Hasta La Gadget!

One thing that I’ve personally experienced from living the always-connected 21st century lifestyle – your gadgets can stress you out. Whether it’s the pressure that you constantly need to check email, or that your boss might text you at three in the morning, it’s become almost impossible to distance yourself from the stressors of work and life if you’re carrying a smartphone. Now, a group of technologists at Stanford are working on a program to help decrease the stress caused by technology – and by life in general.

The Stanford Calming Tech Center is focused on research and development of technologies which can help us better manage our stress, while decreasing the likelihood that gadgets become an added source of stress. I was recently introduced to this budding program while attending Further with Ford, an annual event which shares not only the auto manufacturer’s vision for the future, but provides access to technology and design thought-leaders to share their insights.

The Calming Tech program was founded by Neema Moraveji, who says that the stresses caused by our gadgets can affect your breathing. There’s even evidence that shows that checking your email can cause the same sort of irregular breathing caused by our fight-or-flight mechanism. So how can we decrease our stress levels in the connected world? While you could lock your devices away, that’s not always practical.

What Moraveji proposes is that we leverage our gadgets to help us live more consciously – through practices such as breathing exercises and meditation. His research shows that the introduction of “calmors” such as music, intentional distractions, and moments of mindfulness can make a difference. Among their projects, the Calming Tech team is working on a system called BreathAware, a biofeedback device that pairs with your wireless device to help you manage your breathing throughout the day.

In addition, the team is working on ideas for user interfaces which reduce stress, as well as tools which let users know how frequently they’re performing common tasks like reading emails. The lab also offers a regular course called “d.compress – Designing Calm,” which encourages students to create interactive technologies which reduce, rather than introduce stress.

It’s a very interesting field of study, and one well worth pursuing in my opinion. While I’m all for pervasive technology and connectivity, it is important that we don’t let them add new forms of stress to our lives.

SLOrk’s not the most elegant name, so far as acronyms go, but Stanford’s weird and wonderful Laptop Orchestra wears it pretty well. The group dates back to 2008, an outgrowth of the school’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, culled together from a mishmash of parts, including car speakers, pillows and salad bowls, led by future Smule co-founder Ge Wang. Fittingly, the project made an appearance at a party thrown by the darlings of the music app scene, and we took the opportunity to speak with club member (and computer music doctoral student), Spencer Salazar, who told us how SLOrk transformed a golfing game peripheral into an instrument for strange and ethereal music creation. Check out that video after the break.

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Source: SLORK

When constructing computer circuits, most folks start with silicon and metal, but not the researchers at Stanford. The boffins in Palo Alto want to build computers out of living tissue, and to that end they’ve created a biological transistor, called the transcriptor. Transcriptors substitute DNA for semiconductors and RNA for the electrons in traditional transistors — essentially, the transcriptor controls the flow of a specific RNA protein along a DNA strand using tailored combinations of enzymes. Using these transcriptors, researchers built logic gates to derive true/false answers to biochemical questions posed within living cells. Using these bio-transistors, researchers gain access to data not previously available (like whether an individual cell has been exposed to certain external stimuli), in addition to allowing them to control basic functions like cellular reproduction.

This new breakthrough — when combined with the DNA-based data storage and a method to transmit DNA between cells the school’s already working on — means that Stanford has created all the necessary components of a biologic computer. Such computers would allow man to actually reprogram how living systems operate. Of course, they haven’t built a living genetic PC just yet, but to speed up its development, the team has contributed all the transcriptor-based logic gates to the public domain. Looking to build your own biologic computer? A full explanation of the transcriptor awaits below.

Filed under: Science

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Via: The Verge

Source: Stanford University, Science Magazine

The modern day jet engine may be powerful enough to shuttle travelers across a continent in just six hours but it’s also unbearably loud—for both the ground crews that work around them and residents within earshot of airports. And while aircraft engineers are developing quieter designs, building and testing these hushed prototypes can run into the six figures. But with the help of Livermore National Labs’ supercomputer and some open-source modeling software, commercial airliners may soon be whisper quiet. More »

Exploring micro-gravity climates like Mars, which has just 38 percent of the Earth’s force, or its moon, Phobos, which has 1000 times less gravity than that, can be a challenge for rovers that rely on wheels or skittering legs for traction. That’s why Stanford researchers plan to survey the Martian moon with an fleet of bounding, spiked spheres. More »