New App to rank relationships
Researchers have launched a new app that monitors reaction and behaviour of users while interacting with others. lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald are the creative minds behind this innovative app called ‘Pplkpr’ (People Keeper) that observes the negative or positive impact of the people by recording the feelings of the user while interacting, Mashable.com reported.
McDonald, a co-developer said that this app helps in making healthy decisions that usually people are unable at, but it will not enforce the user for a aim like other lifestyle applications, instead they observed in their research that there was a positive behavioural changes that happened and users were up to make good relations with everyone they met.
This application works with any Bluetooth 4.0-enabled tracker that incorporates GPS and heart-rate monitoring, such as the “Polar H7 chest band” and the “Zephyr HxM.”
Eyeglasses convert to sunglasses
Anew type of eyeglass lens that rapidly darkens when you want it to — eliminating the need to passively wait for light changes in your surroundings — is soon to become a reality, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. There are considerable limitations to the transitional, or photochromic lenses currently on the market, which fail to darken inside cars or under baseball caps.
Furthermore many brands let the harmful rays seep through. It also takes time for them to clear up when the sun disappears, which poses inherent safety implications. A small electrical charge adds the magic touch to the Georgia Tech research team’s new development, which switches from clear to dark and back again in seconds, enabling the capacity for fine color tuning.
Any color in the entire range of hues in which sunglasses are commercially available is possible, according to the researchers, who say their method could be easily applied for retail versions.
Smartphone users are emotional
People are not just dependent on their smartphone they are emotionally attached to it as well. Gisli Thorsteinsson of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik and Tom Page of loughborough University, UK, said today it is considered the norm for people to repeatedly and distractedly to check their phones, not for missed calls, but for the countless notifications on social sites.
To to know whether attachment to one’s smartphone has a serious emotional element, the researchers used a questionnaire given to 205 smartphone users in the age range 16 to 64 years from the UK, Hong Kong, China, Canada, Australia, Peru and the US and a case study to draw a preliminary conclusion. They found that people do indeed grow emotionally attached to their smartphone, or at least, the connectivity and the technology that the device facilitates.
Whales Can Hear Through bones
Using computer simulation of a fin whale head, scientists have discovered that the skulls of at least some baleen whales have acoustic properties that capture the energy of low frequencies and direct it to their ear bones. Baleen whales, also known as mysticetes, are the largest animals on earth, and include blue whales, minke whales, right whales, gray whales and fin whales.
These whales can emit extremely low frequency vocalisations that travel extraordinary distances underwater. The wavelengths of these calls can be longer than the bodies of the whales themselves. “Bone conduction is likely the predominant mechanism for hearing in fin whales and other baleen whales. This is, in my opinion, a grand discovery,” said lead researcher and biologist Ted W Cranford from San Diego State University (SDSU).