Watch Bose’s incredible electromagnetic car suspension system in action

Bose spent 24 years developing the ultimate suspension system that offered a super smooth, magic-carpet like ride. It was a technical success but a commercial flop.

I really wish this had made it into mainstream production. Same as I don’t like hearing people when they are eating food or the sound of wind blowing, I also hate bumpy roads and loud road noise in a car. This would have been a dream. Hoping they can still figure out a way to reduce the cost and eventually bring it to market. Come on Bose! Make it happen!

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KPYIaks1UY.

Bumblebees learn to roll balls for a reward

Researchers trained bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to move a ball in order to access a sugar solution as a reward. Other bees learned from experienced bumblebees and the bees choosed the ball positioned closest to the center.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exsrX6qsKkA.

Watch a Rescued Baby Wombat Frolic and Get Tickled

After a heartbreaking start to life, things are finally looking up for George the wombat. In fact, slowing him down now seems like the biggest challenge!!

At just 4 months of age, little George’s mum was hit and killed by a car. Thankfully a passer-by checked her pouch and discovered this tiny, scared face staring back at her. Suddenly alone in the world, George was brought to the Australian Reptile Park where General Manager Tim Faulkner became his new ‘fill-in’ family, providing him with the milk he needed and the cuddles he craved.

He’s now 8 months of age and after putting his difficult past behind him, this baby wombat is well and truly in the fast-lane to a happier life ahead!!

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZ9Zyi6XaA.

Premature Baby Hippo Fiona Gets a Bigger Pool – Cincinnati Zoo

One-month-old Fiona has outgrown two pools already! Now that her IV has been removed, vets have given her the okay to resume supervised pool time.  

Hippos don’t actually swim.  They float and are able to hold their breath for long periods. Spending time in the pool will help Fiona build muscle and lung strength, keep her skin moist and let her act like a hippo! Her new pool is set up close to mom and dad so she can hear and smell them. #TeamFiona 

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp0v8UTgR2M.

Amazon Alexa Hits 10,000 Skills. Here Comes the Hard Part

A year and a half ago, Amazon opened up its Alexa voice assistant to developers. With the Alexa Skills Kit, Alexa and its hardware hosts—the Echo, Dot, Tap, and now dozens more from third parties—became more than just speakers and digital weathermen. It became a platform, capable of supporting a full ecosystem of skills, which are essentially apps that you talk to instead of touch. Today, there are 10,000 skills available on Alexa. It’s an exponential increase since last summer, a rise that presents a host of new opportunities—and new challenges.

While 10,000 may seem like an arbitrary milestone, it’s an instructive one, especially when you consider how fast it’s come. Last June, a full year after the ASK launched, Amazon announced that Alexa had reached 1,000 skills. By September, that number had tripled. In January, Alexa’s skills catalog swelled to 7,000. It took just over a month to tack on another three thousand.

Alexa still doesn’t come anywhere close to rivaling its mobile counterparts; the App Store and Google Play both count their offerings in the millions. But the 10,000 skills mark represents a beachhead in the the brave new (and increasingly competitive) world of voice assistants. Where it goes from here will help define the next generation of user interfaces. As will, more importantly, how it gets there.

Skills Set

While Alexa became a developer’s playground in 2015, Amazon’s vision for a home-grown voice assistant started a full four years ago.

“We had this inspiration of the Star Trek computer,” says Steve Rabuchin, who heads up Alexa voice services and skills at Amazon. “What would it be like if we could create a voice assistant out of the cloud that you could just talk to naturally, that could control things around you, that could do things for you, that could get you information?”

Amazon’s first key innovation wasn’t voice itself, or even responsiveness; speech recognition has been around for decades, and Apple introduced the conversational Siri in 2011. Amazon’s accomplishment was freeing its voice assistant from the smartphone, nudging users closer to a truly ambient experience. The second breakthrough? Giving those users things to do.

At the end of 2015, a few months after the ASK availability, Echo owners had 135 skills to choose from. Today, they’ll find among their 10,000 options a bevy of smart home controls, multiple car companies, Starbucks, and not one but two national pizza chains. There are even a handful of games, like Jeopardy, and the whimsical Magic Door.

In that time, too, it’s also gotten easier to use those skills. While previously Echo owners would have had to dig into a companion Alexa app to enable, say, Jeopardy, they can now do so with a simple voice command. Similarly, the developers behind the skills have added features as they better understand the way their customers use them. GE Appliances, for instance, noticed that customers frequently used Alexa for hands-free oven operation (the company sells over 70 connected appliances in all; the future is full of odd wonders).

“We saw how popular those features were, so we started rolling in presets,” says GE’s Bill Gardner. Now, customers can simply ask Alexa to set the oven for chicken nuggets, or pizza, or cookies, or whatever else they’re heating up that night. “We tried to make it one step quicker.”

So the number of skills has grown, as has the range of available features, as has the consumer embrace of the platform, which Rabuchin describes as “commensurate” with the hockey stick uptick in Alexa abilities. So far, it’s one of the great tech success stories of the last decade. Now comes the hard part.

Undiscovered Countries

If the Alexa skills origin story sounds familiar, that’s because so far it maps pretty neatly with that of Apple’s App Store. It’s a smaller scale, but the pacing is about right, as well as the types of developers that are signing on in the early days.

For Amazon, that’s encouraging. The App Store is an indisputable success. But its growth wasn’t without pains, some of which Alexa may be feeling soon, if it hasn’t already.

“We know what happened when Apple opened up the App Store and developers started pouring applications in there,” says Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey. “Suddenly it became really, really hard for developers to get in front of their intended customers. There became this big problem of clutter.”

A problem that, notably, persists even today, nearly nine years later. And while Amazon has fewer skills to get lost among, its voice-first paradigm makes searching through those skills much more difficult. That creates potential frustrations for customers and developers alike; the former doesn’t know where to find skills they might enjoy, and the latter doesn’t see a return on the invested time spent creating the skill in the first place.

Not surprisingly, Amazon has taken steps to mitigate the problem. It sends weekly emails to Alexa users highlighting recently added skills. And after a year of the skills interface consisting of just a list within the Alexa app, the company last summer launched a skills store online, complete with ratings and reviews. All of which helps, but still requires staring at a screen—which Alexa was supposed to free you from in the first place.

“We’re working on ways with your voice to better navigate the skills that are there,” says Rabuchin. “You’re able to ask Alexa what the top skills of the week are, what the new skills are, a whole bunch of categories just by voice.”

All of which brings much-needed clarity to the skills search. And at the rate things are going, Amazon will find out soon enough if the same solutions for 10,000 skills can scale up to 100,000 and beyond.

Expansion Pack

Today the skills Alexa offers fall broadly into two categories. There are the hobbyists, who make skills for fun, and the corporations who wring a lot of marketing value out of being on the front lines of the voice revolution. What do they have in common? They aren’t overly concerned with turning skills into profit.

“[Alexa]’s not going to make a real solid transition to professional development unless there’s a way to make money,” says McQuivey. This is how the App Store works as well; even though most apps aren’t cash cows, the chance that one might hit is motivation enough for high-level developers to put resources in.

That’s not to single Amazon out. It’s a common challenge across not just voice assistants but also chatbots and other next-generation platforms. These are early days.

“Everybody’s learning how their business models are going to be set up on these platforms, and these ecosystems, where they’re allowing companies to play and not play,” says Dennis Maloney, chief digital officer of Domino’s, an early Alexa enlistee whose AnyWare program has put it at the forefront of multiple next-wave technologies. “It’s two steps forward, one step back as we continue to grow and learn in this space.”

Amazon declined to comment specifically on monetization plans, but a spokesman says the company is “listening closely to our developer community to identify new features and tools that will improve the ASK experience.”

In many ways, it’s as much an opportunity as it is a challenge. The first company to figure out how to both create and share the voice-enabled wealth will stake out a dominant position, an increasingly heated race as Google Home encroaches on Echo’s turf. And Amazon may be better situated than anyone to do so. It has a history of app store experimentation, including Amazon Underground, which normally gives apps to customers for free, and pays developers based on usage time. There could also be more straightforward approaches, especially for retailers; Maloney looks forward to the day that a Domino’s customer can simply tell Alexa what kind of pizza she wants to order from scratch, rather than requiring her to fill out a form on the internet first.

Besides, whatever roadblocks like ahead clearly haven’t hindered Alexa’s growth so far. Rabuchin says Amazon has thousands of people on the team, with tens of thousands of developers signed up for accounts. And while the first batch of skills have been mostly centered around the smart home, streaming music, or simple timers, or marketing tie-ins, there are signs that Alexa’s starting to broaden its horizons.

In fact, Alexa’s 10,000th skill, approved just last night, isn’t any of those things. It’s Beat the Intro, a “name that tune” game that already found success on the App Store and Google Play. Now, with a few voice-friendly tweaks, it’s going to give Alexa a try.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/amazon-alexa-hits-10000-skills-plenty-room-grow/.

The Science of Navy SEAL Superlearning

Published on Feb 24, 2017

How long would it take you to master a new language? A year? 18 months? Longer? For a special operator in the elite Navy SEAL Team 6 it used to take six months of study, but thanks to a combination of physiological and neurological optimization, it’s now down to six weeks -then they’re off in a foreign country navigating the cultural terrain, and engaging with locals and allies. High-performance expert Jamie Wheal spent time at”The Mind Gym’, the Navy SEAL training facility, while researching his new book in collaboration with Steven Kotler, Stealing Fire. Here he gives us just a taste of the advantageous technology that is cracking open seemingly super-human skills like accelerated learning, and raising the bar of human performance. Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler’s book is Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work (goo.gl/m3Quy0).

Transcript: Out of all the organizations we’ve studied the Navy SEALs are probably right there on the cutting edge of deploying advanced technology to accelerate their performance in the field and to accelerate their performance in forming and leading teams. There are probably three major areas in their bodies and brains they focus on. The first is neural electric activity, so what is happening in our brain wave states as we go into stressful situations, our heart rate and the quality of our cardiac rhythms, so not just how many beats a minute are our hearts beating under stress but literally what is the quality? Is it anabolic meaning and healthy and positive or catabolic meaning unhealthy and destructive in my cardiac rhythm. And then even galvanic skin response so how much is my system under stress or strain and sweating kind of the same metrics that are used in lie detector tests, polygraphs and those kind of things. And they actually have very robust vests filled with sensors that will allow teams to go through operations and have commanders being able to see on a laptop up to 50 operators at once and being able to monitor all of their activities in the field, see who’s fallen down, see what their core body temperature is, see a host of biometrics.

In their mind gym, which is unique and specific to DEVGRU, which is more popularly known as SEAL Team Six, but their official name is Special Warfare Development Group, those guys also have an entire center built called the Mind Gym and it’s dedicated to deeper dives for training and recovery. And amidst all the other tools that we’ve just discussed they are also making use of sensory deprivation as a recovery and learning aid. And sensory deprivation tanks, which are usually they look like giant egg shaped pods and they’re filled with basically lukewarm super salty bathwater that’s very, very buoyant. So you go into them and close the hatch and you’re floating in pitch-black darkness with no reference points. And these have been used for the last half century to research consciousness because one of the ways we determine who we are and where we are is by understanding visual sidelines and what’s in our environment. When you take that away you take away one of the core elements of orienting where am I and who am I in time and space.

What DEVGRU is doing now is they’re adding in 21st century biometrics into that experience. And so they are adding audio and visual feedback as well as biometrics. So again, brain waves and heart rate variability and they’re able to steer operators into an optimum state of physiological and neurological relaxation and then introducing new content. And one of the examples that they shared with us was the learning of foreign languages. So obviously special operators are special operators. They are highly trained and there aren’t enough of them to go around when the U.S. is engaged in overt and covert conflict on at least five continents.

It’s essential that they understand solidly the language of the territories they’re about to enter so they can engage with locals, they can engage with allies, they can do what needs to be done. In the past that’s been a minimum of a six-month cycle time. So you take highly trained operators and you have them sitting on the bench learning a foreign language before being deployed that’s incredibly inefficient. By combining these deprivation tanks with next generation biofeedback these guys have been able to reduce a six-month cycle time in learning a foreign language down to six-weeks. So that’s basically cutting it into a quarter and that is just by, same people, same body same brains, but just optimizing where they are to receive and learn and retain new content.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdf1Fe4wZu8.

Fasting diet ‘regenerates diabetic pancreas’ – BBC News

Can you reverse the symptoms of diabetes?

The pancreas can be triggered to regenerate itself through a type of fasting diet, say US researchers. Restoring the function of the organ – which helps control blood sugar levels – reversed symptoms of diabetes in animal experiments.

The study, published in the journal Cell, says the diet reboots the body. Experts said the findings were “potentially very exciting” as they could become a new treatment for the disease. People are advised not to try this without medical advice.

In the experiments, mice were put on a modified form of the “fasting-mimicking diet”. It is like the human form of the diet when people spend five days on a low calorie, low protein, low carbohydrate but high unsaturated-fat diet. It resembles a vegan diet with nuts and soups, but with around 800 to 1,100 calories a day. Then they have 25 days eating what they want – so overall it mimics periods of feast and famine.

Previous research has suggested it can slow the pace of ageing.

Diabetes therapy?

But animal experiments showed the diet regenerated a special type of cell in the pancreas called a beta cell. These are the cells that detect sugar in the blood and release the hormone insulin if it gets too high. Dr Valter Longo, from the University of Southern California, said: “Our conclusion is that by pushing the mice into an extreme state and then bringing them back – by starving them and then feeding them again – the cells in the pancreas are triggered to use some kind of developmental reprogramming that rebuilds the part of the organ that’s no longer functioning.”

There were benefits in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes in the mouse experiments. Type 1 is caused by the immune system destroying beta cells and type 2 is largely caused by lifestyle and the body no longer responding to insulin. Further tests on tissue samples from people with type 1 diabetes produced similar effects. Dr Longo said: “Medically, these findings have the potential to be very important because we’ve shown – at least in mouse models – that you can use diet to reverse the symptoms of diabetes. “Scientifically, the findings are perhaps even more important because we’ve shown that you can use diet to reprogram cells without having to make any genetic alterations.”

What’s it like? 

BBC reporter Peter Bowes took part in a separate trial with Dr Valter Longo. He said: “During each five-day fasting cycle, when I ate about a quarter of the average person’s diet, I lost between 2kg and 4kg (4.4-8.8lbs). “But before the next cycle came round, 25 days of eating normally had returned me almost to my original weight. “But not all consequences of the diet faded so quickly.” His blood pressure was lower as was a hormone called IGF-1, which is linked to some cancers. He said: “The very small meals I was given during the five-day fast were far from gourmet cooking, but I was glad to have something to eat”

Separate trials of the diet in people have been shown to improve blood sugar levels. The latest findings help to explain why. However, Dr Longo said people should not rush off and crash diet. He told the BBC: “It boils down to do not try this at home, this is so much more sophisticated than people realise.” He said people could “get into trouble” with their health if it was done without medical guidance.

Dr Emily Burns, research communications manager at Diabetes UK, said: “This is potentially very exciting news, but we need to see if the results hold true in humans before we’ll know more about what it means for people with diabetes.

“People with type-1 and type-2 diabetes would benefit immensely from treatments that can repair or regenerate insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.”

This article originally appeared at: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-39070183

3 Simple Ways to Make Yourself Happy Every Day, According to Neuroscience

No need to spend hours on meditation — just make these mental tweaks.

Do you want to be happier? That’s a pretty silly question–who doesn’t want more happiness? Fortunately, there are simple things we can all do to raise our happiness quotient that are actually supported by scientific research. And even though brain scans show that the happiest person on earth is Tibetan monk Matthieu Ricard, you can do each of these things every day. No need to travel to a remote mountaintop, sit in meditation for hours, or even quit your day job.

UCLA neuroscientist Alex Korb, Psychology Today blogger and author of The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time, has studied many of the ways we can gently tweak our attitudes, outlooks, and behaviors to bring more happiness into our lives. Here are some of his top recommendations:

1. Think about things you’re grateful for.

There’s plenty of scientific evidence to support the notion that being grateful makes us happier. As Korb notes, it increases dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with our reward centers and also the pleasurable effects of taking drugs. In other words, feeling grateful gives you a natural high. Not only that, feelings of gratitude increase your serotonin levels, which is what antidepressants do. No wonder gratitude is such a mood booster. And, Korb says, even if you’re feeling very down and can’t come up with a single thing you’re grateful for, the mere act of searching will give you some of these effects by leading you to focus on the good aspects of your life.

My simple approach to daily gratitude is to mentally list three things I’m grateful for before getting out of bed in the morning. That helps set me up for a better mood throughout the day. But anytime is a good time for gratitude.

2. Think about things you’ve done well.

Our brains are hard-wired to pay more attention to negative rather than positive information, and this applies at least as much to our evaluation of ourselves as it does to anything else. But focusing on the things we’re proud of has many brain benefits. For one thing, pride is a powerful brain-stimulating emotion, and focusing on happy memories (assuming your accomplishments made you happy) is another way to release serotonin in your brain. And, Korb notes, “Several studies have shown that reflecting on your positive qualities is a type of self-affirmation that actually strengthens your abilities to change bad habits.” So focusing on what you’ve done right might actually help you accomplish more good stuff in the future.

3. Make a decision or set an intention.

Making a decision, choosing a goal, or setting an intention all have a positive effect on the brain, decreasing stress and anxiety and increasing problem-solving ability, according to Korb. But–this will be difficult for some people (including me)–your brain will benefit most if you make a good-enough decision sooner, rather than wait for the most complete information in order to make the best possible decision.

Research suggests that the ability to make decisions quickly (and then make them right after the fact, if need be) is one of the ways entrepreneurs’ brains differ from everyone else’s. According to Korb, making a good-enough decision activates a part of the prefrontal cortex that makes you feel more in control. And choosing to do something you want to do will not only make you happier. Research shows that the mere act of having chosen will make you enjoy whatever you choose more. In other words, choose what you love and you’ll love what you choose.

Source: https://fyrst.wordpress.com/?p=1626