Leap seconds are necessary to prevent atomic clocks from speeding ahead of solar time.
Governments are headed for a showdown after ten years of talks as they vote this week on an issue that pits technological precision against nature’s whims. The United States, France and others are pushing for countries at a U.N. telecom meeting to abolish the leap second, which for 40 years has kept computers in sync with the Earth day.
Continue reading… “Global showdown over push to abolish leap second”
Male sex life suffers if partner is too close to his friends.
Middle-aged men are more likely to have a poor sex life if their wife is close to their friends because it undermines their masculinity, a study has found.
Sex-selective feticide is warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation.
The world over the past three decades has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide. The feticide is implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female and occurs all around the world. In fact is is almost universally female.
Continue reading… “War on baby girls goes global”
Skunk Juice magnetic ear buds
At CES in Las Vegas this past week I “Got Hooked Up” with Skunk Juice magnetic connecting ear buds. These earbuds are great for kids or adults who want to hook up with their friends’ music or videos.(Pics)
Continue reading… “‘Get Hooked Up’ with Skunk Juice magnetic ear buds”
TP-LINK’S Dancebot
TP-Link had an incredibly articulated dancing robot as a means of getting people to visit their booth at the Consumer Electronics Show so they could promote their TL-WR700N mini wireless pocket router. (video)
Continue reading… “Incredible TP-Link dancing robot”
The researchers hope their discovery can be exploited to combat obesity by increasing people’s sensitivity to fat in their food.
Scientists thought the human tongue could detect only four basic tastes: sweet, sour, salt and bitter. Then a fifth was discovered, “umami” or savory. Now, researchers have identified a previously-unrecognized “sixth taste” – fat.
The study looked at whether the psychological perception of power may cause people to feel taller than they truly are.
The Swedish-born Chairman of BP Carl-Henric Svanberg touched off a firestorm of controversy in June 2010 with his remarks about his company’s reaction to the Gulf oil spill.
“… we care about the small people. I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don’t care. But that is not the case in BP. We care about the small people.
Continue reading… “Powerful people think they are taller than they actually are”
Miniaturized information storage in atomic-scale antiferromagnets. The binary representation of the letter ‘S’ (01010011) was stored in the Neel states of eight iron atom arrays.
After five years of work, IBM announced on Thursday that its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data. (video)
Continue reading… “IBM creates a bit of data using only 12 iron atoms”
Futurist Thomas Frey: After spending the past three days scouring the showroom floors at CES, watching people become overwhelmed by what they saw, I tended to be more underwhelmed by what I didn’t see.
Continue reading… “25 Technologies I Didn’t See at CES”
Eating 50g of processed meat a day can increase the risk of pancreatic cancer by 19%.
Eating two slices of bacon or one sausage a day can increase the risk of a deadly form of cancer by almost a fifth, according to a new study.
Continue reading… “Eating two slices of bacon everyday can increase risk of cancer by a fifth”
PowerTrekk
A Swedish company, myFC, has figured out how to power smartphones using a system that includes some water, a tray, a little round container, and an eyeglass case styled cover. The company is introducing its PowerTrekk system to Americans at the CES show in Vegas. PowerTrekk describes its charger as a pocket size, lightweight gizmo for users “who spend time away from the electricity grid.” Translation: If you are hiking over the weekend with no Starbucks or friend’s flat in sight, your phone can still get charged. (Videos and pics)
Continue reading… “PowerTrekk uses water to charge mobile phones”
Glucose monitoring is just one aspect of the iHealth package.
iHealth Lab, Inc. offers innovative, mobile personal healthcare products that make it simple and easy to test, track, graph and securely share health information. The iHealth Blood Pressure Dock is the first personal health management tool for iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. iHealth Lab continues innovating with its iHealth Scale, which measures, tracks and securely shares weight change over time. Plans to develop a suite of personal healthcare devices and applications designed for use with the Apple iOS mobile platform are under way…
Photos by Thomas Frey
Continue reading… “Advance your health with iHealth peripherals”