a 25-million-year period when most of the modern animal families - vertebrates, molluscs, arthropods, annelids, sponges and jellyfish - came into being.

"These new species were 'ecological engineers' who changed the environment in ways that made it more and more difficult for the Ediacarans to survive," said Darroch.

He and his colleagues performed an extensive paleoecological and geochemical analysis of the youngest known Ediacaran community exposed in hillside strata in southern Namibia. The site, called Farm Swartpunt, is dated at 545 million years ago, in the waning one to two million years of the Ediacaran reign.

Simon Darroch in Namibia searching for fossils.

"We found that the diversity of species at this site was much lower, and there was evidence of greater ecological stress, than at comparable sites that are 10 million to 15 million years older," Darroch reported. Rocks of this age also preserve an increasing diversity of burrows and tracks made by the earliest complex animals, presenting a plausible link between their evolution and extinction of the Ediacarans.

The older sites were Mistaken Point in Newfoundland, dating from 579 to 565 million years ago; Nilpena in South Australia, dating from 555 to 550 million years ago; and the White Sea in Russia, dating also from 555 to 550 million years ago million years ago.

Darroch and his colleagues made extensive efforts to ensure that the differences they recorded were not due to some external factor.

For example, they ruled out the possibility that the Swartpunt site might have been lacking in some vital nutrients by closely comparing the geochemistry of the sites.

It is a basic maxim in paleontology that the more effort that is made in investigating a given site, the greater the diversity of fossils that will be found there. So the researchers used statistical methods to compensate for the variation in the differences in the amount of effort that had been spent studying the different sites.

Having ruled out any extraneous factors, Darroch and his collaborators concluded that "this study provides the first quantitative palaeoecological evidence to suggest that evolutionary innovation, ecosystem engineering and biological interactions may have ultimately caused the first mass extinction of complex life."

Apple patent looks at fuel cell system for portable device

Technology

Apple patent looks at fuel cell system for portable device

A fuel cell battery to last weeks, not days, is the subject of a patent filed by Apple. According to news reports, the patent is about an energy cell powering a portable electronic device. The Telegraph said this was likely a MacBook.

James Titcomb, Telegraph technology news editor, said the patent application suggests a number of different energy sources.

He said that "the energy could come from.... (read more...)

Brazilian wasp venom kills cancer cells by opening them up

Health Technology

Brazilian wasp venom kills cancer cells by opening them up

The venom of a wasp native to Brazil could be used in the fight against cancer, according to new University of Leeds research.

The social wasp Polybia paulista protects itself against predators by producing venom known to contain a powerful cancer-fighting ingredient.

Google updates health conditions feature

Health Technology

Google announced today that is massively upgrading its database of health conditions in Google search, and more than doubling the actual number of conditions to over 900. The feature, which launched last February, displays basic info on symptoms, treatments, and prevalence when you search for things like diseases.... (read more...)

Researchers efficiently charge a lithium-ion battery with solar cell

green peace Technology

Researchers efficiently charge a lithium-ion battery with solar cell

Consumers aren't embracing electric cars and trucks, partly due to the dearth of charging stations required to keep them moving. Even the conservation-minded are hesitant to go electric in some states because, studies show, if fossil fuels generate the electricity, the car is no greener than one powered with an efficient gasoline.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-efficiently-lithium-ion-battery-solar-cell.html#jCp

New technique lowers cost of energy-efficient embedded computer systems

green peace Technology

New technique lowers cost of energy-efficient embedded computer systems

Electrical and computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for creating less-expensive, low-power embedded systems – the computing devices found in everything from thermostats to automobiles.

"Using our techniques, we've been able to create prototype systems with power converters that have a combination of energy efficiency and low cost that – as far as we've been able to tell – is unmatched by anything currently on the market," says Alex Dean, co-author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State.
To understand the new technique, you have to know a little about embedded systems. For one thing, they require a power source. And to maximize energy efficiency, the system should be designed to operate using the best voltage possible. Sometimes this means using the lowest voltage needed to run the circuit. At other times, this means raising the voltage slightly so the system can finish the work sooner, and then going into a low-power sleep mode.
But batteries usually put out power at a voltage level that makes the system operate inefficiently; often, the battery puts out more voltage than the system needs. To change the voltage to the best level, a system may use a power converter.
The most efficient power converters, called switch-mode power converters, have two parts. One part consists of "power stage" hardware that controls the storage and flow of power. The other part is a "controller" which allows the converter to respond to changes in the embedded system's demand for power or changes in the flow of energy from the power source, or even provide protection against extreme temperatures and device failures. The controller can be a specifically-designed circuit or a separate processor which runs special control software.
Having a dynamic, responsive power converter is also important because it allows the embedded system to be more energy efficient; the system can go to sleep, then operate quickly, then shut back down – and the power converter can adjust the flow of power accordingly.
"Our advance is that we've used design principles from real-time systems and incorporated the power converter software into the embedded system processor. These methods guarantee that the other software on the embedded system's processor will not disturb the power converter's correct operation," Dean explains. "This eliminates the need for a separate processor or controller circuit on the power converter itself, which in turn makes the overall system less expensive."
It also makes the embedded system smaller, lighter and more flexible.
"Because the embedded system software and power converter software are using a shared processor on a single chip, it gives developers more coordinated control over both the system's functions and related demands those functions may make on the power converter," Dean says.
The researchers made two prototype converters using the new technique and compared them to dozens of other compatible power converters on the market – and found that none of the other converters could match the prototypes' combination of low cost and high efficiency.
"Our second-best prototype had 90 percent efficiency – less than 10 percent of the energy was wasted," Dean says. "Our best prototype had 95 percent efficiency. And both had component costs of about 50 cents. All other converters either cost more, were less efficient or both."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-09-technique-lowers-energy-efficient-embedded.html#jCp