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(credit: Valentina Palladino)

We're still trying to figure out what we want our wearables, particularly wristbands, to do for us. There are a number of devices including some smartwatches and fitness trackers that are truly multipurpose, but we have yet to see what features will stick in the long run. Now, a company called Mighty Cast is taking a slightly different approach to smart wristbands with its Nex Band—it's made to do pretty much anything that an existing fitness tracker or smartwatch can already do. It monitors activity and receives smartphone alerts, but you can personalize notifications and actions as much as you want by "hacking" its small, removable modules, creating numerous possibilities for new features.

The Nex Band has been floating around for the past couple years, but it has the chance to entice the most enterprising wearable users by giving them more personalization options than any other wristband. Mighty Cast bills it as a hackable smart band because you can assign functions to each of its five "mods" that are all independent from each other and can relate to different things. You might tap on of your mods to turn on your living room lights, while the mod next to it flashes when you receive an e-mail from your boss. A nearly infinite number of functions can be customized from within the Nex Band's companion app, and it's also compatible with all of IFTTT's control combinations.

When I sat down with Mighty Cast's CEO Adam Adelman to learn more about the Nex Band, I was initially confused as to how it worked. However, you don't need to be a developer or have special tech skills to "hack" the band—it's all done from the companion app. Once you choose which mod you want to customize, a basic hack has a two-step "when X happens, do Y" formula. It's really similar to how IFTTT sets up its automated actions by integrating social media, smartphone alerts, IoT products, and other devices to work more for you. For example, you could program a hack that say "when I double-tap, play My Workout Playlist." Then when you completed that action on that mod, your smartphone will start to play that particular playlist.

(credit: CNN)

Key evidence that helped convict two British men last week for terrorist offences was reportedly obtained from a locked phone using a simple but highly effective ruse.

According to CNN, which cited a source close to the investigation, undercover police officers visited Junead Khan, 25, of Luton posing as company managers and asked to check his driver and work records.

"When they disputed where he was on a particular day, he got out his iPhone and showed them the record of his work. The undercover officers asked to see his iPhone and Khan handed it over," CNN reported. At that point they apparently arrested Khan and changed the password settings on the iPhone to prevent it from becoming locked.

Google nearly had to pay $85 million over a 1996 patent said to cover Android's push notifications. (credit: Johan Larsson)

In 2014, an East Texas jury ordered Google to pay $85 million to SimpleAir, a "patent troll" company with no business beyond enforcing its patents. It was a massive victory for the company's broad claim—that Google's use of push notifications in Android phones infringed its US Patent No. 7,035,914.

SimpleAir's victory, the largest patent verdict ever won against Google, has since fallen apart. Google appealed the ruling, and on Friday a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held (PDF) that the lower court judge didn't interpret the patent claims correctly and that Google does not infringe.

The ruling is another signpost that while low-level patent trolling is thriving, the era of large patent troll victories may be waning. The chances of well-resourced tech companies like Google, if they're willing to fight through an appeal, appear better than ever.

Pieces of Japan's Hitomi satellite are seen tumbling through the Orion constellation Sunday night. (credit: William Keel)

The prognosis wasn't good last week when the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, lost communication with its new Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellite. However, there was some hope a few days later when the space agency reestablished intermittent contact with the spacecraft orbiting some 580km above the Earth.

Astronomers have since been observing the satellite, originally known as Astro-H, as it has orbited around the Earth. The photos with this story, captured by University of Alabama astronomer William Keel on Sunday evening, appear to show different pieces of the spacecraft catching the Sun as they slowly rotate. The brightest moments are probably caused by solar panels spinning into view. The pattern of brighter and then fainter light suggests at least two large pieces, with different periods, are tumbling out of control.

One astronomer who has been tracking Hitomi closely, Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted on Sunday evening, "Sadly, I now believe that the radio signals were the dying sighs of a fatally wounded Astro-H."

The Xbox One controller and other accessories are hidden in a secret compartment under the tracking camera. (credit: Kyle Orland)

An unknown number of Oculus VR customers have been forced to wait a little longer for the Rift virtual reality headset, after Facebook said it had been hit by "an unexpected component shortage"—thereby delaying some of its shipments.

Oculus—in an update—promised to, er, update customers who have been affected by the hold-up within the next week.

Facebook—which last week began delivering the virtual reality units trumpeted by boss Mark Zuckerberg as "the most social technology ever"—hasn't revealed how many orders were hit by the shipments delay. Oculus said in an e-mail to customers on Saturday:

(credit: Public Domain)

Battling bulge can often be a frustrating fight—with tedious calorie counting, rigorous exercise regimens, and invasive and expensive stomach-shrinking surgeries. But a new method to offload the flab promises to be a quick and simple treatment that cuts cravings and leads to sustainable weight loss.

The non-surgical procedure works using tiny, injectable beads that restrict blood flow to the part of the stomach that releases the hunger-sparking hormone, ghrelin. In a pilot clinical trial with seven severely obese patients, the method successfully curbed hunger and trimmed an average of 13.3 percent of excess weight after six months.

Though the clinical data is still preliminary and in a small number of patients, doctors are hopeful that the method, called bariatric arterial embolization (BAE), will be a safe and effective tool for slashing obesity numbers. "These early results demonstrate that BAE appears to be effective in helping patients lose a significant amount of weight in the short and intermediate term," lead author Clifford Weiss, associate professor of radiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. said in a statement. Weiss and colleagues presented the clinical results so far at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 2016 Annual Scientific Meeting in Vancouver.