Month: July 2016

(credit: Amazon)

Amazon's annual 24-hours of deals, dubbed Prime Day, is coming soon on July 12 and the company is incentivizing voice-shopping with its virtual assistant Alexa. On Prime Day, those with an Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or Amazon Tap can use Alexa to shop exclusive deals only available while voice shopping. Customers will also receive $10 off their first purchase of $20 or more when they use Alexa from now through July 12.

On July 12, customers can ask, "Alexa, what are your Prime Day deals?" to get the full list of exclusive savings. Amazon has been tight-lipped about the exact deals of Prime Day so far, but in a press release, the company did detail that some of the exclusive deals will be on smart home products, toys, Amazon devices, and more. For the past few days, Amazon has been releasing new deals every 24 hours leading up to Prime Day; some of today's deals include 35 percent off a Polaroid Cube 1080p action camera and 66 percent off an Anker 20000 mAh PowerCore portable charger.

Amazon has been pushing voice shopping using Alexa for a while now, so it's fitting that the company would hide some deals away to entice Alexa users who may have never shopped using the virtual assistant before. Keep in mind that Amazon's Prime Day deals are only available for Prime members, as are the Alexa-exclusive deals as well. Would-be buyers still have time to sign up for a free trial of Amazon Prime before July 12 to get in on the sale.

Enlarge / The cyborg, showing off its gold skeleton. (credit: Karaghen Hudson and Michael Rosnach)

Biology has given robot makers lots of good ideas about how to solve certain problems, like how to squeeze into tight spaces, how to conserve energy for flying, and how to move around without a skeleton. But now it's giving us the raw materials for building a robot—or perhaps more properly a cyborg. Researchers have not only based the design of their robot on animals like skates and rays, but have used muscle cells to power its movements and light-sensitive proteins to replace its circuitry.

Skates and rays (technically batoid fish) are distinct from other cartilaginous fish in that they have a largely flat body plan and generate propulsion by undulating their bodies rather than by flapping fins. This undulation is a very simple way to generate locomotion, but it's highly energy-efficient and lends itself to soft-bodied robotics. It's also relatively easy to steer, simply by alternating the frequency of undulations on the right and left sides of the body. So the builders (a huge US-Korean team) of the new robot used this as inspiration for their new design.

To mimic this type of fish, the authors built the body out of a flexible polymer called PDMS. Internally, they added a flexible metallic skeleton made of gold so that once an undulation was done, the body would flex back into its original shape.

(credit: Dennis van Zuijlekom)

Ideas can be powerful drugs. If a person is simply convinced that a pill or treatment is going to yield real results, it can—even if that pill or treatment is completely bogus. Those results can be pretty substantial, too. Mental maneuvering, or placebo effect, can improve pilots’ vision, help people lose weight, and even up their IQ by a few points. And, according to a new study, it may also be able to help patients manage a chronic illness.

In an experiment in which researchers duped participants about how much time had passed, the researchers found that participants’ blood sugar levels tracked with perceived time rather than actual time. That is, blood sugar dropped faster when the participants thought more time had passed. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, support the idea that mindsets and psychological processes, like the abstract internal representation of time, can have profound influence over what our bodies do, the authors conclude.

Moreover, it raises the idea of using the mind to help manage certain chronic conditions, particularly type 2 diabetes, which causes periodic and dangerous rises in blood sugar levels. “Official standards for care and treatment of diabetes make no explicit mention of the influence of subjective cognition on diabetic metabolism, but our results indicate otherwise,” the authors argue. They suggest that mindfulness, coping strategies, and trained cognitive styles may prove useful in controlling blood sugar levels in further studies.

(credit: Deric Lostutter)

Federal prosecutors in Kentucky have formally indicted the man who revealed himself as “KYAnonymous” more than three years ago.

On Thursday, Deric Lostutter was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the notorious anti-hacking statute that dates back to the 1980s, among other accusations.

As Ars reported previously, in late 2012, after The New York Times published an account of a horrific rape against a teenage girl in Steubenville, Ohio, an online vigilante campaign began against a few local officials believed to be too close to the suspects, some of whom were high school football players.