Time for a road trip. You punch the destination into your GPS and choose the suggested route. But is this shortest route the safest? Not necessarily, according to new findings. Dominique Lord and Soheil Sohrabi, with funding from the A.P. and Florence Wiley Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M, designed a study to examine the safety…

New software ‘streams’ data and code resources to an app from a cloud server when necessary, allowing the app to use only the space it needs on a phone at any given time. New software «streams» data and code resources to an app from a cloud server when necessary, allowing the app to use only…

The time a person spends on different smartphone apps is enough to identify them from a larger group in more than one in three cases say researchers, who warn of the implications for security and privacy. They fed 4,680 days of app usage data into statistical models. Each of these days was paired with one…

Human-computer interaction researchers have developed a new prototype that can monitor people’s brain signals while they are coloring mandalas and produce real-time feedback on a peripheral display to represent levels of mindfulness. The researchers, who specialize in thinking about how new computing technologies can be designed to help people, believe systems like these could be…

A new study showing that computers can predict what paintings people will like offers insight into how our brains make aesthetic judgments. The new study, appearing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, utilized Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to enlist more than 1,500 volunteers to rate paintings in the genres of impressionism, cubism, abstract, and…

Athletes still have the edge over action video gamers when it comes to dynamic visual skills, a new study shows. For an athlete, having strong visual skills can be the difference between delivering a peak performance and achieving average results. «Athletes involved in sports with a high-level of movement — like soccer, football, or baseball…

Academics have established a method of turbocharging desktop PCs to give them the same capability as supercomputers worth tens of millions of pounds. Dr James Knight and Prof Thomas Nowotny from the University of Sussex’s School of Engineering and Informatics used the latest Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to give a single desktop PC the capacity…

Researchers have developed a technique that could allow expectant parents to hear their baby’s heartbeat continuously at home with a non-invasive and safe device that is potentially more accurate than any fetal heartrate monitor currently available in the market. The device, which uses the same commercial sensors used in smartphones to horizontally or vertically orient…

Using a new microspectroscopic technique, scientists have found that steam disinfection of silicone-rubber baby bottle nipples exposes babies and the environment to micro- and nanoplastic particles. The health and environmental risks of these very fine particles are still unknown, but microplastic pollution is a growing global concern on land, in the seas and in human…

Impressive athleticism was on display during the Winter Olympics, but being at the top of one’s game doesn’t necessarily protect against digestive distress resulting from exercise. Surprisingly, some people are adding cocoa to their diets to reduce these symptoms. Now, researchers report that long-term daily consumption of cocoa doesn’t appear to improve exercise-related digestive issues…