A Covid-Friendly Wearable Shocks You With 450 Volts When You Touch Your Face

A reporter for Medium’s tech site OneZero recently spotted an especially bizarre ad on Instagram:
The ad features a GIF of a person wearing a Fitbit-style wristband, with the text “Eliminate Cravings.” Across the frame from their hand sits a giant slice of cake. As the person reaches towards the cake, the wristband turns red and zaps them with electricity. You can…

The Gig Economy Is Failing. Say Hello to the Hustle Economy.

An anonymous reader shares a report: “We have nothing to sell besides physical touch.” The thought jarred Amber Briggle awake some nights. It kept her from eating in the first week of the Covid-19 shutdown when she lost six pounds fretting over the sudden collapse of the business she’d built up her “entire adult life.” For seven years, Briggle has owned…

How growth of the scientific enterprise influenced a century of quantum physics

Austrian quantum theorist Erwin Schrödinger first used the term “entanglement,” in 1935, to describe the mind-bending phenomenon in which the actions of two distant particles are bound up with each other. Entanglement was the kind of thing that could keep Schrödinger awake at night; like his friend Albert Einstein, he thought it cast doubt on quantum mechanics as a viable description…

Amazon and Google Now Require Continuous Data From Other Smarthome Devices

An anonymous reader quotes CNET:
For years, smart speakers from Amazon, Google and Apple have traded data back and forth with other devices in the home. This is how their voice assistants turn on the smart lights. But in early 2019, something changed: Amazon and Google began requiring continuous status-change updates from devices — requiring, for instance, partnered smart bulbs to send…

Early Riser or Night Owl? New Study May Help To Explain the Difference

Some people are early risers, wide awake at the crack of dawn. Others are night owls who can’t seem to get to bed until well after midnight and prefer to sleep in. Why is this? An NIH-funded team has some new clues based on evidence showing how a molecular “switch” wired into the biological clocks of extreme early risers leads them…

Night Mode Could Actually Be Worse For Your Sleep Pattern, Study Finds

According to a new study published in Current Biology, the “night mode” on your phone could actually be worse for your sleep pattern. Scientists say the blue light, which is significantly reduced when night mode is enabled, could be telling our brain that it’s night time because it resembles the colors of twilight. From the report: According to the study, brightness…

ESA studies human hibernation for space travel

In movies and books, fictional astronauts enter ‘suspended animation’ to cross the vastness of space. Recently ESA investigated how real-life crew hibernation would impact a space mission to Mars. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/esa-study-human-hibernation-trip-to-mars…