Hasta La Gadget!

Living with pollution – that seems to be what most of us are doing these days, especially for those of us who happen to reside in cities that are clogged up with cars and a blanket of haze that does not seem to lift – ever. Well, it seems that is the price to pay for “progress”. Here is a rather strange device that looks as though it would be better suited for medieval times – the Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer, which is a helmet that lifts up a person’s lips mechanically. The reason for doing so? No, it is not meant to help you make a career out of funny faces to entertain the crowd, but rather, to detect the levels of air pollution in your immediate vicinity at a far higher level of accuracy.

The Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer works this way – it gained inspiration from observing horses, pulling back their lips to show their front teeth. Horses do that not to smile, but rather, to sniff out chemicals in the air, and the Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer’s designer, Susanna Hertrich, figured out that humans might want to follow suit.

There will be relevant sensors in the Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer which are capable of detecting carbon dioxide levels in the air. All collected data will then be forwarded to an Arduino board, which in turn figures out whether CO2 levels are at a high enough level to be dangerous. This will in turn make gears in the headset to move, lifting the hooks attached to the user’s upper lip, which is a warning to the user that the air is highly polluted.

Detect Air Pollution Levels With This Helmet , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The Gmail app has a pretty decent design and its more than capable of handling email. A few months back Google launched another app called Inbox that changes the way email is managed on a mobile device. The app still requires invites before it can be used and today is the first full day of Google providing invites for Inbox. Anyone can get an invite today if they send in their requests on time.

In the past Google has opened up invites to people for a few hours. This is the first time that it is guaranteeing invites to anyone and everyone who sends in a request. Be sure to send your request between now and 9am PST tomorrow.

The process is pretty easy. Simply send a blank email to inbox@google.com from a personal Gmail account. Inbox currently only works with personal Gmail accounts.

If you use email provided by an organization or school using Google Apps for Work you won’t be able to use Inbox.

Once Google receives the request it guarantees that an invite will be sent. However since its definitely going to receive a lot of requests it may take some time before invites are rolled out for all those who want one.

Rest assured if you send the email within these 24 hours you’re certainly going to get one.

Google Inbox Invites Available All Day Today , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

If you’ve ever found yourself in a new restaurant or a trendy tourist spot, you might’ve looked up Yelp or Foursquare — or, heaven forbid, used Google — on your phone to find out where the best view is or whether or not you should order the shrimp….

This morning Visceral Games announced that the next release of Battlefield Hardline will be in the form of a new Beta. Visceral Games suggests that “we consider this to be a real beta – we need your feedback on balance, economy, and to help identify and iron out the last remaining bugs.” This beta will be open to all those … Continue reading

BY LAURA SECORUN PALET, OZY

These days, thanks largely to Google Earth, it seems not an inch of this planet is left unexplored or a single treasure left undiscovered. But that’s just not true. Some of the world’s most incredible riches, from pirate treasures to royal jewels, are still out there somewhere, lost, waiting to be found.

Some of them are legendary and a mere mention spurs the imagination: the Holy Grail, sought after for centuries by devout men hoping to find the cup that once held the blood of Christ. Or El Dorado, the mythical Incan city paved with gold and unimaginable treasure that drove waves of conquistadores mad with greed.

Today still, the art of treasure hunting survives, and few treasures are more appealing than shipwrecks. Probably the largest treasure among them is La Flor de la Mar — The Flower of the Sea — a Portuguese frigate that set sail from Malacca, Malaysia, in 1511 carrying the largest treasure ever assembled in Portugal’s naval history. The ship was caught in a violent storm in the Strait of Malacca and shipwrecked on the reefs of Sumatra, splitting in two and spilling its precious contents into the waves.

Spain’s 1715 Treasure Fleet is also a dream trophy. At the height of its empire, Spain assembled one of the richest treasure fleets ever seen: 11 ships, all filled to the gunwales with silver, gold, pearls and emeralds from the New World. The ships left Cuba just before hurricane season in the hope of deterring pirates. It worked, but a few days later a storm sank all 11 ships, sending thousands of sailors and tons of treasure to the bottom of the sea. Seven of the ships have been located, but only a small percentage of the bounty has been recovered.

Another, more macabre, form of treasure hunting is the quest to discover the resting places of history’s greatest figures. The graves of Egyptian queen Nefertiti and the Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan have never been found, though they are both believed to hold great riches. Another much-sought-after tomb is that of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor. It’s actually been found — protected by the famed Terracotta Army — and is thought to contain priceless artifacts. But excavation is slow because the soil surrounding the burial area has a high concentration of toxic mercury that could poison the water supply if mishandled.

The Nefertiti bust is pictured during a press preview of the exhibition ‘In The Light Of Amarna’ at the Neues Museum in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, pool)

When we think about long-forgotten treasure we imagine one thing: jewels. Take King John’s Crown Jewels. This corrupt ruler of England truly loved ostentatious displays of wealth. But in 1216, his majestic crown jewels were lost when a flood washed away carts transporting them. John died several days later, and the jewels were never found.

When the Bolsheviks stormed the czar’s palace in 1918, eight priceless Fabergé eggs — made with precious stones, expensive metals and precise engineering — went missing from a collection of 50. While they have never been found, rumor has it that several of them made it to the U.K. and the U.S.

The Faberge egg “The Coronation Egg”, 1897, is displayed at an exhibition in the museum Bellerive in Zurich, Switzerland, Wednesday, June 7, 2006. (AP Photo/Keystone, Alessandro Della Bella)

But many of the world’s most-sought-after treasures are much larger. This is the case of the legendary Amber Room, a room lined with panels of amber, gold and mirrors that was given to Peter the Great as a gift from Friedrich Wilhelm I in 1716.

How could a room go missing? Well, in 1943 German soldiers dismantled the room after invading Russia, packed it into 27 crates and shipped it to Kaliningrad. World War II Allied bombing raids are said to have destroyed it, though some evidence suggests that it was actually shipped out of the city in the following months and hidden along with other Nazi treasures.

More Nazi valuables could lie on the bottom of Lake Toplitz in the Austrian Alps. During a hasty retreat, Nazi officers dumped a handful of mysterious iron crates into the lake. So far the treasure has eluded divers trying to reach it because of a dense layer of sunken logs halfway to the bottom of the lake.

Of course, many treasure hunts are based on rumor and hearsay. And as the years go by, and facts mix with legends, it becomes hard to tell truth from tale. Yet recent examples show there’s still hope for the aspiring Indiana Jones.

In June 2011, billions of dollars worth of gold and priceless jewels were discovered beneath the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in India. And this year, the discovery of a 19th-century shipwreck off the coast of South Carolina uncovered millions of dollars worth of gold coins and ingots.

Granted, searching for Nefertiti’s tomb might not be a reliable retirement plan, unless you don’t need the money anyway and are just in it for the fun.

A June 27, 2011 photograph of the 16th-century Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum, the capital of the southern state of Kerala, India. (AP Photo)