Nabu

Razer

The last product I tried from Razer, a gaming hardware company producing some great, if expensive, gadgets, was the Edge, an unholy fusion of PC and tablet that turned out to be pretty neat. Given that combinatorial spirit, you'd think I wouldn't be surprised when the company tried something similar, even if it wasn't related to gaming. But here we are: the company has announced the Razer Nabu, a cross between a smartwatch and fitness tracker.

And that's an apt description. The Nabu is somewhere between the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch and the Nike+ FuelBand. First, it gives you notifications: all of your emails, texts, weather alerts, news, and more pop up on an OLED screen, grabbed by the Nabu through your Android or iOS phone. A vibration alerts you when that happens. On the bottom of the wrist-a-ma-jig (Razer calls it a "smartband") is a second screen that gives more details on the alert. It's all operated by a single button you use to scroll through your notifications. 

On the fitness tracking side, the Nabu uses a location tracker to let you know about how healthy you've been lately, telling you the number of miles you've walked, the steps you've climbed, etc. It's also loaded with a sleep tracker that can monitor your rest and wake you up with an alarm at the optimal time. 

The band will be coming out at the end of the first quarter of this year, and will start at $49. (That's the price for developers hoping to make an alert system for the gadget ahead of a wider release.) We haven't tried it out yet, and so we can't say how it'll stack up to other wristwear we've loved, but we'll keep you posted if we come across it or any other gear at CES. 

Ferret

Luciano Bernardi via Wikimedia Commons

There are many things that are important to keep an eye on to prevent theft, such as your wallet, phone... and your ferrets. Throughout rural southern England over the past two years, there's been a rise in the number of ferret thefts, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The story begins with Ken Jenkins, a pest controller who uses ferrets to remove rabbits from open fields near the ancient site of Stonehenge, a site shrouded in mystery. But the more pressing enigma on Jenkin's mind: Why are people stealing ferrets? 

Some ferret enthusiasts say thieves sell animals for clandestine drug research, Mr. Jenkins says. Others speculate they go to the illicit pet trade. Many suspect the involvement of organized-crime rings.

"These people are linked to badger baiting, dog fighting and worse," says Mr. Jenkins's business partner, James Bradley, referring to a banned practice of using dogs to maim badgers for sport.

Mr. Bradley says he had about 27 ferrets filched last February in an unsolved crime that added his name to the long list of victims. "I know of a lot of disillusioned people who have had their ferrets stolen," he says.

As if there were anything worse than lost ferret disillusionment (LFD, soon to be a recognized psychiatric condition), the thefts seem to make little sense: Ferrets are not especially valuable, and they also breed rapidly and often have leftover, unwanted young. The Journal continues: 

Now is a worrying time for the "working ferrets" of the U.K. The domesticated descendants of European polecats have for centuries been used to hunt rabbits. "Since the Romans," says Mr. Jenkins, who breeds a strain of ferrets inherited from his father...

Across rural England, thieves—often with balaclavas, Mr. Bradley says—have struck at night, carrying off their writhing contraband in pillowcases.

"They leave everything of value and just take the ferrets," says Mr. Bradley, puzzled.

Ferrets aren't the only English animals that are being stolen more often in recent years. According to the Telegraph, dog kidnappings are also on the rise: 3,500 dogs were stolen in England in 2012, a 17 percent increase over the year prior. 

As if things couldn't get worse for ferrets, researchers recently engineered a highly-contagious form of the bird flu that can infect ferrets and pass between them when the animals sneeze. Ah-Choose your poison, ferrets! 

Iris identification is great for its accuracy, but the gadgets to make it happen can be expensive or unwieldy--and usually not great for personal use. Enter Myris and its eyeLock, a cheap, beautiful, simple gadget for iris ID'ing.

The eyeLock connects to your computer through a USB port, and works on Chrome, Mac, and Windows systems. It takes a brief--one-second-ish--video, then registers your passwords to your iris. You can then log in to multiple sites--your Facebook, your email--and open them all, by simply holding the device up to your eye. Easy and intuitive. 

There's not a set release date or price, but the company estimates it'll be coming in the second half of this year and cost less than $300.

For Intel’s big CES press conference, they promised an ambitious goal: make computer sensors more like human senses. And I don’t know if the product they announced, the RealSense 3-D camera, is quite as amazing as the human eye, but it’s pretty darn rad.

Using the embedded camera, laptops and tablets can scan depth when taking pictures, through infrared and color sensors. Once the camera’s determined that depth, you can do some pretty crazy stuff, like immediately crop out a particular object by selecting its depth, or even, through a new partnership with 3D Systems, create a shareable scan and 3-D print what your camera sees.

It’s not perfect; there’s a way to use the camera to detect a person and place a new background behind that person, but it still looked a little rough in the demo: the person wasn’t perfectly cut out in the frame.

It’s part of a push by Intel to create a series of sensors under their RealSense banner that are more intuitive, and the tech is coming to gadgets from a bunch of manufacturers, like Dell, Lenovo, and HP. The company also showed off some gesture recognition tech for tablets, Leap Motion style, that could be used with the camera. One demo showed someone watching Google Earth, turning her head to tilt the direction. (Less cool: new voice-listening tech, also under that RealSense banner.)

There were also some gaming-related uses for the cam: it tracks finger-by-finger gesture control, letting people move their hands or a flat plane to manipulate on-screen objects. It looks a lot like the Xbox Kinect, but it could fit in a tiny laptop. And it looks like a lot of fun. The same idea could be applies to augmented reality games, too.

This is something that feels like the future, something that with disparate devices—like the Kinect and 3-D scanning—we’ve been leading up to. We were waiting for the tech to get small enough to be viable for a laptop. Now, here it is. 

Carbon-Emitting

Washington State House Democrats

Congrats, city-dwellers! Your carbon footprint is just half the size of the national average. But… too bad, all the suburbs surrounding your city cancel out the effects of your greener lifestyle. At worst, households in the suburbs emit four times the amount of carbon as households in cities do.

These numbers come from new, detailed carbon-footprint calculations for U.S. counties, made by two energy and resources researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The researchers published their work in a new paper, but also made some cool online tools to let you compare your carbon use to your neighbors' to your heart's content. For example, let's compare the average carbon emissions for a household in Diamond Bar in southern California and one in Indianapolis:

Average Household Carbon Emissions, Diamond Bar, California

Cool Climate Network

Average Household Carbon Emissions, Indianapolis, Indiana

Cool Climate Network

As you can see, Diamond Bar residents emit very little carbon for electricity, but that's not because they necessarily use less. California has very clean energy sources, while many in the Midwest rely on coal. On the other hand, Diamond Bar residents emit fifty percent more carbon from car fuel than residents of Indianapolis—this might be because Diamond Bar is primarily suburban, or because Diamond Bar has a high median household income, or both.

"The goal of the project is to help cities better understand the primary drivers of household carbon footprints in each location," David Kammen, one of the carbon-footprint calculators, said in a statement. "We hope cities will use this information to begin to create highly tailored climate action plans for their communities." If different American cities emit carbon in wildly different ways, the thinking goes, then different cities should do different things in an effort to reduce their emissions and stall global warming.

Kammen and his colleague Christopher Jones' work also suggests that it's the suburbs that need the most work in America. Suburbanites have bigger houses and own cars, which contribute to their carbon output. They also tend to have higher incomes, which is associated with greater emissions. But Kammen has solutions, too, based on his research. "Suburbs are excellent candidates for a combination of solar photovoltaic systems, electric vehicles and energy-efficient technologies," he said.

Curious about your own household's footprint? You can calculate it, roughly, on Berkeley's Cool Climate Network site. Don't miss the calculator for figuring out how many tons of carbon you would save a year for doing things like riding a bike or switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs. You can also check out a map of the carbon emissions of counties throughout the contiguous United States, and see the city-suburb emissions effect at work.

Kammen and Jones published their work in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Samsung Curved UHD TV

Samsung Electronics

There's no shortage of flash on the Consumer Electronics Show press conference circuit. Samsung is particularly fond of its garish displays and celebrity drop-ins (this year was Mark Cuban and Michael Bay), but what they really want you to notice is the technology. This year, the Korean manufacturer is making much hullabaloo about its curved TVs. The giant screens have a subtle bend that the company claims will improve your overall viewing experience. Sound vague enough to be bunk? That's because it is. But Samsung isn't the only company trotting flexi-screens this year. LG has announced the rollout of its G Flex smartphone, and with it shows us precisely what a curve can do in the right circumstances. 

In Samsung's case, the screens are massive -- from 78 to 105 inches, to be precise. So think about it. If you're standing in the center of a curved screen, it will feel like the screen is enveloping you, which is good. But only one person can really be in that sweet spot, which is bad. So what do you have? Dozens of inches of wasted--and expensive--screen. (Equal blame: LG has equally large curved TVs, too.) Now picture the LG G Flex and its six-inch display. You're the only person looking at it, so the sweet spot issues are non-issues. And, the bend is actually doing more good than harm overall. The convex shape of the panel magnifies the reflection of your face, which helps to block annoying ambient light. 

LG G Flex

LG Electronics

The LG G Flex will be available from several carriers later this quarter, though there's no pricing information yet. As for the curved TVs? Timelines are fuzzy. 

Artist's Rendition of a Storm on a Brown Dwarf

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Western Ontario/Stony Brook University

Brown dwarfs may be cooler than stars like our sun, but that doesn't mean they're less dramatic. New data suggest that most—maybe all—brown dwarfs are home to enormous, planet-sized storms that rain molten iron, hot sand, or salts. Maybe I'll just retire to Southern California.

Brown dwarfs are star-like bodies that are somewhere in size between planets and stars. They start life in much the way stars do, but they never achieve the mass needed to trigger a nuclear reaction in their cores. So they burn cooler and dimmer than stars. Yet they're still much too hot for liquid water, which explains their unpleasant-sounding rain. Astronomers are interested in studying their weather as a proxy for what the weather is like on giant gas exoplanets—distant planets like our own Jupiter.  

For this study, astronomers from the U.S. and Canada observed 44 brown dwarfs using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer detects infrared light—perfect for observing brown dwarfs, which are too cool to emit visible light. (Fun fact: When the Spitzer telescope was first proposed, scientists had only theorized brown dwarfs existed.) The astronomers in this project looked for slight variations in the brightness of the infrared light Spitzer detected, which would indicate varying cloud cover and turbulent weather.

They found half of the brown dwarfs they examined had such variation. Considering that they expected that half of the objects they observed would be oriented in such a way that their storms wouldn't be visible or would always appear in the same position, the new Spitzer results suggest nearly all brown dwarfs are racked by storms. The storms are likely similar to Jupiter's Great Red Spot, with high winds and possibly lightning.

The study, led by Stanimir Metchev of the University of Western Ontario in Canada, is part of the team's "Weather on Other Worlds" project. They focus on brown dwarf weather because it's easier to observe than planetary weather, which may be obscured by the brightness of planets' stars.

Metchev's team member Aren Heinze of Stony Brook University, New York, presented their work today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. You can also see their analysis of the cloud cover on just one brown dwarf, published last spring in The Astrophysical Journal.

[Jet Propulsion Laboratory]

The Yellow Jacket is the thing you probably didn't know you needed (and maybe still don't need but would like to see a video of): a combination iPhone case and stun gun. Put in your iPhone 4 or 4S--and, soon, iPhone 5--then power up the case and send some voltage to the bad person nearby. Also, less uniquely but still helpfully, the case acts as a battery charger, juicing up your phone while you defend yourself from a mugging or whatever. It even comes in a variety of colors so you can express yourself during said situation. 

Gold

iStockphoto

“Finding such high concentrations of gold in the foliage of this tree growing over a gold deposit buried beneath 35 meters of weathered rock was a complete surprise,” Melvyn Lintern, a geochemist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), told The Scientist. 

Perhaps surprisingly, it's been known for more than a century that plants may accumulate gold and other valuable metals. In 1900, an inventor from Brooklyn named Emil Lungwitz reported that plants can accumulate gold, The Scientist noted. But it never caught on as a prospecting method, in part because it wasn't clear whether gold found in plants came from viable deposits, or if it ended up there from atmospheric dust. 

But the study, published in Nature Communications, determined the gold found in the leaves derived from underground, which is the first time this has been definitively shown in a wild plant (not raised in a lab). 

The finding suggests that it could make economic sense to "prospect" for gold with plants, sampling a small amount of leaf matter in trees to find precious metal deposits, according to the study. This method would also be more environmentally friendly than typical prospecting methods, The Scientist reported. And plant matter can also be sampled year-round and in many environments; it's difficult to dig or drill in some areas during the winter, or in certain soil types. 

Burn baby burn. Today, we use water to put out fires. But what if we could use it for the opposite effect? Astronaut researchers on the International Space Station are experimenting with water that can start a fire. It's called supercritical water and it might offer benefits such as clean-burning municipal waste disposal and improved saltwater purification.

Water becomes supercritical when it is compressed at 217 times the air pressure found at sea level and heated above 703.4 degrees Fahrenheit. At that point, the water is not liquid, solid or gas – it's more of a liquid-like gas. When this supercritical water mixes with organic material, oxidation occurs. The supercritical water burns the organic material, but without the pesky flames.

The burning process with this transformed water breaks down unwanted materials without the risk of dangerous byproducts. It's mostly just carbon dioxide and water. Studying supercritical water in space without the complications of gravity, researchers can better understand how to use its burning properties and how to control leftover salt that can damage pipes and tanks. Check out the video, from ScienceAtNASA, above.

Maingear Spark

Maingear

Enthusiast gaming PCs tend to be big. In some cases, they're very, very big. But the Spark, from boutique system builder Maingear, bucks the trend by going small—and by desktop standards, this thing is tiny.

The aggressively styled red-and-black Spark measures just 4.5 x 4.2 x 2.3 inches, so it won't take up too much room on your entertainment stand. And it weighs in at just 0.98 pounds, according to Maingear. Its tiny size is due to its mostly laptop-class internals. But with a quad-core AMD A8 processor that tops out at 3.1GHz, brand-new AMD R9 M275X graphics, and up to 16GB of RAM, it should have enough power to make modern games look pretty good on your HDTV. There's also room inside for two drives: an SSD to run games from for fast load times, and a hard drive to store media files. Four USB 3.0 ports let you add extra storage or other devices.

The Spark will be offered running Valve's Linux-based game-centric SteamOS. But if you're more of a traditionalist, Maingear will sell you one with Windows (7 or 8) installed as well. Maingear isn't offering a price just yet, but we're sure that will slip out once we get closer to when it's expected to go on sale. The company says that should be sometime in late February or March. 

Lenovo Horizon 2

Matt Safford

Just when you thought it was time to give up on desktops, Lenovo has made one worth at least a little notice. With a large 27-inch touch display, Intel Core i7 internals, a battery, and the ability to function as a standard iMac-like desktop or dip all the way down to become a massive table-like touch surface, the Horizon 2 is a seriously forward-thinking desktop -- a phrase we didn't think we'd be saying again. 

Its most impressive feat is how it interacts with your smartphone or tablet. Install an app, and you can drop your device anywhere on the screen and an interface will pop up around it, showing your recent photos, letting you pull them off the handset and onto the PC. You can also pick your phone up off the screen and shake it, and recent photos "fall" from your phone and appear on the Horizon's massive display. 

Lenovo says they couldn't accomplish this through standard wireless-transfer means like NFC. Instead, when you drop the phone down, a series of color-changing lines scan across the display for a couple seconds. As the lines slide across your phone's rear-facing camera lens, the surface records color and timing, telling the Horizon 2 precisely where your phone is on the screen. 

With so much focus on mobile computing, the traditional desktop has felt a bit like a dinosaur as of late (outside of gaming circles, at least). But the Horizon 2 feels futuristic and slick -- did we mention that it's also less than an inch thick, even with a battery that's expected to last about four hours? If the consumer desktop has a future, it probably looks a lot like this. 

The Horizon 2 is expected to be available sometime in June, for around $1,500. 

All this week, we're showing off the coolest, most futuristic, and strangest gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. Here we have the Toyota i-Road, a one-person, three-wheeled car already moving into production. Check it out in this video, and be sure to see the rest of our CES coverage here. 

Old money

Ildar Sagdejev via Wikimedia Commons

A bill typically lasts about 3 to 15 years before becoming too dirty and taken out of circulation by central banks. The world's treasuries print out almost 150 billion new banknotes annually, an expense of about $10 billion. And with the addition of these 150 billion crisp new bills, about 150,000 tons of old bills end up in the shredder for disposal – out with the old and in with the new. A team of scientists decided to see if they could clean money by getting rid of the build up of human sebum.

Scientists successfully removed the human gunk and motor oil from dollar bills by using supercritical carbon dioxide, a fluid commonly used in other cleaning processes that acts like both a gas and a liquid. The bills' security features such as holograms and phosphorescent inks stayed intact, safely and effectively preserving the banknotes. This cleaning method could prevent bills from becoming the the ratty, old ones that vending machines hate and that eventually need to be disposed of. No clothes line needed. 
 

Leonardo da Vinci's Drawings of the Heart

Digital file hosted on Wikimedia Commons

Nearly a decade ago, Jeffrey Karp was playing around with a new, biodegradable polymer he'd made. He was a post-doctoral researcher at MIT. He ended up gluing together two pieces of glass… but later forgot about it. He ultimately developed the material for something else (as a scaffold for growing artificial organs, if you're curious).

"It's critical in science to be focused and to advance projects with, you know, scientific rigor, so I didn't have time to explore all of these kinds of side projects," Karp, who's now a researcher with Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, tells Popular Science.

Then he met Pedro del Nido, a cardiac surgeon at Boston Children's Hospital. Del Nido specializes in sealing up children's heart defects, literally holes in the heart that shouldn't be there. He wanted to know if Karp could make a surgical glue that would work in the heart. It was a tall order: Such a glue would have to be biodegradable, safe for use inside the body, a bit stretchy, and strong enough to hold onto a beating muscle continually awash in blood.

Karp remembered the cell scaffolding that could glue glass together. He started with that, and from there, he worked with del Nido and a team of surgeons and engineers to develop a glue that they recently tested in hearts of living rats and pigs. The glue is made of body-friendly chemicals that cells normally produce. In the future, del Nido hopes, this could become a gentler alternative to the stitching doctors rely on for many surgeries. "All the needles and the thread, they themselves cause injury to the healthy tissue," he says. "We've always have looked for a way to glue things together."

Del Nido and Karp's latest study took their invention to the final phase before turning it over to a commercial company, which will now finish the animal and human testing it needs before it can apply for regulatory approval. Paris-based Gecko Biomedical has licensed the technology and plans to bring it to market in Europe first, and then the U.S. soon after, Karp says.

The tests Karp and del Nido performed included closing heart defects in laboratory rats and closing cuts in the arteries of pigs. They also used the glue to attach a patch, made from another biodegradable material Karp invented, onto the thick inner wall of the still-beating hearts of four pigs. They followed the pigs for up to 24 hours. They found the patches stayed in place the entire time, even after they gave two of the pigs an injection that raised their heart rates to about 190 beats per minute, a heart rate a person might achieve when exercising vigorously, and their blood pressures to about 200 mmHg, which is a bit higher than even unhealthy blood human blood pressures usually reach.

"It actually works in the situation that's as close to as what we would see in the human clinical setting as possible," del Nido says.

Illustration of a Blood Vessel, Sealed with the New Surgical Glue

Image courtesy of Randal McKenzie (McKenzie Illustration)

If the new glue passes Gecko Biomedical's further testing and makes its way into hospitals, it could be the first such glue that works under the tough conditions in the heart. There are some U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved surgical glues in use today, but they're either not strong enough to use on the heart, or they're strong, but would be toxic inside the body, so they can only be used for closing cuts on the surface of the skin.

So what made Karp think of using the chemicals he did for this glue? He was inspired by spiders and insects that make secretions that stick to wet surfaces, he says. (Think: slug goo.) Those secretions, he found, are viscous and hydrophobic, or water-repelling. The new glue is the same, so it's thick and won't get washed away when it's applied to an organ that's wet from bodily fluids. Then, a five-second blast of ultraviolet light transforms the viscous gel into a solid that interlaces with the heart's fibers and locks in place.

Karp, del Nido and their colleagues published their work today in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Thin Film Transistor Membrane with Human Hairs

Salvatore et al

What's this? It's an electronic membrane that's so thin and flexible, it can drape itself over human hairs and continue to work. Yep, those long sticks are hairs. The membrane is one micrometer thick, while the hairs are about 100 micrometers thick.

This device happens to come from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, but many labs around the world are working on making super-thin, super-soft electronics that researchers hope may one day go into things like flexible solar panels, wearable electronics, and even brain sensors for research. To show that it was possible, the Swiss team made a translucent version of their membrane and put it on a soft contact lens, although nobody actually put the lens in their eye. In the future, technology like this could go into electronic contacts that monitor or diagnose glaucoma, the team wrote in a paper they published yesterday in the journal Nature Communications.

To make the membrane, the team created a layer of polyvinyl alcohol on a stiff silicon wafer. On top of the polyvinyl alcohol goes a layer of parylene, then layers acting as a semiconductor and other components of a thin-film transistor. In some experiments, the team put a sensor on the parylene layer that measured the strain the layer underwent when bent. Finally, the team stuck the whole silicon chip in water. The polyvinyl alcohol dissolved, separating the membrane from its silicon backing.

Thin-Film Transistor Membrane After a Crumpling Test

Opaque versions of the membrane continued to work after crumpling, but not translucent ones.

Salvatore et al

Now that Liquipel has saved our phones (and apparently earbuds and Jamboxes) from watery deaths, they're out to save your wardrobe, too. At CES this year, the company is announcing that its water (and muck) repelling treatment is coming to fabrics. They're working with labels to release never-wet clothes later this year, but we got a sneak peek at a treatred t-shirt on the Consumer Electronic Show floor today.

PowerAll

Amber Williams

Amidst the never-ending phone accessories at CES, this one stood out: A portable battery that can charge your phone AND jumpstart your car. The PowerAll is a rechargeable 12000-mAh battery with two USB ports (it holds roughly six charges for a smartphone) and a built-in 86-lumen LED flashlight.

The sell, of course, is that it’s also a 400-amp engine starter, which can jump-start your car’s battery up to 20 times on a full charge. It will keep its charge for three to six months, so it is crucial to remember to check its status every season or so, but since it can help you out in several situations and is only about double the weight of a smartphone, it seems worthy of a place in the trunk.

All this week, we're showing off the coolest, most futuristic, and strangest gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. Here we have Celestron's Cosmos 90GT WiFi Telescope. Check it out in this video to see how it will open up the sky for millions of smartphone addicts, and be sure to see the rest of our CES coverage here. 

Virtual reality that meets our expectations is finally happening with the Oculus Rift, and there are a handful of other companies, including Sony, announcing VR headsets as well. With the amazingly immersive graphics and reaction times, it's easy to focus entirely on the gaming side of virtual reality. But there's another component that's just as important to the experience: your surroundings. You can't chase virtual aliens if you're slamming into walls or tripping over furniture in this world. 

To solve that problem, Virtuix was showing off its omnidirectional "treadmill" at CES, which allows you to travel around in 360 degrees without leaving a four-foot-square area. It's still in the prototype stage, but available for preorder and shipping later this year. They've also made sneakers that have a felt-like material on the bottom that reduces traction for a glide-like run.