Hasta La Gadget!

By Steve Keating

OMAHA, Nebraska, June 29 (Reuters) – Michael Phelps, who came out of retirement in 2014 and rededicated himself to the pool, punched his ticket to the Rio Games on Wednesday by winning the 200 meters butterfly at the U.S. Olympic trials.

Cheered on by a capacity crowd that included his fiancée and their infant son, Phelps stormed to the wall in one minute, 54.84 seconds to become the first American male swimmer to make five Olympic teams in his career.

“That means the most tonight,” an emotional Phelps said about his remarkable feat. “I think with everything that has happened and being able to come back that was probably harder than any swim I have had in my life.”

Already the most decorated Olympian of all-time with 22 medals, including 18 gold, Phelps will head to Rio looking to reclaim the Olympic title he won in 2004 and defended in 2008 but surrendered to South African Chad le Clos in 2012.

“I didn’t feel good the first two swims, didn’t really feel good tonight but getting on the team was the most important thing and that was the only thing I had to do tonight,” said Phelps. “I tried to take it out and just prayed to God I was going to be able to hang on.”

Phelps has trimmed back his program for Rio, scratching from the 100 and 200 free, but will try to qualify in the 100 butterfly and 200 individual medley.

He will have little time to savor the moment as he will be back in the pool early on Thursday for the preliminary heats in the 200 IM.

“I’ve been in the sport a long time and just being able to finish how I want to is so important to me and getting on this team is what I wanted to do,” said Phelps.

(Editing by Frank Pingue)

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Rejoice, PlayStation Vue subscribers! Sony’s live television service has arrived on Android, allowing you to watch live TV from the comfort of your tablet or smartphone. This follows the recently announced Roku channel, and greatly expands the number of devices where PlayStation Vue can be watched. In addition to the new PlayStation Vue app, the service on PS3 and PS4 … Continue reading

If you want to escape the sneezing, congestion and itchy eyes of spring, some great new warriors can bring on the adios chorus for you! Most recently, my family and have felt the spring allergies arriving with the blooming of the lovely bushes and trees.

Imagine the ability of elements, including good fatty acids, pepper pigment and ginger, helping to ease that spring congestion. Great news that common foods contain these elements and are easily accessible for those in need.

The latest allergy busters can be found closer to you than you think… Avocado, ginger and bell peppers may be the natural remedies for you. Even better that these remedies are available at your local grocery and natural food stores!

The first of these is the avocado* and can be found at just about every food store. The power of the avocado is delivered through its ability to boost the immune system. Other great fatty acid sources come from fish, nuts and flax. Just a few ounces of these foods daily is sufficient.

The second powerful food comes in the form of peppers. Pepper as in bell peppers*, whether they are green, red, yellow or orange, deliver allergy busting power (up to 40%). This comes from the pepper pigments providing the vibrant colors. The amount recommended is a daily serving of 2/3 cup of any one of these peppers.

A third effective natural food source to battle spring allergies is ginger.** Some easy ways to have ginger are by drinking ginger tea, adding ginger flavor to meals and eating a ginger candy. Ginger acts to suppress the immune system reaction to major spring allergens present in the greenery and flowers.

Now comes the fun part – Create a tasty, “adios to spring allergy treat “

Avocado and Red Pepper Guacamole

3 avocados (peeled and mashed)
Add:
fresh cilantro 1/3 cup (diced),
lime juice( 1 tbsp),
garlic minced 1 tsp.
red pepper 2/3 cup (cubed),
salt (to taste)
Chill your homemade guacamole for one hour.

Top it off with some Ginger Tea!! Enjoy!!

*Public Health Nutrition Journal (study co-author Joachin Heinrich)
**Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry 2016
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If you’ve got an entire collection of limited edition kicks, you’re going to want to know about BMW’s and Puma’s new X-Cat DISC sneakers. Find out when they come out (hint really soon), where to buy them and what they’re based on.

By Matthew Mulrennan

This post by Matt Mulrennan originally appeared in National Geographic’s Ocean Views.

Our ocean remains the greatest mystery on planet Earth. The ocean takes up 70% of our blue planet, yet we’ve only explored 5% of it. The ocean suffers from many urgent grand challenges – we don’t know enough about the ocean, too much pollution is going in, and too many fish and other animals are coming out.

Thankfully, ocean-related technology is riding the innovation wave, and we’re seeing some really amazing breakthroughs in ocean health and exploration.

This World Oceans Day, we’re celebrating eight amazing innovations that are helping to save our ocean.

Please share your favorite ocean innovations with #TeamOcean.

8. Snotbot

The “Snotbot” can hover above a whale to collect mucus from a whale’s blow to gain valuable biological information like stress hormones, without stressing the animal.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and drones are improving biological research, monitoring coastal waters to scan for illegal activity and enforcing marine protected areas. They can also be used to make epic videos of a stampeding ‘megapod’ of dolphins.

7. Fishface

Fishface by the Nature Conservancy is an affordable fish identification tool being used for population assessments in Indonesia.

The technology that automatically tags you in a picture on Facebook is being applied to counting and describing fish stocks. Facial recognition and visual computing software are revolutionizing the process of counting fish and fisheries managers are using this information to make fisheries more sustainable.

6. Whale Alert App

The Whale Alert 2.0 App alerts mariners about the potential presence of whales to avoid deadly ship strikes, a leading cause of death for these protected species.

Whale Alert provides recommended routes to avoid whales and allows you to report when whales are in distress, such as being entangled in fishing gear. New innovative apps allow people to track marine debris, check fisheries regulations, visualize pollution and contribute observations to citizen science.

5. SkySails

Cargo ships with high altitude sails, like SkySails, can save 10-30% on daily fuel use.

About 90% of all global trade uses large cargo ships. The fuels burned by the global shipping fleet are a major contributor to climate change and ocean acidification, which are already harming marine life. But green shipping initiatives are saving fuel through improved hull design, breakthrough propellers, and simply slowing down ships.

4. Global Fishing Watch

Global Fishing Watch is a platform to monitor global fishing activity run by SkyTruth, Oceana and Google. It pools together historical data from a satellite-based vessel monitoring system and uses an algorithm to assess where fishing has occurred.

With advancement in tools like this for global fisheries monitoring, the writing is on the wall for taking down lots of illegal ‘pirate’ fishers. Argh.

3. Saildrone

Saildrone is an autonomous wind-propelled sailing vessel that can conduct scientific missions independently in rough weather for months.

95% of the ocean is still largely unexplored, and unmanned vessels are transforming oceanography by cutting down on expensive research ships that cost upwards of $50,000 per day to operate. Increasing autonomy for ocean exploration is a goal of the $7 million Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, and team registration is still open!

2. Edible Six-Pack Rings

Saltwater Brewery has developed an edible and biodegradable six-pack ring out of wheat and barley from their brewing process. Nom.

There are 5 trillion pieces of plastics in the ocean causing $13 billion per year in damage to marine ecosystems. To solve ocean plastic pollution globally requires disruptive “moonshot” technologies in materials design for more benign packaging products, a circular economic approach that never allows plastics to become waste, as well as basic waste management in more cities and countries to stop the leakage of plastics into the ocean.

1. Live Dives

The Fish Eye Project is broadcasting a live SCUBA dive online today June 8th. You can tune in and submit questions to the diver via #LiveDive.

We are the first humans that can watch things happening live in the ocean from our computers or phones, and interact with the divers and robots. This is great for ocean exploration, and expanding access to the ocean to exponentially more people. The cutting edge in this field is high-definition, 360-degree cameras propelling footage immediately into virtual reality headsets from hard to reach habitats like the deep-sea. These interactive technologies will hopefully usher in a wave, better yet a tsunami, of new ocean explorers and innovators.

Matthew Mulrennan is the lead of the Ocean Initiative at XPRIZE – a commitment to conduct five ocean XPRIZE competitions, and put us on a path to making the ocean healthy, valued and understood.

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