Track Your Workout Like a Pro Athlete With This Fancy Smartwatch

Polar

It takes different strokes to rule the wrist-mounted computer world. Your basic activity tracker won’t run apps or send your heartbeat to your boo, while a full-featured smartwatch isn’t something you’d wear in the pool or during Tough Mudder training. And if you’re a pro athlete, or just super into tracking your stats while working out, a watch made for that purpose can set you back as much as $500.

The Polar M400 is a more affordable option built for data-crunching strenuous workouts. For around $200, it offers many of the same functions the company’s higher-priced V800 does. This durable watch is waterproof down to 100 feet, and it’s loaded with its own GPS tracker and sensors that measure your distance, altitude, and speed. It also goes a lot further than your average fitness tracker by connecting to Polar’s chest-mounted heart-rate monitors via Bluetooth.

Along with your activity, the M400 also tracks sleep patterns, and delivers all that information to the Polar Flow app for iOS and Android. Once all that data is on your phone, it can also be used by RunKeeper and other popular workout apps.

With the watch’s GPS functions turned on, the M400 is rated for about 13 hours of battery life, according to Polar. It’s not exactly designed to be worn as an everyday watch—at least not with the GPS turned on—so those 13 hours of battery life should stretch over a couple weeks of one-hour daily workouts.

The higher-end, double-priced V800 has a few features that make it a better pick for some athletes. Although both the new M400 and V800 can connect to Polar’s heart-rate monitors, the V800 is the only one of the two that can track your heart-rate while swimming. The V800 also has a tracking mode built for triathlon training, as well as a more durable stainless steel and Gorilla Glass build.

Unless you’re a triathlete or swimmer, the M400 looks like the best fit. Shipping the second week of October, it will cost $180 without the separate heart-rate monitor or $240 as a bundle with Polar’s H7 heart-rate sensor.

Fantasy Nobel Laureates, 2014 Edition

Could this object – an organic light emitting diode – win its inventors a Nobel prize? (Image: Wikimedia/meharris)

With the advent of autumn, a time-honored tradition is ushered into the public consciousness – a chance to draft a team of top-notch talent and see how you stack up against your friends. That’s right, it’s time to assemble your fantasy team.

Your Nobel Laureates fantasy team, that is. The coming season of scientific awards will be recognizing some of the most transformative work from the last several decades, and the team at Thomson Reuters has your cheat sheet. By combing through their Web of Science database, analysts are able to spotlight work and researchers that have been cited with high frequency by other studies over the years. “As imitation is one of the most sincere forms of flattery,” notes Dasil Moftah, Thomson Reuters’ president of IP and Science, “so too are scientific literature citations one of the greatest dividends of a researcher’s intellectual investment.”

It’s scientific populism, the suggestion that citations are proportional to importance, but the method appears to be relatively robust – after all, the Thomson Reuters crew has gotten it right 35 times since 2002. This year, the data pointed to 22 researchers – all men – in the fields of physiology / medicine, physics, and chemistry. And here they are, coming to a fantasy draft board near you:

Physiology or Medicine

James Darnell, Jr (Rockefeller University); Robert G. Roeder (Rockefeller University); Robert Tjian (University of California, Berkeley)

For their work on eukaryotic transcription and gene regulation. The pathway from genetic code to physiological reality is a mysterious road with many potential digressions. In eukaryotic cells, the process is even more complicated than in single-celled prokaryotes, with an array of regulating molecules and feedback loops.

David Julius (University of California San Francisco)

For his studies of the molecular basis for pain. In a quest to determine how molecular interactions interact with nerve endings, Julius and his group have experimented extensively with hot and cold sensations, using capsaicin (the “spicy” ingredient in peppers) and menthol (the cooling component of mint), respectively.

Charles Lee (Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine); Stephen Scherer (University of Toronto); Michael Wigler (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)

For their discoveries linking gene copy number variation with certain diseases. Genetics dogma suggests that you inherit one copy of every autosomal gene from each parent, but these researchers pieced together a befuddling puzzle to conclude that this is not always the case. In fact, wide variations in the numbers of gene copies exist at hundreds of sites throughout the human genome, leading to a cascade of effects that may be associated with diseases including breast cancer and spinal muscle atrophy.

Physics

Charles Kane (University of Pennsylvania); Laurens Molenkamp (University of Wurzburg); Shoucheng Zhang (Stanford University)

For research on the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators. The specialized quantum spin Hall effect is a state of matter in which two electrons’ magnetic field and spin orientations are coupled. Kane, Molenkamp, and Zhang established much of the theoretical framework for the effect, while ushering in a more applied exhibition of the phenomenon based on semiconductor physics.

James Scott (University of Cambridge); Ramamoorthy Ramesh (University of California Berkeley); Yoshinori Tokura (University of Tokyo)

For their contributions to ferroelectric memory devices and multiferroic materials. Flash memory plays a key role in many of our technological devices, but ferroelectric-based technologies may ultimately prove to be preferable for certain applications. Using an iron-based layer rather than a dielectric one, these materials require less power, and process information faster, and can withstand many more cycles of writing and erasing data.

Peidong Yang (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

For his work on nanowire photonics. Manipulating optical energy is a critical capability for computers and communications tools; doing so with devices smaller than the wavelength of the light you’re trying to alter is a promising but extremely challenging corollary. Yang and his team have made progress with miniscule components called “nanoribbons” that can guide light despite the unwieldy scale differential.

Chemistry

Charles Kresge (Saudi Aramco); Ryong Ryoo (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology); Galen Stucky (University of California Santa Barbara)

For the design of functional mesoporous materials. Mesoporous objects have pores between 2 and 50 nanometers wide. These parameters are proving extremely useful in chemical and alternative energy industries for directing reactions that require even dispersion and particular surface area-to-volume ratios

Graeme Moad (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, CSIRO); Ezio Rizzardo (CSIRO); San Thang (CSIRO)

For their development of the reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization process. RAFT polymerization controls the otherwise rapid and chaotic process of free radical reactions, using a certain class of intermediary molecule (thiocarbonylthio compounds, if you must know) and reaction conditions in a reversible process. This approach is able to accommodate a wide range of precursor molecules – styrenes, acrylamides, acrylates – and can generate several different macro-scale architectures, making it one of the most versatile and valuable modes for industrial polymerization techniques.

Ching Tang (University of Rochester / Hong Kong University of Science and Technology); Steven Van Slyke (Kateeva)

For inventing the organic light emitting diode (OLED). OLEDs are comprised of a light-emitting organic compound layer sandwiched between two electrodes, one of which is typically transparent. These optical and electrical properties allow for many of today’s digital displays, such as computer screens and mobile phones.

Regulatory thermometer that controls cholera discovered by microbiologists

Karl Klose, professor of biology and a researcher in UTSA's South Texas Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, has teamed up with researchers at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany to understand how humans get infected with cholera, Their findings were released this week in an article published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cholera is an acute infection caused by ingestion of food or water that is contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. An estimated three to five million cases are reported annually and 100,000-120,000 people die from cholera infections every year. Cholera patients suffer from dramatic fluid loss and can lose up to 40 liters of fluid from their body in just a few days.

Klose and his collaborators discovered that Vibrio cholerae, which normally lives in oceans and rivers, senses a shift in temperature as it enters the human body through a mechanism called a Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) thermometer. The thermometer detects the higher body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and then turns on the virulence factors that lead to cholera. Klose's laboratory showed that interfering with the thermometer prevents the bacteria from causing disease, suggesting possible therapeutic outcomes from this research.

The research collaboration stemmed from a long friendship between Klose and Franz Narberhaus, who trained as microbiologists together at U.C. Berkeley 25 years ago.

"The temperature shift is one of the signals that the bacterium uses to turn on the virulence factors, such as the cholera toxin, that cause the disease," said Klose. "We have shown that the bacteria's thermometer controls temperature-dependent expression of the virulence factors. They only express them when they are at body temperature and not at ocean temperature."

"We found that if the RNA thermometer is prevented from working correctly and detecting the right temperature, the bacteria won't cause any disease at all. The organisms will just pass right through the body," explained Klose. "If you can figure out how to disrupt the RNA thermometer in some manner, then you may have a therapy against this disease."

Klose says the long-term goal is to come up with intervention strategies against cholera. Understanding exactly how the bacterium controls the expression of the virulence factors is one step forward in trying to intervene during cholera epidemics.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Texas at San Antonio . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Drones Get OK from Feds to Shoot Movies in US Airspace

A Parrot drone. Image: Parrot

The federal government has taken a step toward opening US skies to commercial use of drones, allowing several movie production companies to use flying bots on their shoots.

On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that six companies have been granted exemptions from current regulations that, the agency says, ban most commercial use of unmanned aerial vehicles.

In a conference call with reporters, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta called the exemption process a roadmap for other applicants seeking to use drones for other purposes, from crop inspections to pipeline patrols. “This process opens up a whole new avenue,” Huerta said. The approved exemptions represent the first of 40 petitions under consideration by the FAA.

The exemptions allow the companies to use the drones for any kind of video production, but only under strict conditions. Drone operators must have pilots’ licenses, and the drones cannot leave the pilots’ line-of-sight while airborne. The drones cannot go higher than 400 feet, and they can only fly over closed sets. What’s more, filmmakers must still apply to the FAA for approval to operate in specific areas.

Safety Struggle

The restrictions reflect the long struggle to reconcile the many potential uses of inexpensive unmanned aircraft with concerns over safety and privacy. Determining how to integrate drones with the national air traffic control system is also proving complicated. The FAA is under congressional mandate to craft rules for the civilian use of drones in US airspace by September 2015, though an audit predicted the agency is likely to miss that deadline.

In the short term, these difficulties mean that one of the most powerful features of drones—the ability to pilot themselves over long distances without human observation or control—won’t be available to commercial users. “We’re a long way from having autonomy in civil airspace,” said attorney Greg Cerillo, a partner at Wiley Rein, who heads the Washington, D.C., law firm’s aviation practice.

Safety concerns in particular also mean drones are less likely to be approved anytime soon for uses that would require them to fly over populated areas, such as delivery or news-gathering. “For the most part, you’re dealing with image capture, heat sensing, chemical sensing. You’re not dealing with moving objects from point A to point B yet,” Cerillo said.

More Drones, More Jobs

Still, some in the drone industry are hailing the FAA’s decision as a move in the right direction. “I am happy for the news and expect to see many more of these granted,” said Jesse Kallman, head of regulatory affairs at Airware, a San Francisco startup that makes software for commercial drones.

The exemptions will also mean more domestic business for the motion picture industry, said former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, now chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, which worked with the FAA to craft the new rules.

Productions ranging from Skyfall to The Smurfs had to go outside the U.S. to shoot in countries where drone regulations were more lax. “The decision today allows more of that production now to occur in the United States,” he said, adding that drones would open up creative doors for filmmakers. “This is great news for all of us.”

Eyeless Mexican cavefish lost metabolic circadian rhythm [Life Lines]

Image of eyeless Mexican tetra fish from http://ift.tt/ZSS8EI by H-J Chen.

The metabolism of most animals follows a circadian rhythm that differs between the day and night. Mexican cavefish living in constant darkness, lost this circadian rhythm some time ago. In a newly published study in PLOS ONE, researchers compared the metabolic rate of both cave- and surface-dwelling Mexican tetra fish (Astyanax mexicanus). They hypothesized that since the fish living in each location naturally experience differences in food, predation as well as exposure to daily light fluctuations, they might also have different metabolic needs. When they exposed surface-dwelling fish to constant darkness, the circadian rhythm in terms of metabolism was consistent with oxygen demands normally seen in the daytime resulting in the expenditure of 38% more energy than the cave-dwelling fish. In contrast, the eyeless cave-dwelling fish do not have a metabolic circadian rhythm which the researchers say conserves 27% of their energy in comparison to surface fish. In a quote published in Discovery News, lead study author Dr. Damian Moran said, “These cave fish are living in an environment without light, without the circadian presence of food or predators, they’ve got nothing to get ready for, so it looks like they’ve just chopped away this increase in anticipation for the day.” The study authors suggest that conserving energy is important for life in a cave where food may be scarce.

Sources:

Moran D, Softley R, Warrant EJ. Eyeless Mexican Cavefish Save Energy by Eliminating the Circadian Rhythm in Metabolism. PLOS ONE. September 24, 2014. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107877

Discovery News

Hackers Are Already Using the Shellshock Bug to Create DDoS Botnets

Paul M. Gerhardt

With a bug as dangerous as the “shellshock” security vulnerability discovered yesterday, it takes less than 24 hours to go from proof-of-concept to pandemic.

As of Thursday, multiple attacks were already taking advantage of that vulnerability, a long-standing but undiscovered bug in the Linux and Mac tool Bash that makes it possible for hackers to trick Web servers into running any commands that follow a carefully crafted series of characters in an HTTP request. The shellshock attacks are being used to infect thousands of machines with malware designed to make them part of a botnet of computers that obey hackers’ commands. And in at least one case the hijacked machines are already launching distributed denial of service attacks that flood victims with junk traffic, according to security researchers.

The attack is simple enough that it allows even unskilled hackers to easily piece together existing code to take control of target machines, says Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer for the web security firm Veracode. “People are pulling out their old bot kit command and control software, and they can plug it right in with this new vulnerability,” he says. “There’s not a lot of development time here. People were compromising machines within an hour of yesterday’s announcement.”

Wysopal points to attackers who are using a shellshock exploit to install a simple Perl program found on the open source code site GitHub. With that program in place, a command and control server can send orders to the infected target using the instant messaging protocol IRC, telling it to scan other networked computers or flood them with attack traffic. “You install it on the server that you’re able to get remote command execution on and now you can control that machine,” says Wysopal.

The hackers behind another widespread exploit using the Bash bug didn’t even bother to write their own attack program. Instead, they rewrote a proof-of-concept script created by security researcher Robert David Graham Wednesday that was designed to measure the extent of the problem. Instead of merely causing infected machines to send back a “ping” as in Graham’s script, however, the hackers’ rewrite instead installed malware that gave them a backdoor into victim machines. The exploit code politely includes a comment that reads “Thanks-Rob.”

The “Thanks-Rob” attack is more than a demonstration. The compromised machines are lobbing distributed denial of service attacks at three targets so far, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs, though they haven’t yet identified those targets. The researchers at the Russian antivirus firm say they used a “honeypot” machine to examine the malware, locate its command and control server and intercept the DDoS commands it’s sending, but haven’t determined how many computers have already been infected.

Based on his own scanning before his tool’s code was repurposed by hackers, Graham estimates that thousands of machines have been caught up in the botnet. But millions may be vulnerable, he says. And the malware being installed on the target machines allows itself to be updated from a command and control server, so that it could be changed to scan for and infect other vulnerable machines, spreading far faster. Many in the security community fear that sort of “worm” is the inevitable result of the shellshock bug. “This is not simply a DDoS trojan,” says Kaspersky researcher Roel Schouwenberg. “It’s a backdoor, and you can definitely turn it into a worm.”

The only thing preventing hackers from creating that worm, says Schouwenberg, may be their desire to keep their attacks below the radar—too large of a botnet might attract unwanted attention from the security community and law enforcement. “Attackers don’t always want to make these things into worms, because the spread becomes uncontrollable,” says Schouwenberg. “It generally makes more sense to ration this thing out rather than use it to melt the internet.”

The Bash bug, first discovered by security researcher Stéphane Chazelas and revealed Wednesday in an alert from the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT), still doesn’t have a fully working patch. On Thursday Linux software maker Red Hat warned that a patch initially released along with CERT’s alert can be circumvented.

But Kaspersky’s Schouwenberg recommended that server administrators still implement the existing patch; While it’s not a complete cure for the shellshock problem, he says it does block the exploits he’s seen so far.

In the meantime, the security community is still bracing for the shellshock exploit to evolve into a fully self-replicating worm that would increase the volume of its infections exponentially. Veracode’s Chris Wysopal says it’s only a matter of time. “There’s no reason someone couldn’t modify this to scan for more bash bug servers and install itself,” Wysopal says. “That’s definitely going to happen.”

Amazon Takes A Big Step Toward Competing Directly with UPS

Packages slide down chutes, separated by delivery method, at an Amazon fulfillment center in Phoenix. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

This past Christmas, when delivery delays left many Santas empty-handed, Amazon’s biggest vulnerability was exposed: it doesn’t control the last, most important step.

Amazon is brilliant at getting orders out its own doors, but with rare exceptions, it relies on third parties—mainly UPS and FedEx—to get those orders onto the doorsteps of customers. Over the past year, however, Amazon has been quietly building out its own capacity to do more of what the big carriers do—a logistics upgrade that takes the company one step closer to taking over the entire delivery process for itself.

In a blog post on Thursday, ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo describes Amazon’s new “sortation centers” that funnel packages into zones based on zip code. In the past, Amazon simply loaded all orders onto various trucks operated by various carriers and left the more specific geographic sorting to them. By doing that sorting itself, Amazon is removing a step in the logistics chain, clearly in hope of streamlining the delivery process to avoid another holiday snafu this year.

“With Amazon’s growth into the sortation process in the US, they clearly are trying to further own the fulfillment process,” Wingo says. In the process, if they add their own fleet of trucks, they could wind up competing directly with UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service

Amazon’s North American fulfillment center network. ChannelAdvisor

Wingo’s company makes software for the millions of third-party merchants who sell their goods on Amazon. Many of them also store their merchandise at Amazon warehouses and rely on Amazon to ship orders to customers. This dependence makes them avid consumers of intelligence on Amazon’s fulfillment operations, which tend to run below the radar despite the million-square-foot warehouses that anchor the network. While delivery drones capture all the attention, Amazon’s on-the-ground business keeps expanding at an astonishing scale.

By Wingo’s count, Amazon is on its way to 90 fulfillment centers across the US, and 155 total globally. This gives Amazon by far the largest direct-to-consumer fulfillment operation in retail, even compared to Walmart, whose logistics network is designed mainly to ship items to stores. As Amazon has built out this network, it has also embarked on a slow rollout of its own grocery delivery service, using its own branded trucks, that delivers not just food but a wide selection of consumer merchandise the same day. The more fulfillment and sortation centers Amazon builds—Wingo points to an offhand remark on a recent Amazon earnings call that the company had 15 in the works—the more capacity Amazon has to support those trucks making deliveries for Amazon by Amazon.

At a company where customer worship is the corporate religion, it must be monumentally frustrating not to control the only part of the customer experience that involves actual physical contact. However important Amazon is to UPS or FedEx as a customer, it’s still not the only customer. “The challenge is that these carriers are not dedicated exclusively to Amazon,” says Marc Wulfraat, president of MWPVL International, a logitics consulting firm. “These carriers have to service all of their customers at peak season and therein lies the problem … the pain needs to be spread around.”

In the process, some Amazon customers lose out—and at a time of year when late deliveries mean not just inconvenience but teary children under Christmas trees. In Amazon’s warehouses, millions of packages zip around on mazes of conveyor belts, inspiring comparisons to Santa’s workshop. If Amazon wants to win this Christmas, it might also need its own sleighs.