Through a stroke of luck scientists discovered Frigate Birds routinely fly high enough to collect valuable data. Via Scientific American: They found that frigatebirds fly high enough to skim the edge of the planetary boundary layer, a low layer of the atmosphere that interacts with the surface of the Earth to influence clouds, winds and other weather-related factors. They can collect all kinds of useful atmospheric measurements when they’re outfitted with special sensors. Read more! Learn all about the Adafruit VL53L4CX Time of Flight Distance Sensor ..read more

A pair of Caltech research teams have created an entirely new kind of drug-delivery system, one that they say may finally give doctors the ability to treat cancer in a more targeted way. The system employs drugs that are activated by ultrasound—and only right where they are needed in the body. The system was developed in the labs of Maxwell Robb and Mikhail Shapiro. In a paper appearing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers show how they combined elements from each of their specialties to create the platform. Working collaborative ..read more

  Heart Rate Variability (HRV) has been shown to be an excellent biometric indicator of stress. A high HRV value implies a lower stress level. Athletes have known this for years and often check their HRV first thing in the morning to get an idea how recovered their system is from the previous days events. A low HRV value might indicate that one is getting sick, over trained, suffering from anxiety or just did not get enough sleep. This process of testing each morning is time consuming and erratic at best. It can be greatly improved if it was a passive process.   The HRV4Training ap ..read more

  Goals Could we really be just one year away from implanting a human with a 1,536 channel brain machine interface? Last weeks Neuralink announcement was primarily for recruiting, but Elon Musk and his team shared with the public a quantum leap in implantable brain technology. The first of Neuralinks three goals is to increase by orders of magnitude the number of neurons which you can read and write from. Considering that the current FDA approved deep brain stimulation device has only 10 electrodes and Neuralink has been testing configurations up to 3,072 electrodes they are on track. An ..read more

Elon Musk unveils Neuralink’s plans for brain-reading ‘threads’ – The Verge. Elon Musk’s Neuralink, the secretive company developing brain-machine interfaces, showed off some of the technology it has been developing to the public for the first time. The goal is to eventually begin implanting devices in paralyzed humans, allowing them to control phones or computers. Mrs. Brisby, a widowed mouse, lives in a cinder block with her children on the Fitzgibbon farm. She is preparing to move her family out of the field they live in as plowing time approaches, however her son Timothy has fallen il ..read more

Muse 2 The Muse 2 EEG meditation device started shipping in January of 2019. It features a sleek design and is thinner than previous models. The new unit offers body biofeedback in the form of breath, heart and posture. It still makes use of 7 electrodes (2 forehead, 2 behind the ears and 3 reference) as EEG sensors to provide real-time brainwave feedback. This device falls into a strange category of being used as an inexpensive research grade tool. The 2014 Muse had been shown to be 95% as effective as a $77,000 actiCHamp EEG in a 10/10 electrode configuration. Muse Direct My favorite ..read more

In late May of 2019 Oura the company that makes an excellent sleep tracking ring added a meditation feature to their iOS App. This new meditation feature is called “Moment” and it collects heart rate data while providing various add-ons to your daily meditation in the form of a timer, voice guided experience and background noises. Researchers and studies have shown that a mindfulness practice can have a positive effect on sleep. Being able to look back at each meditation and compare your initial stress level to the final resulting relaxation level can help develop the best routine for your me ..read more

Ben Jabituya was looking at commercial products for sleep monitoring using EEG, and thought to take a look at more DIY based approaches using some open source sensor boards and a basic microcontroller. I had a Feather M0 Adalogger around from a previous project so decided to go with that. By all accounts the ATSAMD21 chip has a decent ADC and the SD card meant I can record and process data between the board and my PC easily. It’s also pretty small and has a connector for a battery so can be built into a wearable pretty easily. The code used on the Feather and a Python script to generate a s ..read more

Stella Harry Lee has prototyped this design, via thisismold.com The Microgreen Shoe is a prototype designed by New York-based material designer, Stella Harry Lee. By contemplating how individuals can re-evaluate the function of the materials they surround themselves with, Lee created a sneaker which grows organic materials through the use of bacterial-grown synthetic material. Through everyday use and exposure to the elements, plants such as micro-greens and radish can be grown on the shoe’s uppers. Although many fashion brands have reoriented their goals to become more “sustainable,” not ma ..read more

Remember the scene from the Matrix where Neo unlocks his full power, and the world around him is revealed as lines of code running in all directions? What if you could see the world around you in this way? Recent breakthroughs in nanopore sequencing, driven by developments in open-source software, have made it possible to greatly reduce the time it takes to decode a genome, shrinking what used to be a 15-day process to three days or less. It wasn’t so long ago that decoding a genome took years! To understand the code behind these new techniques, which have been dubbed UNCALLED, we chatte ..read more