Watching the latest footage of a solar eclipse on Mars gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “out of this world.” Earlier this month, NASA’s Perseverance rover spotted one of Mars’ moons, Phobos, passing across the Sun. The 40-second eclipse was captured by the rover’s Mastcam-Z camera system. It is a partial solar eclipse because of the moon’s size. While Phobos is the larger of Mars’ two moons, it is still extremely small, measuring 17 x 14 x 11 miles in diameter. Its small size means that there can never be a total eclipse on Mars. No matter what, parts of the sun will always peek out from behind the shadows of Mars’ moons.
A new report links heart rate variability (HRV) with risk of insomnia and used a novel tool for identifying patients who may be suffering from insomnia — their beds. The study, which was presented in March at the World Sleep Conference, in Rome, found patients with insomnia tended to have lower HRV. However, it also showed that so-called “smart beds” that are equipped with sensors and other technology to track people’s physiological and sleep pattern can produce meaningful health insights for and about the people who sleep in them.Ssleep disorders disrupt the way the brain operates and affects the regulation of bodily functions such as breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. Sleep Number’s 360 smart beds are equipped with technology that gathers biometric and sleep data points. Garcia-Molina and his co-author, Shawn Barr, Ph.D., wanted to know whether those data might help indicate signals that a patient might be suffering from a sleep disorder.
For now, such data will not replace formal sleep studies in laboratories, but Garcia-Molina said they do offer something those sleep studies do not — accurate longitudinal context to support sleep disorder diagnoses. Moreover, he pointed to a recently published study suggesting that sleep data collected by the bed correlates strongly with data from formal polysomnography. In the future, he said advancements in data collection and analysis will be able to provide users with advanced sleep monitoring and personalized health insights, he said. The insomnia study is just one area of research for Sleep Number, which also presented data suggesting the bed can help identify symptoms of respiratory illnesses such as influenza and COVID-19.
The science is in: The creme filling in Oreo cookies is classified as "mushy," and it's very difficult to get it to stick to both sides when you twist one apart. "I had in my mind that if you twist the Oreos perfectly, you should split the creme perfectly in the middle," MIT researcher Crystal Owens said in a statement. "But what actually happens is the creme almost always comes off of one side." Owens and three co-authors have an article titled On Oreology, the fracture and flow of "milk's favorite cookie" in the current issue of the journal Physics of Fluids this week.
The team created a so-called "Oreometer," a 3D-printed device that works using rubber bands and is loaded with coins to provide the weight that then translates into the force needed to mechanically twist the two parts of the cookie apart. Oreometer is actually a play on words that only a very specific set of fluid dynamics nerds will recognize. That's because the device is actually a rheometer, which is used in labs to measure the way substances flow in response to applied force. One other variable involved dipping the cookies in milk, which caused them to degrade and crumble after about a minute, unsurprisingly. The researchers didn't indicate if they plan to continue their research to pursue the most obvious remaining Oreo-related mystery: What's wrong with people who eat the cookies without event attempting to twist them apart?
Skydio, the US company building self-flying, obstacle-dodging drones that a three-year-old can pilot without fear, is making two announcements today during CES 2022. One of them is an expensive fix for the Skydio 2’s single biggest shortcoming — the other, a totally free update that adds one of the most exciting features yet. First, the Skydio 2 Plus. At $1,099 and up, the new drone promises the kind of long-range, robust connection that the original Skydio 2 was missing, thanks to a new high-power 5GHz Wi-Fi radio and a pair of pop-up antennas. The company now claims you’ll see 3 kilometers of range from a new optional Skydio 2 Plus Beacon controller — twice as much as with the original Skydio 2 and Beacon — and 6 kilometers of range if you’re using the optional twin-stick Skydio Controller, up from 3.5km originally.
Skydio 2 will soon have a brand-new feature in common, one that won’t cost an additional cent: a new mode called KeyFrame, which unlocks one of the most impressive concepts for drone cinematography. But with Skydio’s self-flying drone, you don’t need to sketch or photograph those still frames, of course. You simply fly there. You fly the drone to a point in 3D space, press a button when the drone’s camera is lined up with what you want to see in the video, then fly to the next, virtually storyboarding your shot with every press. At $1,099, you’re still limited to the very poor ranges of your phone as the controller: the new $219 Beacon and old $179 joystick controller cost extra, though both are included in Skydio’s $1,949 and $2,169 extensive combo kits.
A California man recently devised a cunning plot to never be held responsible for any parking or traffic tickets ever again—a plot that spectacularly backfired. Recounting his experience at this year's DEF CON hacking conference, an information security researcher who goes by the handle "Droogie" cheekily attempted to fool the DMV's computer system by registering a vanity plate that read "NULL," the computer programming shorthand for a non-existent value. If all went to plan, any and all tickets issued to the plate "NULL" would, at the end of the day, be issued to no plate at all. As anyone with a modicum of programming experience will attest, these things rarely go as planned. "I was like, 'I'm the greatest,'" Droogie told the audience. "'I’m gonna be invisible.' Instead, I got all the tickets."
Apparently, a privately operated citation processing center kept a database of outstanding tickets attributed to a NULL plate—these are tickets with missing or incomplete plate data, not plates that literally read "NULL," like the one Droogie owns. Unfortunately for the California I.T. professional, the system in question wasn't sophisticated enough to differentiate the two inputs, automatically sending all NULL tickets his way. When he contacted both the DMV and Los Angeles Police Department to explain what was happening, both government agencies simply told him to change his plate. Droogie, however, stubbornly refused. "I said, 'No, I didn’t do anything wrong.'" While the original bill of $12,000 has been wiped by the DMV, he has accumulated another $6,000 in fines by other drivers since then.
Can your earbuds or headphones purify the air you breathe? Dyson, the company best known for products such as vacuums and hair dryers, plans to launch its first wearable device: a pair of over-ear headphones that also serve as an air purifier. According to a statement from Dyson, the Dyson Zone compressors in the earcups on the headphones draw in air through filters, then project purified air to the user's nose and mouth through a special visor. The Dyson Zone has been in development for six years, as the company tested more than 500 prototypes before coming up with the final product. Dyson did not provide details on pricing. The device will launch this fall.
Jake Dyson, chief engineer at Dyson, cites the rise in global air pollution as inspiration for developing the device. "Unlike face masks, it delivers a plume of fresh air without touching your face, using high-performance filters and two miniaturized air pumps," said Dyson in a statement. "After six years in development, we’re excited to deliver pure air and pure audio, anywhere." The price has not yet been announced.
For years, the ambiguous yet contented face of Mr. Trash Wheel has been an icon of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The googly-eyed trash collector has been gobbling up millions of pounds of the city’s river-borne garbage for years, and led to the creation of several water-wheel allies like Capt. Trash Wheel, and Prof. Trash Wheel. The idea for some sort of garbage collector came from local inventor John Kellet, who would walk across the footbridge spanning the Jones Falls stream that feeds the Baltimore harbor—and be disturbed on seeing the unabated flow of garbage floating towards it. Kellet looked around to see if there were any potential solutions to the problem, but found none. He would end up not only giving the harbor a more sparkling, trash-free appearance, but one of the city’s biggest celebrities and social media icons—though he admitted it wasn’t his idea to put googly eyes on the barge.
Mr. Trash Wheel rotates based on power drawn from the river’s current. If not enough electricity can be generated from the river alone, the wheel uses solar energy instead. Kellet, who runs Clearwater Mills, also makes specially designed cages to fit into storm drain outfalls—which is the source of most of the garbage pollution into the harbor. His idea has been so successful that several other organizations are building their own Mr. Trash Wheel. Coming soon to the Gwynns Falls River in Maryland is Gwynda the Good Wheel of the West, while Oakland, California is building one called Trasharella.
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