Smartphone apps are now an integral part of our daily lives. We already use them to check in on our bank accounts, keep in touch with friends and play games but how about controlling our sofas? The brand new Aladin app by ROM will take the term ‘smart home’ to a whole new level by allowing you to control your sofa positions with a simple touch of a button. Your ALADIN Sofa is capable of things that other sofas are not capable of! After configuring your sofa via our app, you can simply s...

As humans, we sniff out different scents and aromas using chemical receptors in our noses. In technological gas detection, however, there are a whole host of other methods available. One such method is to use infrared lasers, passing a laser beam through the gas to an adjacent separate detector, which measures the degree of light attenuation it causes. TU Wien's tiny new sensor now brings together both sides within a single component, making it possible to use the same microscopic structure for ...

Approximately 2% of Americans have a visual disability— vision that cannot be corrected even with the strongest prescription—and in developing countries where infectious disease or untreated cataracts are more common, the percentage is often higher. Many different diseases and conditions can cause low vision, including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and cone dystrophy (a genetic mutation affecting the cone cells of the retina). People with low vision find everyday act...

One may not think that the humble toothbrush is a particularly glamorous health device, but if you scour the Dentistry category here on Medgadget, you’ll quickly discover how important oral health is to your overall health. So important is dental health that October in America has been designated National Dental Hygiene Month. To help commemorate this important month, we were given two electric toothbrushes that have evolved into the “smart” category. These smart toothbrushes feature Bluetooth t...

Recent research suggests that nanotechnologies may lead to the development of novel cancer treatment. Gold nanoparticles with their unique physical and chemical properties hold great hopes for the development of thermal-based therapies against human malignancies. This review will focus on various strategies that have been developed to use gold nanoparticles as photothermal agents against human cancers. Pancreatic cancer begins in the tissues of your pancreas — an organ in your abdomen that li...

Team of scientists, led by the University of Southampton, have produced a fast nanoscale optical transistor using gold nanoantenna assisted phase transition. The work, published in the journal Light, Science and Applications, opens up new directions in antenna-assisted switches and optical memory. Small nanostructures that can interact strongly with light are of interest for a range of emerging new applications including small optical circuits and metasurface flat optics. Nanoantennas are ...

Phenotypic plasticity can be defined as the ability of one genotype to produce more than one phenotype when exposed to different environments. Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to change its phenotype in response to changes in the environment. With climate change forcing plant and animal species to adapt, shape-shifters are taking a unique approach that involves changing their physical appearance without having to migrate or evolve in order to cope, new research shows. A ...

Start, locate and control your car from virtually anywhere with your iPhone, or Apple Watch! “Making the cloud-connected car a reality”. You can remote start or lock and unlock your car just by pushing a button on your iPhone or iPod Touch; using the exciting new Viper SmartStart app from Directed Electronics, the leader in vehicle security and remote start. The simple graphical interface gives you control over the following features of your installed Viper remote start or security/remote sta...

Did you know that your brain processes information in a hierarchy? As you are reading this page, the signal coming in through your eyes enters your brain through the thalamus, which organizes it. That information then goes on to the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain, where populations of neurons respond to very specific basic properties. For instance, one set of neurons might fire up because the text on your screen is black and another set might activate because there are vertical l...

From the journey of protons racing through the world’s largest particle collider in Europe to up-close views of the Big Bang and emergent universe, and the nearly mile-deep descent to an underground experiment in South Dakota, a new planetarium show is designed to immerse audiences in the manifold search for dark matter. Michael Barnett, a physicist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), imagined these scenes coming to life inside planetarium domes...

A team of Harvard scientists led by Venkatesh Murthy, professor of molecular and cellular biology, tackled a seemingly complex phenomenon in their investigation: how mice can distinguish scents from one another. Using a machine-learning algorithm, Murthy and his colleagues “trained” a computer to recognize the neural patterns linked to various scents, and to identify specific odors in a mixture of smells. The study, published in the journal Neuron, focused on creating an algorithm for a compu...

  Colorectal cancer is the second most common cancer. New treatments tend to be in high demand because current treatment options offer limited efficacy and can be ineffective in up to 70% of patients, in part due to genetic variation, rendering personalized medicine to be increasingly important. Argonaut Therapeutics plans to reboot the cancer cell so that it undergoes the body’s natural cell death process, known as apoptosis. Essentially, their therapies will target a “switch” that p...

For years, doctors have had reliable charts of the body and its organs -- blood circulation, digestive system, nerves and the like -- but always with one frustrating grey zone: the brain. On Wednesday, a team of neuroscientists, computer specialists and engineers said they had compiled what "could be the most accurate map yet" of the mysterious expanse between our ears. In the process, they discovered nearly 100 previously unreported regions of the organ's wrinkly outer layer -- called the...

Relying on a single router is like asking a loud speaker in your living room to provide great sound throughout your home. It’s simple physics: WiFi waves don’t go through walls well and have an even harder time climbing stairs. Ever tried to stream a show from your bedroom when your router’s in the office downstairs? It’s a buffering nightmare. To solve this, you need multiple access points — devices that broadcast WiFi — distributed throughout your home. That’s what you’ll find in office bui...

A new development in the MAVEN mission has shown an incredibly detailed ultraviolet glow from the Martian atmosphere. The pictures display dynamic behavior which was previously invisible, and shed light on how winds circulate at high altitudes. Dayside UV images display shifts in ozone amounts over various seasons and clouds which form over Martin volcanoes. According to Nick Schneider of the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder who said in a NASA...

Do you ever wish you had a smart lock that would protect your belongings in any cabinet, drawer, or closet? Smart Cube is just that—it turns your phone, or rather the Smart Armor App, into a key and can allow a user to keep everything from harmful products (such as kitchen chemicals and medication) to personal documents, secure. Smart Cube is targeted towards a wide audience, from parents with babies who wish to protect their children from potentially harmful products, to business owners to r...

The iRBeacon is the one, simple solution that will rid you of the cluster of remotes - and it is capable of much more. The iRBeacon is the first step towards an intelligent home. It is a smart, elegant and tiny device which combines the infrared technology with the latest Bluetooth Low Energy (very energy efficient, more than a year working time with a single CR2032 coin battery), so the iRBeacon accompanied with the app (iOS, Android) can smart up your devices and replace your remotes in jus...

Meural Canvas, is a Wi-Fi-enabled digital canvas built to showcase artwork. Each frame gives you instant access to 20,000+ works of art and photography, and it’s easy to upload your own. Meural's proprietary technology renders each image as lifelike and textured as a real painting. Desktop digital picture frames have largely faded away, a side effect of the ubiquity of smartphones. Now the next thing to go digital is the artwork on your wall, such as the latest connected-art canvas from New Yor...

The normally diurnal birds don't need time to adjust their circadian clocks before departing for their winter habitats Each year, billions of songbirds set out on autumn evenings to fly to their wintering grounds, necessitating a change of daily rhythm for the usually diurnal animals. Scientists had always assumed that the birds gradually adjusted their rhythm, but new technology has now enabled researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, with international partners...

NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland has signed its first commercial Startup licensing agreement with AirFlare LLC in Nashville, Tennessee to productize the Glenn-patented Portable Unit for Metabolic Analysis, or PUMA. This agreement makes AirFlare the go-to source for the public to access NASA technology in the fitness market. Startup NASA is a new opportunity offered by NASA’s Technology Transfer Program. Startup companies can apply to license patented NASA technology with no up-front pa...

This technology is a device that uses electrical activity to facilitate the wound healing process while protecting the wound. The bandage is made of an electroactive material (pictured above) that is stimulated by the heat of the body and the pressure of cell growth, thus no external power source is required. NASA has developed a high-tech electroactive bandage that creates an electric charge to help promote the healing process of wounds. Electroactive material is so sensitive that a push ...

Millions of people worldwide need glasses or contact lenses to see or read properly. We introduce a computational display technology that predistorts the presented content for an observer, so that the target image is perceived without the need for eyewear. By designing optics in concert with prefiltering algorithms, the proposed display architecture achieves significantly higher resolution and contrast than prior approaches to vision-correcting image display. We demonstrate that inexpensive ligh...

Most people notice that they naturally experience different levels of sleepiness and alertness throughout the day, but what causes these patterns? Sleep is regulated by two body systems: sleep/wake homeostasis and the circadian biological clock . When we have been awake for a long period of time, sleep/wake homeostasis tells us that a need for sleep is accumulating and that it is time to sleep. It also helps us maintain enough sleep throughout the night to make up for the hours of being awake...

Smart kitchen gizmo that lets you cook like a pro. Cluck is a smart temperature sensor and kitchen timer. It works with the pots and pans you have. Just bring your smartphone to monitor your foods more conveniently. Despite all of the technical advances in the kitchen, cooking remains an activity which requires time and a good degree supervision. As a result, people are often unable to easily monitor certain cooking activities while moving about in the home. Often, home cooks must leave an ac...

Astronauts know their bodies will be tested during time spent on the International Space Station, from the 15 daily sunrises and sunsets wreaking havoc on their circadian rhythms to the lack of gravity that weakens bone density and muscle. NASA is working to counteract these otherworldly challenges to enable long-term human exploration of space. For example, special lighting helps with sleep, and rigorous exercise helps keep astronauts’ bodies strong. But, frustratingly, bone loss continue...

Turn Your Smartphone into Any Kind of Sensor It started when NASA answered a call for a tool to detect dangerous gases and chemicals with a smartphone. The result became a smartphone-linked device that can do, well, just about anything someone can build a sensor for. The NODE+ platform can be outfitted with an array of different sensor modules for detecting light, gases, temperature, motion and more. It can store data or transmit it to a smart device using Bluetooth wireles...

NASA Ames Research Center received an unusual call for help: a local woman was still bleeding weeks after giving birth, despite every attempt to halt it — including nine surgeries. Her condition, known as postpartum hemorrhage, can result from a number of different complications during childbirth. Left untreated, it can prove fatal. Ames researchers and engineers proposed applying pressure to the woman’s entire lower body using an inflated anti-gravity suit, or G-suit — like tightly wrapping ...