Imagine walking up to enter a live event — but instead of pulling out a physical or mobile ticket to get admitted — you pull out your smartphone which lets out an ultrasonic sound tailored for you that lets you into the event.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill that began on April 20, 2010, was the largest maritime oil spill in history. Killing 11 people and discharging 4.1 million barrels of oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico, the event was an unparalleled personal, environmental, and business disaster. It was also the first major oil spill to take place in the deep ocean.
If you haven't been on any sort of social media all day — which I seriously doubt — then you might not have heard that today, June 30, is Social Media Day. It's been trending on Twitter, but has also been making appearances on Instagram and Facebook. While major influencers are talking up a storm about this, most people are simply asking "what is social media day?"
Add breathing in your house as another possible danger to your health. If your home is sick, it's possible you could get sick too.
Bone loss and belly fat may no longer be certain fates of menopause, thanks to new research from an international team of scientists.
Tesla hopes high-level personnel changes will help it gain an edge in neural network knowhow for its models' self-drive features, following the replacement of its Autopilot chief and the appointment of a recent Stanford grad to head its AI and Autopilot vision research.
If you know that ticks spread Lyme disease, you may already know you might also catch a bunch of other infections from them. One of the lesser-known diseases spread by ticks is infection with the bacterium Anaplasma phagocytophilium, called anaplasmosis.
We are in a pretty major technology boom at the moment. One that will likely make the industrial revolution look tiny. And one of these technologies that are building up to lead the way is something called augmented reality.
Citrus greening disease — caused by a bacteria spread by psyllid insects — is threatening to wipe out Florida's citrus crop. Researchers have identified a small protein found in a second bacteria living in the insects that helps bacteria causing citrus greening disease survive and spread. They believe the discovery could result in a spray that could potentially help save the trees from the bacterial invasion.
The next-generation Audi A8 to launch in July is expected to be the world's first Level 3-capable production car to go on sale in retail channels.
Move over whole wheat — white bread may be back in style after a new study shows that it may be your gut microbes that decide what kind of bread is best for you.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) issued a health alert for a Boston mumps outbreak, on Monday, June 5th, to healthcare providers and local boards of health. There have been 12 reported cases of mumps during the recent outbreak. The affected residents' symptoms occurred between March 24th and May 31st, and 10 of the 12 had symptoms after May 9th. There have been 35 confirmed cases of mumps in 2017 in Massachusetts, and "nearly 300" suspected cases in the continuing outbreak.
One of the most exciting features in iOS 11 was the fully revamped Control Center, which improved the overall interface visually, made it one page only, and finally made it possible to customize what controls actually appear within it. Customizable controls was previously only available to jailbreakers, but now it's available to anyone running iOS 11 or iOS 12.
Since its debut 9 years ago, the iOS App Store has always had roughly the same functionality: Featured apps, categories, top charts, a search function, and a place to update your apps. But starting with iOS 11, that's all changing — drastically.
Ford's appointment of Jim Hackett as its new president and CEO reflects how the company is largely pinning its long-term survival hopes on its driverless business. Following his previous role as head of Ford's Smart Mobility division, which overseas Ford's autonomous driving activity, Hackett will help the company take a more self-driving direction as a whole.
Drug-resistant bacteria have made curing some infections challenging, if not nearly impossible. By 2050, it's estimated that 10 million people will be dying annually from infections with antibiotic-resistant organisms.
Even though the Ebola virus was discovered as recently as 1976, over 30,000 people have been infected since, and half have died a horrible death. Since there's no way to cure the infection, the world desperately needs a way to prevent it — and the five similar viruses in its family, the ebolaviruses.
Long admired for their active and cooperative community behavior, some types of ants also wear a gardening hat. Nurturing underground fungus gardens, these ants have a win-win relationship that provides food for both ants and fungi. If we humans understand it better, it may just help us out, too.
If you're a developer in the augmented and mixed reality space, there's a high probability that you're intimately familiar with the 3D application and game engine Unity. In May, at VisionSummit 2017, Microsoft announced that 91% of all HoloLens applications have been made with the software. But there's a section of Unity that you may not be familiar with, which has become very important to augmented, mixed, and virtual reality (known collectively as XR, for "extended reality") — Unity Labs.
Disney Parks are hard at work bringing the technology from a long time ago in a land far away to life for the opening of Star Wars Land parks in Anaheim and Orlando in 2019.
Devastating and deadly, land mines are a persistent threat in many areas of the world. Funding to clear regions of land mines has been decreasing, but new research may offer a less dangerous method of locating hidden, underground explosives by using glowing bacteria.
In a disturbing turn of events, Uber has been tracking oblivious iPhone users even after they removed the application from their phone. Two years ago, the situation escalated to such an extent that CEO Travis Kalanick earned a slap on the wrist from Apple mogul Tim Cook.
Every Tuesday, Next Reality will give readers a rundown of the augmented and mixed reality news briefs from the preceding week that we didn't cover already. This way, you'll never miss anything of importance in the Next Reality landscape, and will always know what's going on with new augmented and mixed reality tech and applications.
In the ongoing search to find better ways to use antibiotics, an extract made from maple syrup has some surprisingly important medical benefits.
The squiggly guys in this article's cover image are Propionibacterium acnes. These bacteria live in low-oxygen conditions at the base of hair follicles all over your body. They mind their own business, eating cellular debris and sebum, the oily stuff secreted by sebaceous glands that help keep things moisturized. Everybody has P. acnes bacteria—which are commonly blamed for causing acne—but researchers took a bigger view and discovered P. acnes may also play a part in keeping your skin clear.
Growing populations and higher temperatures put pressure on world food supplies. Naturally occurring soil bacteria may save crops in drought-stressed areas, put more land into crop production, and produce more food.
The photo-centric Instagram app is a great way to share "evergreen" pictures and videos when compared to Snapchat and Facebook's new Messenger Day feature. But like all social media, keeping the account secure is an essential aspect, as it restricts unwanted viewers from seeing your content and can prevent unauthorized users from accessing your account. Instagram has several methods for locking down the account including a new two-factor authentication (2FA) mechanism.
New statements from Apple make it clear that they do not believe a hacker, or group of hackers, breached any of their systems. This comes after a recent report from Motherboard that a hacker gang called the "Turkish Crime Family" is threatening to remotely wipe up to 559 million iPhones by April 7.
Before many games make it to the US-based iOS App Store, they get "soft launched" in a smaller country to get real-world testing for bugs. It's a pilot program, so to speak, as countries like Vietnam or the Philippines have far fewer iPhone users than the US, thus offer a more controlled environment for developers to get feedback and zero-in on issues that may occur in a game's early development phases.
Call them what you will—moss piglets, water bears, or by their real name, tardigrade—but these intriguing tiny creatures can come back from the brink of death. They can survive boiling, deep freezing, UV radiation, completely drying out, and even a trip to space—without the benefit of being in a spacecraft.
As a fan of the HTC One series, I almost always upgrade my phone soon after the new model becomes available. I purchased the M7 when it first came out, upgraded to the M8 shortly after its launch, and then jumped on the M9. However, I stopped right there.
If you're a parent of a toddler (or have a friend that acts like a toddler), you occasionally need to take a break just to preserve your mental health. The perfect way to buy yourself some "me time" in this scenario would be to pull up an episode of Dora the Explorer on Netflix or YouTube, then hand your phone or tablet over to your child (or child-like friend) and try your best to relax while they're occupied.
In the past, to see a pre-constructed state of the house that you would one day live in, you had to be able to read blueprints or hire an artist to sketch it out. Later came the ability to have a 3D rendering of that house on a screen, but you'd still have to work hard to envision it in real life.
We may not fully appreciate all the important roles wheat plays in our lives until it's gone—or at least, when it's in very short supply. What would a world be like without bread, cakes, cereal, pasta, or wheat beer? If the dire warnings about an impending stem rust fungus come to pass, we may know all too soon.
A new study just out reveals that HIV takes hold in the human body with the help of cells that usually work to heal, not kill.
Although their effectiveness is waning, antibiotics remain a front-line defense against many infections. However, new science reveals using the wrong antibiotic for an infection could makes things much worse.
Ah, wine. The bouquet fills your nose. The rich finish fills your mouth with soft flavors of oak and raspberries. The wine warms your belly and soothes your mind. Yeast and their biochemical factory help create this feast for your senses. Thanks to a research group from France, we now have a little more information on how that process works and a little more appreciation for yeast's contribution.
Using extreme time-lapse microscopy, scientists watched a virus take over a bacteria to create a cell that looked and functioned more like a plant or animal cell. True story.
We all know you are what you eat—or so the expression goes—but it's good to remember that what you are (at least intestinally) is mainly bacteria. A new study has shown that what you eat, and how your gut microbiome reacts to that food, might be a key player in your risk of developing a certain type of colon cancer—and changing your diet can help decrease your risk.
If you've got big plans to lose weight and get healthier in 2017, know up front that it will be an ongoing challenge. It's not easy to break bad habits, and it's even harder to form new and better ones.
