Month: March 2016

If you've been dying for an Android Wear watch that can withstand the most treacherous adventures, your search ends soon. Casio announced that its rugged Android Wear smartwatch, the Smart Outdoor Watch WSD-F10, will be available to purchase on March 25 at its website, Amazon, Rei, and Google's online store.

Casio first unveiled the WSD-F10 at CES and made it clear that the company isn't targeting the majority of people interested in Android Wear. The WSD-F10 is made specifically for the most outdoorsy users, featuring a 1.3-inch, 320 x 320-pixel dual-layer LCD display designed to be readable even in bright sunlight and a fairly chunky case that's water-resistant up to 50 meters. The case is also military-tested to withstand shocks, vibrations, and other disturbances that could come while trekking in the wilderness.

The watch will include an app called Tools that provides nature-based updates including sunrise and sunset times, altitude and atmospheric pressure measurements, and tide graphs. These stats are meant to help adventurers on their trips, as are the physical buttons on the side of the device that can be used to control the watch even while wearing gloves. In addition to the standard features of Android Wear, you'll also be able to track basic fitness including steps and distance and specific-activities like trekking (hiking), cycling, and fishing.

(credit: Aaron Gustafson)

New details of the Paris attacks carried out last November reveal that it was the consistent use of prepaid burner phones, not encryption, that helped keep the terrorists off the radar of the intelligence services.

As an article in The New York Times reports: "the three teams in Paris were comparatively disciplined. They used only new phones that they would then discard, including several activated minutes before the attacks, or phones seized from their victims."

The article goes on to give more details of how some phones were used only very briefly in the hours leading up to the attacks. For example: "Security camera footage showed Bilal Hadfi, the youngest of the assailants, as he paced outside the stadium, talking on a cellphone. The phone was activated less than an hour before he detonated his vest." The information come from a 55-page report compiled by the French antiterrorism police for France’s Interior Ministry.

Will the future of doping involve zapping your brain with electrical current? If one believes what San Francisco-based company Halo Neuroscience is claiming, it might well be so.

The firm manufactures devices for transcranial direct stimulation (tCDS)—namely the usage of low-current electrical pulses to fire up certain areas of the brain. The practice is thought to bolster specific neurons and create additional neural connections, improving some cognitive abilities—such as memory, concentration, and learning skills.

Halo’s first product Halo Sport, released last month, focuses specifically on boosting sport performances by delivering 2.0mA pulses to athletes’ motor cortex, a brain area in charge of movements and coordination. The wearable looks essentially like a pair of headphones, but if you look at the underside of the headband you'll see that it's lined with spiky foam-clad electrodes. According to Halo, if an athlete wears them while training, their neurons will react much faster, maximising each session’s gains.

(credit: Andrew Williams)

Headphone amps are usually pretty simple things. You get an input or two on the back, a headphone input on the front, and a volume knob. That's all you really need, particularly if you're not looking for one with a dedicated DAC (digital-to-analogue converter).

The Audio-Technica AT-HA5050H, which gets bonus points for sounding like an awesome website that we all know and love, is well beyond the curve. Far from being just ready for so-called "high-res" audio and expensive headphones, it's an amp that can satisfy those with headphone collections valued at more than a London flat deposit, provided you're willing to fork over a cool £3,500 (MSRP $6,000) to buy one. And that's only if you manage to find one in stock at all—the unit I looked at was apparently the only one in the UK at the time.

The AT-HA5050H is a headphone amp that assumes you have good knowledge of how headphones work, that you know about impedance, and that you know about the difference between a DSD audio file—that's Direct Stream Digital, the format used by Super Audio CDs that stores audio at a 2.8224MHz sampling rate—and a "normal" one.

In its sixth year, the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s “Cool Science Image” contest has lived up to its name.

As the name implies, the contest strives to pick out awe-inspiring images of nature or science composed by creative and technically skilled students, researchers, and faculty at UW-Madison. Of the 93 entries, which included 86 stills and seven videos, a panel of judges selected 10 images and two videos. The winners were announced late last week.

The subjects of the winning entries include microscopic impressionism and strobing biochemistry, state lakes snapped by satellites, and the sun’s path from solstice-to-solstice, tracked with a homemade camera.