Another leak has emerged on the upcoming Fitbit Versa, and this is a big one. According to our sources, the new device is coming on April 16th. The Blaze replacement will be swim proof, it will have contactless payments but no built-in GPS.
Once the dominant force, Fitbit has been losing market share and needs something to turn its fortunes around. Its latest innovation, the Ionic, was released back in October to a lukewarm response. This was confirmed by its dismal holiday quarter results. Results came below Wall Street estimates as the wearable technology company sold fewer devices in the three months.
… With Garmin now actively shipping the Forerunner 645 Music to customers, it’s definitely in-depth review time. I’ve been using the watch since this past December, and it’s been on my wrist virtually 24×7 (except the roughly once a week I’d charge it up). Runs, rides, swims, and all sorts of randomness in between. First in beta, and now with final software.
As always, I’ll hand back this loaner/test unit to them and go out and get my own from regular retail channels. Feel free to hit up the links at the end of the review to help support the site if you found this interesting. With that, let’s dive into it!
… Our take: We’ve been bullish on the next wave of wearables changing athlete performance and even moving into adjacent markets like health care. We follow this “Quantified Athlete” trend closely, but we define it much more broadly than wearable devices. However, we remain skeptical that form factors that focus on wrist worn devices will have a meaningful impact or staying power in the market.
Runners aren’t the only ones obsessed with their stats. Skiers and snowboarders also love analyzing their performance. But unlike runners, skiers don’t have a wealth of apps at their fingertips. Still, there are some great apps for winter sports enthusiasts who want to get immersed in the details of their on-hill performance.
Motivation is different is highly personal, and what motivates each of us changes over time. However, if you’re having trouble staying psyched for your runs, research shows using a fitness app may help.
… Mr Murtagh cannot prove it, but thinks he might know why the thieves knew exactly where to look.
He had been using an app that logs cycling data, called Strava, to track his cycling speeds and compete against other users – but her did not realise his settings were the default ones – which are “public”.
The setting meant that the start and end of his rides could easily be seen online. He had also recorded the make and model of his top of the range time-trial bikes.
University of California-Berkeley, The Daily Cal student newspaper, Shelby Mayes from
UC Berkeley researchers have developed an exercise app designed to keep consumers motivated by establishing personalized, dynamic and realistic daily step goals using technology that determines the user’s physical activity.
CAL Fit, which is similar to exercise apps such as Fitbit and Google Fit, tracks the number of steps a user takes daily and sets future goals based on current physical activity levels. Unlike its more established counterparts, however, CAL Fit is able to modify an individual’s future fitness goals through a machine learning algorithm, which allows the app to gauge an individual’s motivation to exercise based on data from their past steps and goals.
The app was designed by a team of two graduate students, three UC Berkeley faculty members, two UCSF faculty members and three undergraduate students who helped with the experiments.
… Your SXSW talk is about how “Fitness Is More Fun with Friends.” What are some of the challenges—or advantages—for Peloton in building its digital community? How do you keep people social and engaged?
We are consistently blown away by the power and positivity of our community. But we don’t force social engagement on our Members; rather, we watch how they engage organically, whether online or offline, then invest to help that engagement to flourish.
In our early days, one passionate Member created a closed Facebook group to talk all things Peloton. We loved what we saw and invested a full-time resource to help moderate the group and, over the past three years, it has grown to become a thriving digital community of over 75,000 of our most passionate Members sharing their personal stories, encouraging one another and, of course, coordinating group rides.
We also enable community engagement at the local level, whether by welcoming Member meetups at our 31 showrooms around the country or hosting events at our flagship NYC studio.
Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch has been a major curiosity among surfers for months. Located more than 200 miles from the ocean in Lemoore, California, the Ranch is home to Slater’s ground-breaking artificial wave technology, which can reportedly create near-perfect seven-foot barrel waves on demand. This makes it a potential paradise for surfers who have been clamoring for a closer look at it since it was first revealed nearly three years ago. Now, we all have the opportunity to witness the Surf Ranch firsthand when it opens its doors to the public for the first time.
Finding the perfect running shoe can be a tough endeavour with hours of background research, consulting experts and trying on and trying out several pairs. So, when you finally do find the best running shoes for you, you want to hold on to them, right?
But, even if they feel irreplaceable and as valuable as diamonds, running shoes are not forever. Even the best of the best can only take so much, but how do you know when it’s time to replace your running shoes?
Mary Arnold, an ultramarathoner and co-leader of November Project in New York City, has spent nearly 15 years working in the run specialty industry, fitting thousands of runners for their first – or fiftieth – pair of shoes. Here’s her insight on when to replace running shoes.
The hairs of a polar bear have a hollow core, which reflects back IR emissions from the animal’s body. This structure helps prevent heat loss and keeps the bears warm in their Arctic environments.
But the hairs have an added advantage: They can conceal the bears from thermal imaging cameras used in many night-vision devices. Textiles that can mimic polar bear hair’s IR-reflecting abilities might be useful in stealth applications, such as concealing soldiers. Previous attempts to make synthetic versions of the hairs have produced fibers that are too weak to be practically useful.
A team from Zhejiang University has now used a freeze-spinning method to make fibers that are porous, strong, and highly thermally insulating. They consist of fibroin, a protein found in silk, along with a small amount of the polysaccharide chitosan.
… AscentShell is nice stuff! It has a high moisture vapor transmission rate and is slightly air permeable thanks to the membrane’s physical structure.
To spin this fabric, Outdoor Research uses electricity. Electric charges attract polyester fibers from a liquid polymer mixture and spin them into a crystalline structure.
As shown in the image above, the result is a microscopic cotton candy-like matrix. This randomized web of nanofibers gives the membrane both mechanical stretch and the permeability to pass water vapor while still blocking outside water droplets.
Most people have felt that sting from grabbing a doorknob after walking across a carpet or seen how a balloon will stick to a fuzzy surface after a few moments of vigorous rubbing.
While the effects of static electricity have been fascinating casual observers and scientists for millennia, certain aspects of how the electricity is generated and stored on surfaces have remained a mystery.
Now, researchers have discovered more details about the way certain materials hold a charge even after two surfaces separate, information that could help improve devices that leverage such energy as a power source.
… The American public has had a love-hate relationship with daylight saving time since it first became law in 1918. Personal preferences aside, the empirical evidence for the intended benefits of daylight saving time are mixed at best, whereas the costs of the switch to daylight saving time are becoming increasingly evident.
At the crux of these costs is the effect of the time shift on our sleep patterns. When we spring forward, the clocks on the wall advance, but our body clocks do not change so readily. It generally takes a few days for us to adapt to the time change in a way that allows us to fall asleep at our typical time. The upshot is that Americans sleep approximately 40 minutes less than usual on the Sunday to Monday night following the switch.
Along with my colleague, I first examined how the shift to daylight saving time affected workers in blue-collar settings. Using a database of mining injuries from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, we discovered that the spring shift to daylight saving time resulted in a 6 percent increase in mining injuries and a 67 percent increase in workdays lost because of these injuries.
… It’s great to see more and more older athletes taking part in endurance events, but how does age affect things like recovery, nutritional and hydration requirements? I’m going to look at that last one in particular and discuss three common traits of ageing that mean getting your hydration strategy right all the more important as the years go by.
1. You have less water on board to start with, so dehydration is more of a risk
Around 60 to 70 percent of your total body water is locked inside your cells in the intra-cellular compartment ( ICF), with the remainder sloshing around outside them as extra-cellular fluid (ECF).
Because your muscle cells contain a large amount of your ICF volume, the amount of muscle mass you have has a big influence on your total body water levels. Losing lean muscle tissue is an inevitable consequence of getting older (especially past the age of 50), so it follows that your total body water content declines as you age.
Cellular energy metabolism also follows the rhythm of the circadian clock. A University of Basel study has now shown exactly how this works by revealing the relationship between the circadian rhythm and the mitochondrial network for the first time.