Bio-alarm clocks for the perfect sleep
Clocky has wheels that drive it around, forcing the sleeper to get out of bed and chase it. Wake n’ Bacon wakes a person to the smell of breakfast, while BioBrite SunRise Clock simulates a sunrise using a 60-watt lightbulb. All these products belong to a new generation of devices: bio-alarm clocks. Between them, also SleepSmart, Axbo Sleep Phase also Sleeptracker, three alarm-clocks that track your sleep patterns through sleeping movements and brainwaves activity in order to wake you up exactly when you need it, which is during the light sleep, that occurs various times during the night. Sleep cycles vary from 90 to 110 minutes, so the bio-alarm clocks have a roughly 30-minute margin of error. But do they work for real? Scientists are skeptical: they say that, far from being the light-sleep stage, the best time to be woken up is during a dream. In the uncertainty, follow my suggestion: keep the windows shut if you want to sleep long, open them and let the light in if you want to be up early.
Filed Under Technology
50 skips for a world record
Raise your hand if you’ve never thrown a stone on the water surface to see how many skips it would do. It’s an entertaining pastime, perfect for the time of the day in which you’re cooked by the sun and you want to spend the half-an-hour you’ve left on the beach without thinking too much. Still, it involves some routines and strategies, such as wandering around to find the right stone (thin and flat) and cheating when you have to count the skips.
Surfing the Net in these days means bumping without escape into the new world record for skipping stones video: 50 quick skips made by Russ Byars, ready to enter the Guinness Book of Records. If you go deeper in the topic, you will discover that there’s even a North American Stone Skipping Association (NASSA) and a book by his founder appealingly titled The Secrets of Stone Skipping. You’ll even realize that a French physicist, Lydéric Bocquet, has spent time (and probably the French contributors’ money) to find out that “an angle of about 20° between the stone and the water’s surface is optimal”.
Filed Under Sport
Rolling Stone demands a Swedish apology
The critic and the star have never got along very well. Which is not surprising at all, since the job of the first is crucifying the job of the latter. Still, there’s a certain sense of mutual need (I give you something to speak about, you give me fame and visibility) that usually manages to keep the water calm. This time, though, the storm has arrived. Addressed as a “super drunk” man “who can hardly handle the riff to Brown Sugar any more” by two Swedish newspapers, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has reacted demanding an official apology to him and his fans. Newspapers Expressen and Aftonbladet offended Richards while revewing a concert which saw the Stones playing in front of 6,000 people at the Ullevi stadium. “Write the truth. It was a good show”, Richards added referring to his performance, while apparently he didn’t protest about being described as drunk. At least, he’s honest.
Filed Under Media & Society
There’s arsenic in your rice
In my experience, arsenic is just the mortal poison the murderer used to pour into the victim’s tea before being inevitably unmasked by Sherlock Holmes. In this case, though, we’re not dealing with an average criminal but with a real serial killer, because people who get poisoned are not one nor two but 140 million, coming mainly from developed countries like South and East Asia. Speaking at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), researchers have reported the presence of high rates of arsenic in drinking water, which may lead to a terrific increase in cases of cancer in many parts of the world. Even some of the United States are at risk. The arsenic is a substance usually contained deep in the soil and in the groundwater. The problem is that to avoid drinking surface water, which can be contaminated with bacteria causing diarrhoea and other diseases, aid agencies had been promoting for a long time the digging of wells that eventually reach the arsenic contaminated area. And this affects also rice consumption, since the plant absorbs arsenic from the soil of the shallow puddles it grows in.
Read the original piece of news on the Bbc
Filed Under Environment, Food, Research
Danger! He could be the last!
Hedgehogs are undoubtedly cute and quite slow in crossing roads. When we realise that we’ve accidentally smashed one of them with our car, we usually feel sad and a bit guilty. But we would never imagine that we are seriously contributing to the loss of biodiversity on our planet. Well, we should reconsider the amount of guilt we’re carrying on our shoulders. The hedgehog indeed is one of the animals who appear in the list prepared by the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, the government’s early warning system for species in serious decline. He’s in serious danger due to traffic, pollution, pesticides and garden chemicals. And he’s not the only one on the list. There are also the house sparrow, the harvest mouse, the cuckoo, the garden tiger moth, two seahorse varieties and other cute creatures that we are used to consider part of our everyday life. From now on, all these species will be protected.
Read the original article on the Guardian
Filed Under Environment
Moms are online
Opening an online community is often just the answer to the need of having someone sharing your same kind of experiences. In a recent Btalk post we talked about weird web communites that are flourishing everywhere. That time, though, we didn’t enter the vast field of baby and mom-focused networking sites. There, the competition is wild. Minti, Moxie Moms, Momslife, Blogsbymoms and many others fight each others to gain moms and pregnant women’s attention on the Web. The wish to get attention can reach a point where, more than social networking, we’re dealing with pure business. Like on Monday, when the adquirement of Palo Alto-based social networking site Maya’s Mom has been announced by BabyCenter, “the most complete online resource for new and expectant parents”, owned by Johnson&Johnson. Maya’s Mom is a cross between Yahoo Answers and Facebook, centered around the asking and answering of questions related to parenting. One thing is for sure: web moms won’t feel alone.
Filed Under Media & Society
A window of pixels in the cathedral
There are certain categories of things you would never put together. Too different, too distant. For example? A cathedral and a computer. There’s always somebody, though, who can do it instead of you. In this case Gerhard Richter, a famous German artist. He must have thought that a church and a computer are both places you go to when you want to get in touch with the universe, even if in the first case you’d use God while in the latter the Internet is enough. Richter just unveiled a window at the Cologne cathedral that actually looks like it was made of pixels. He gave it as a gift to the cathedral, visited every year by over one million people.
Go to Gerhard Richter website
Filed Under Modern Life