Hasta La Gadget!

Android Wear was first announced in March earlier this year, where since then, details that concern both hardware as well as software started to leak out for the masses to know more about Android Wear. Well, it is nice to know that such information has not stopped trickling out, with Google sharing off some images and video that depicts just how the Android Wear notifications of the future will look like.

Some of the screenshots do hail from different notifications from various apps such as the Nest thermostat, Calendar, Clash of Clans as well as a podcast. The notifications will be accompanied by details concerning the alert itself,including an icon that indicates just which app that it came from, and where the podcast playback notification is concerned, the ability for the user to pause or change tracks.

Apart from that, developers will also be able to know how to throw in Android Wear notifications that have multiple pages to their current apps. The inclusion of Android Wear alerts will only require the developer to add on just a few additional lines of code into the current app, how painless is that? I am quite sure that many of us do look forward to see what else Android Wear will be able to deliver in the long run.

Android Wear Notification Screenshots Appear

, original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in General, android wear, Google,

The French Open in Roland Garros has already thrown its fair share of surprises, where top seeds have crashed out from the early rounds. It does seem as though the old guard is getting rather wobbly, don’t you think so? Still, if you are a tennis fan, such unexpected eliminations add excitement to the game, and if you love hitting the ball on the court yourself, how about improving your game with some tech? This is where the Smash device comes in handy, and no, it is not meant for the Incredible Hulk to gauge his strength by pounding it.

Generally, the whole point of Smash is to keep track of the consistency of players who happen to wear it. According to Rob Crowder, the Australia-based creator, he claims that Smash is a lightweight wristband and application which would allow tennis lovers to keep track of a slew of statistics that will depend on their movements on the court

Smash will feature the necessary trackers in order to record a slew of key statistics, where it is capable of monitoring the number and type of shots, racket head speed, racket head momentum, amount of spin, wrist rotation, stroke trajectory, impact point consistency, and technique consistency. Using such carefully compiled metrics, the app can then come to a certain summary about your game, in addition to making suggestions which will hopefully improve your future game.

The Smash wrist band can last anywhere from six to eight hours of play time on a single battery charge, with the app running on iOS and Android platforms. Right now, it needs your help as a Kickstarter project to become reality.

Smash Hopes To Help Tennis Players Improve Their Game

, original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in Gadgets, crowdfunding, kickstarter, smash, Wearable Tech,

When I think of summer shrubs, I’m overcome with dread. I envision hours spent under the burning hot sun on my parents’ lawn, balancing precariously on the top rung of a ladder while wielding a chainsaw trimmer. Thankfully, this is not that kind of shrub. This one is refreshing, it usually involves alcohol, and it requires very little physical labor, so … NO CONTEST.

Maybe you’ve had a shrub before (they make a mean shrub at The Library at The Public in New York) or maybe you haven’t, but here’s the gist: a shrub is a fancy name for a “drinking vinegar.” Don’t run away just yet. As Martha Holmberg explains in the summer issue of Sweet Paul Magazine:

Shrubs started as a household practicality. Back before refrigeration, fresh fruit would spoil quickly, but you could extend its life by piling it into a big crock with some sugar. The juice that came off the fruit was redolent with the bright flavor of the fruits in the crock, and after a few weeks it would ferment into vinegar.

In the modernized version below, however, you just add vinegar to your sweetened fruit rather than actually letting it ferment. You can make it with any fruit you want, add any herbs or spices you want, and mix it with whatever type of spirit or sparkling drink you want. It’s basically a choose-your-own-adventure type of recipe, perfect for scofflaws and anarchists.

So you see, the concept of a “shrub” is the base of the delicious-looking cocktails you’ll find below (one is virgin, two are not). Sweet Paul Magazine has generously provided us with one incredibly versatile formula for a summer shrub that you can use in just about any application you can imagine, from drinking it shot-style to treating it as a cocktail mixer. Once you make a shrub, it’ll last several months in your refrigerator. So go make the most of that summer produce and get a shrubbin.’

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Humans may be smart because energy once devoted to brawn was given up for brains, researchers say.

The most powerful computer known is the brain. The human brain possesses about 100 billion neurons with about 1 quadrillion — 1 million billion — connections known as synapses wiring these cells together.

Humans possess more complex, powerful brains than humanity’s closest living relatives, such as monkeys and apes. One reason behind this jump in brainpower may lie in how much of the human metabolism is devoted to the human brain — it consumes a whopping 20 percent of the body’s total energy. [10 Surprising Facts About the Human Brain]

How the brain evolved

To gain insights into how the human brain evolved, scientists compared the metabolisms of humans and animals such as chimpanzees, mice and rhesus monkeys. They focused on how much energy each species devoted to the brain and body.

The researchers analyzed more than 10,000 compounds known as metabolites, which are small molecules formed by, or necessary to, metabolism, such as sugars and fats; the building blocks of proteins, DNA and cell membranes; and chemical signals given off by cells. They investigated metabolite levels in the kidney, thigh muscle and three brain regions — the primary visual cortex, which is involved in vision; the cerebellar cortex, which helps coordinate muscular activity; and the prefrontal cortex, which plays a major role in complex mental behavior, decision making and social behavior.

The investigators next compared how much the metabolisms of these animals differed with how far apart these species are evolutionarily. By analyzing human and other genomes, prior studies revealed when the ancestors of humans and other animals diverged. For instance, the ancestors of humans and rodents diverged about 75 million years ago, while divergence happened about 25 million years ago with the ancestors of rhesus monkeys and about 6 million years ago with the ancestors of chimpanzees.

For the most part, the scientists found the levels of differences between the metabolisms of these species matched how far apart they were evolutionarily. (The further apart evolutionarily, the greater the metabolism differences were.) However, they discovered the rate of change in the metabolism of the human prefrontal cortex was about four times faster than that of chimpanzees. Even more surprisingly, the rate of change in the metabolism of human muscle was more than eight times faster that that of the chimpanzee.

“Even after so many years of research of humans and human evolution, we still can uncover large unknown differences between humans and other species,” said study author Philipp Khaitovich, an evolutionary biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Key Laboratory of Computational Biology in Shanghai.

Humans vs. chimps

To rule out the possibility that these changes simply reflected the modern human couch potato lifestyle, the scientists performed additional experiments on rhesus monkeys, moving them from a spacious countryside facility to small indoor homes and serving them fatty and sugary food for several weeks, all to imitate the environment and behavior of contemporary humans. These lifestyle changes had only a small effect on the metabolisms of the monkeys’ muscles.

“For a long time we were confused by metabolic changes in human muscle, until we realized that what other primates have in common, in contrast to humans, is their enormous muscle strength,” said lead author Katarzyna Bozek, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Key Laboratory of Computational Biology in Shanghai. [The 7 Biggest Mysteries of the Human Body]

Chimps are far stronger than humans. Kevin Hunt, director of the Human Origins and Primate Evolution Lab at Indiana University, once told of watching an 85-pound (38.5 kilograms) female chimp in Africa snap branches off an ironwood tree with her fingertips, one that took Hunt two hands and all his strength to break.

To see just how much stronger chimps and rhesus monkeys are than humans, the researchers conducted muscle strength tests that involved pulling weights upward. All of the human volunteers in the experiment — who included professional athletes — were outcompeted by their primate opponents by more than twofold.

“According to our results, an average adult chimpanzee is approximately two to three times stronger than an average adult human,” Khaitovich told Live Science.

The fact that metabolic changes in human muscle are paralleled by a drastic reduction in muscle strength leads the researchers to hint that human ancestors may have swapped brains for brawn.

“It is a very simple explanation, and it could be completely wrong,” Khaitovich said. “In evolution, however, simple explanations often work well.”

“Our work opens a door to further studies of human metabolic uniqueness,” Khaitovich said. “It is a huge field that is virtually untouched by scientists.”

The scientists detailed their findings online today (May 27) in the journal PLOS Biology.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

• 8 Humanlike Behaviors of Primates
• Precious Primates: Images of Chimeric Monkeys
• 3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain

Copyright 2014 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

While English food typically gets a bad rap, there are certain things that the English do really well when it comes to eating and drinking. They invented the Scotch Egg, they eat a lot of pie and they’ve made drinking outside part of their daily routine. London is home to some of the best restaurants in the world, other countries — especially our own — are imitating the English gastropub at every turn, and hearty, simple fair à la the English Sunday Roast is more fashionable than ever. More and more, the reputation of bad English food is unfair and outdated.

One basic, important food that the English do right is eggs. English eggs look and taste very different from American ones. The yolks are more orange and they taste slightly richer. They also taste fresher and more flavorful than your average American factory farm egg. (We’re not talking free range, organic eggs, but the kind that come from chickens stacked in tiny cages.) English eggs are so different than American ones that American eggs would actually be illegal in the UK — or anywhere in the EU — and vice versa.

The first distinction is that in the U.S., eggs must be washed in order to be sold commercially. In the UK, however, Grade A eggs — the kind sold in supermarkets — must not be cleaned. This is why you might purchase eggs with a little bit of grit and even an occasional feather when you’re in the UK. The idea behind the no-wash mandate is that it will encourage good cultivation on farms. “It’s in the farmers’ best interests then to produce the cleanest eggs possible, as no one is going to buy their eggs if they’re dirty,” Mark Williams, Chief Executive of the British Egg Industry Council told Forbes.

The USDA doesn’t see it that way. They’re concerned with the potential of fecal matter making it from the farm onto the egg, which, being a porous object, could transfer micro-organisms inside the egg. Eggs in the United States must be washed in water a minimum of 90°F. They must then be sprayed with a chemical sanitizer and dried to remove residual moisture that might enable bacteria to penetrate the egg shell. If any moisture is left on the egg, the potential for bacteria is much higher. The U.S. cleaning methods must be followed closely in order for them to work. With such a high risk of bacteria if cleaned improperly, the UK believes cleaning is more trouble than it’s worth, Forbes explains. Careless cleaning would be worse than no cleaning.

There is also a thin layer called the cuticle that naturally protects the egg, and the EU egg marketing regulations prohibit cleaning eggs in order to keep the cuticle intact. The cuticle protects from contamination and should be left on, they say.

Due to the different washing philosophies, the U.S. and UK also have different storage procedures. If you’ve ever bought eggs in Europe, you might have noticed that eggs are not refrigerated in the supermarket. In the U.S., however, eggs are always kept in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. The different methods stem from the different washing methods, and more specifically, the potential for moisture on the egg. In the UK, there is the worry that refrigerating eggs before consumers take them home will lead to a change of temperature drastic enough during transportation to cause moisture to collect. If eggs sweat when moved from a cold fridge to a warm car, for example, unnecessary bacteria could form.

Finally, there is the concern of salmonella — in the U.S., we are instructed to keep eggs in temperatures lower than 40°F because it decreases the risk of salmonella from spreading. In the UK, salmonella isn’t a widespread concern because British farmers have been vaccinating their hens against salmonella since the 1990s. While the “drop in salmonella infections in Britain was stunning,” according to the New York Times, the FDA has not yet mandated vaccination here in the U.S. Vaccination isn’t required by law by in UK either, but necessary if farmers want the red stamp of approval denoting their hens have been vaccinated.

The different washing and storing methods must affect the taste of the eggs, because if you’ve ever eaten an egg in England, it tastes pretty different! Have you ever had eggs from the UK? Could you taste the difference? Let us know!

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