Hasta La Gadget!

There are a number of wearable devices on the market these days which can monitor your activity when you exercise, but they’re all pretty much glorified motion sensors, which extrapolate your activity level based on movement. Now, a team of engineers from MIT is working on a new kind of wearable sensor which could not only monitor motion, but vital health statistics.

The Amiigo wearable sensor is not only capable of detecting movements and gestures, but also your heart rate, blood oxygen levels and skin temperature. All of these data points can help you monitor the effectiveness and safety of your workout routine. In addition, the Amiigo monitor is waterproof, so it can even go in the swimming pool, making it a great gadget idea for triatheletes and winter sports buffs.

The device will come with two sensor components – one worn on the wrist, the other clipped onto the shoe. A companion smartphone app will track all of your workouts and physical activities in detail, as well as enable competition and sharing with friends. A set of proprietary discrimination and machine learning algorithms can even discern exactly what sort of activities you’re partaking in and record these automatically. For instance, it could identify the difference between a bicep curl and a pull-up.

The guys behind the Amiigo also plan on offering an SDK for the device, which would allow for the creation of custom software which could leverage the data from the sensors – whether for other fitness or health applications, or even for gaming.

The Amiigo will be launching a crowdfunding campaign at the end of October, and you can sign up to be notified about it over on their website.

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, fall is upon us. The leaves are already changing colors here in Chicago, a constant reminder that winter is coming. These special paper leaves are designed to work as thermometers, providing a vague sense of the weather by changing colors.

Inspired by actual leaves, designer Hideyuki Kumagai created these paper leaves which are embedded with a chemical that changes color based on temperature. When the leaf turns brown, it’s cool out, when it’s green, it’s temperate, and when it’s yellow, it’s hot.

These leaves come in packs of either 5 larger or 8 small and sell for $22(USD) over at Re!Ex!!Japan!!!. If you happen to live in Japan, I’m sure you can get them for less – or you could just install a weather app on your phone and watch the actual leaves change colors.

In an effort to make flying in the cheap seats a bit more comfortable, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics have completely redesigned airplane seats giving passengers control over their individual climates. So one day fiddling with a vent might not be the only futile way to get comfy. More »

You may have noticed Google’s forecast feature on your HTML5-capable smartphone browser — simply typing “weather” into the search field brings up a basic real-time temperature tool, complete with hourly and five-day forecasts for your current location. That feature has been around in one form or another since the beginning of last year, but as of this week, it’s made its way to tablets, too. Web weather is entirely browser based, and you can bring it up in just the same way as on a smartphone — confirm that your GPS is enabled, then head to Google.com and type “weather” — you’ll be rewarded with a 10-day forecast, complete with temp, precipitation, humidity and wind speed readouts. The tool is interactive, so while you may only be able to view a few days of weather at once, you can simply slide along the timeline to see more. The same applies to the hourly forecast as well. There’s nothing to download or subscribe to for this one, and it’s available right now at Google.com.

James Trew contributed to this report.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablet PCs, Internet, Software

Google adds browser-based weather feature to tablets with temperature, wind and precipitation originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s summer in Texas, and I’ve lived here my entire life. That means I know a thing or two about hot. A group of physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory has landed themselves in the Guinness Book of World Records for creating a temperature that makes a Texas summer sound like winter in the Arctic Circle.

The physicists created the highest man-made temperature in history at 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers were able to produce such a massive temperature only for a fraction of a second using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the lab. The physicists sent gold ions flying in opposite directions around the 2.4-mile collider at a velocity near the speed of light.

The gold ions collided inside one of the six test chambers and the collision produced a substance known as quark-gluon plasma. This is described as a nearly frictionless liquid is about 250,000 times hotter than the core of the sun. It still feels hot here in Texas, regardless.

[via LA Times]