Lifeboat Foundation

In September, Apple announced a new wearable called the Apple Watch Ultra, and one of the company’s key pitches for the device was its use as a diving computer. Now Oceanic+, the app that makes that feature possible, launched exclusively for the Ultra, Apple announced today.

A lot of the features focus on either planning dives in advance or viewing dive reports after you’re done, but for those that you use underwater, the app utilizes haptics to send you alerts. The Watch Ultra’s very bright screen can help with legibility underwater, too.

A key light-activated nanomaterial for the hydrogen economy has been engineered by researchers at Rice University. Using only inexpensive raw materials, scientists created a scalable catalyst that needs only the power of light to convert ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen fuel.

“This discovery paves the way for sustainable, low-cost hydrogen that could be produced locally rather than in massive centralized plants.” —

Continue reading “Light-Powered Nanomaterial Catalyst Could Be Key for Hydrogen Economy” »

Some of Earth’s weirdest fungi, including types of lichen, mycorrhizal, and insect symbiotes, never quite seemed to fit in our current tree of life.

But a new genetic analysis discovered that despite the extreme differences between these oddballs, they actually all belong together on an entirely new branch that parted ways with other fungi more than 300 million years ago.

“I like to think of these as the platypus and echidna of the fungal world,” says University of Alberta mycologist Toby Spribille, because of the fungi’s peculiar traits.

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As part of a new update, the Fitbit Charge 5 introduces an ECG app, Daily Readiness Score, and Blood Glucose Logging feature in India.

Continue reading “Fitbit Charge 5 gets ECG, Blood Glucose tracking in India” »

This article reports a highly integrated watch for noninvasive continual blood glucose monitoring. The watch employs a Nafion-coated flexible electrochemical sensor patch fixed on the watchband to obtain interstitial fluid (ISF) transdermally at the wrist. This reverse iontophoresis-based extraction method eliminates the pain and inconvenience that traditional fingerstick blood tests pose in diabetic patients’ lives, making continual blood glucose monitoring practical and easy. All electronic modules, including a rechargeable power source and other modules for signal processing and wireless transmission, are integrated onto a watch face-sized printed circuit board (PCB), enabling comfortable wearing of this continual glucose monitor. Real-time blood glucose levels are displayed on the LED screen of the watch and can also be checked with the smartphone user interface.

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While the Apple Watch has evolved from a fashionable phone accessory to a high-tech health monitor—capable of scanning for heart conditions and calling for help after injuries—future generations may tap into a deeper set of features to track the body’s inner workings.

This could include long-rumored blood sugar readings, from the wrist-worn gadget, plus blood pressure measurements, hydration levels and more, following newly divulged arrangements with the sensor maker Rockley Photonics.

Continue reading “Apple Watch could gain long-sought glucose tracking with Rockley Photonics deal: report” »

Scientists from the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER) have created a database of 31,618 molecules that could potentially be used in future redox-flow batteries. These batteries hold great promise for energy storage. Among other things, the researchers used artificial intelligence and supercomputers to identify the molecules’ properties. Today, they publish their findings in the journal Scientific Data.

In recent years, chemists have designed hundreds of molecules that could potentially be useful in flow batteries for energy storage. It would be wonderful, researchers from DIFFER in Eindhoven (the Netherlands) imagined, if the properties of these molecules were quickly and easily accessible in a database. The problem, however, is that for many molecules the properties are not known. Examples of molecular properties are redox potential and water solubility. Those are important since they are related to the power generation capability and energy density of redox flow batteries.

To find out the still-unknown properties of molecules, the researchers performed four steps. First, they used a desktop computer and smart algorithms to create thousands of virtual variants of two types of molecules. These molecule families, the quinones and aza aromatics, are good at reversibly accepting and donating electrons. That is important for batteries. The researchers fed the computer with backbone structures of 24 quinones and 28 aza-aromatics plus five different chemically relevant side groups. From that, the computer created 31,618 different molecules.

25 years ago, the film Contact made its theatrical debut starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey and told the story of Dr. Eleanor Arroway (Jodie Foster) who picked up a radio signal from the star Vega and how this discovery impacted not just herself, but humanity as a whole. Over time, she discovers the signal has embedded instructions sent by the aliens to build a device capable of sending one person into outer space, presumably to meet the Vegans.

The device is built, and she is eventually hurled through a series of outer space tunnels where she meets an alien in the form of her long-deceased father. Right before she’s sent back home, the alien informs her, “This was just a first step. In time you’ll take another.” When she awakens, her colleagues inform her the pod she sat in fell straight through the device and she never actually left. With no hard evidence of both her travels and meeting the aliens, Eleanor is left scrutinized by both the public and Congress. She is ultimately given a “healthy grant” to fund further research into finding more signals from ET, and the film ends with her pondering her journey to the stars.

While some moviegoers were bummed that they didn’t see the aliens—who instead downloaded Jodie Foster’s consciousness so they could talk to her easier—the important message of the film, and the book that it’s based on, is to persevere, but also knowing there will be hardships and sacrifices along the way. In the case of Eleanor, she loses her father at a very young age who had gotten her hooked on astronomy. Later, she passes on love with Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) to remain in pursuit of her research, all while consistently being roadblocked by her former boss. And even after she reaches her goal of contacting the aliens who sent the message, she’s still scrutinized and ridiculed.

The minerals were found inside a slice of the El Ali meteorite, which landed in Somalia in 2020.