Facebook Shouldn't
Fact-Check
Jessica Lessin,
The New York Times
How should Facebook combat fake news? The company isn't sure yet, but one tech journalist argues fact-checking isn't the answer. The Information's editor-in-chief Jessica Lessin penn...
Researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind soft, flexible microfluidic device that easily adheres to the skin and connects wirelessly with a smartphone to measure the wearer's sweat to show how...
The Terminator may not feel remorse or pity, but does it even lift, bro? Researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a robot called Kengoro that can sweat, helping it get through 11 minute push-up sessions that would normally fry the moto...
What's the best way to promote a line of workout headphones? Well, if you're Urbanears, offering a "Limited Sweat Edition" that carries the perspiration of real human "movement makers" is how you go about it. The audio company teamed up with seven fo...
Design is more than just about making good looking things. It’s also a tool with great social potential. Fashion and apparel design make full use of that potential. The Gaussian shirt is a shirt that’s part fashion, part function. Its design helps the wearer overcome anxiety, stress and their unpleasant results. Armpit patches of a lighter color and special fabric are designed to make a shirt that looks good under normal circumstances, but when the wearer begins perspiring, the patches absorb the sweat and their color blends perfectly with the rest of the shirt. Designer Eason Chow shows how wet cloth appears a few shades darker than dry cloth. Using that observation to his advantage, his Gaussian shirt makes sure you look stylish no matter what!
Today on In Case You Missed It: Berkeley researchers developed a wearable sensor that can track the chemicals inside your sweat. The idea is that it can help identify dehydration, muscle fatigue and stress, though it could also help spot disease fl...
Plenty of fitness wearables track fundamentals like your heart rate or step count, but there's so much more to your body than that. What about your fluid levels, for example? That's where UC Berkeley might help. It developed a flexible sensor that me...
When robots rise up and rule humanity, they could add insult to injury by using us for physical labor and as a power source at the same time. A group of researchers at the University of California, San Diego led by Dr. Joseph Wang accidentally stumbled upon a way to generate electricity from human sweat.
The scientists were originally working on a small wearable sensor that could measure a person’s lactate levels. According to Phys.org, lactate is generated when the body needs to generate more energy, such as during exercise. A video report by the American Chemical Society states that lactate can also be used to monitor heart or lung conditions. However, current methods of measuring a person’s lactate levels are tedious and intrusive, such as taking blood samples to be sent to a lab for analysis.
Dr. Wang and his team’s sensor on the other hand only needs to be applied on skin, using temporary tattoo paper. The sensor contains an enzyme that takes electrons from lactate (which is excreted through sweat), generating an electrical current in the process. Thus the strength of the current is proportional to the amount of lactate in a person’s sweat. Realizing that they could use the current for another purpose, the researchers then modified their sensor to act as a battery.
Interestingly enough, in the researchers’ tests, the subjects who didn’t work out often produced more electricity than the gym rats. Dr. Wang and his team think that this is because people who get tired easily need their body to create extra energy sooner compared to people who workout often, thus creating more lactate and more current.
The moral here is that you should workout so that our robot overlords won’t turn you into a human battery. Then again, your uselessness on that front could be one more reason for them to get rid of you.
Would you drink your sweat? Obviously, we’d all choose to drink water if we had a choice. But if there’s no clean water, would you drink sweat instead?
The Sweat Machine was created by engineer Andreas Hammar upon the request of Unicef.
It essentially purifies human sweat to turn it into drinking water. It’s not being used as a tool to tackle water shortages, but as a means to raise awareness on the issue.
Unicef recently brought out the machine to offer a glass of fresh sweat to visitors and footballers at last week’s Gothia Cup soccer tournament.
The Sweat Machine uses water filtration technology called Membrane Distillation that was developed by HVR and The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It uses a plastic cassette where the sweat to be filtered is heated into vapor and made to circulate between two membranes. This separates non-volatile substances effectively.
Hammar explained that a sweaty t-shirt can provide about 10ml of water, or just about a mouthful. Just think of how many sweaty shirts you’d need for a full glass of water.
Valve has a surprisingly varied staff roster. Mike Ambinder is the company's very own experimental psychologist and he's been outlining some of Valve's work with biofeedback technology, including eye-motion controls for Portal 2 and perspiration-based gaming adjustments on Left 4 Dead. Mentioning these developments at the NeuroGaming Conference last week, Ambinder notes that both are still at an experimental stage, but that "there is potential on both sides of the equation, both for using physiological signals to quantify an emotion [and] what you can do when you incorporate physiological signals into the gameplay itself."
In Left 4 Dead, test subjects had their sweat monitored, with values assigned to how much they were responding to the action. This data was fed back into the game, where designers attempted to modify (and improve) the experience. In a test where players had four minutes to shoot 100 enemies, calmer participants would progress normally, but if they got nervous, the game would speed up and they would have less time to shoot. When it came to the eye-tracking iteration of Portal 2, the new controls apparently worked well, but also necessitated separating aiming and viewpoint to ensure it worked. With Valve already involving itself in wearable computing, it should make both notions easier to accomplish if it decides to bring either experiment to fans. Venture Beat managed to record Ambinder's opening address at the conference -- we've added it after the break.
Facebook Shouldn't
Fact-Check
Jessica Lessin,
The New York Times
How should Facebook combat fake news? The company isn't sure yet, but one tech journalist argues fact-checking isn't the answer. The Information's editor-in-chief Jessica Lessin penn...
The Terminator may not feel remorse or pity, but does it even lift, bro? Researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a robot called Kengoro that can sweat, helping it get through 11 minute push-up sessions that would normally fry the moto...
What's the best way to promote a line of workout headphones? Well, if you're Urbanears, offering a "Limited Sweat Edition" that carries the perspiration of real human "movement makers" is how you go about it. The audio company teamed up with seven fo...
Today on In Case You Missed It: Berkeley researchers developed a wearable sensor that can track the chemicals inside your sweat. The idea is that it can help identify dehydration, muscle fatigue and stress, though it could also help spot disease fl...
Plenty of fitness wearables track fundamentals like your heart rate or step count, but there's so much more to your body than that. What about your fluid levels, for example? That's where UC Berkeley might help. It developed a flexible sensor that me...
