I’ve done some more digging after last week’s post on the imminent Forerunner 245 and 245 Music. The two 245 product releases are a near certainty, just take that as being correct and focus on some even more exciting news.
There is evidence that I have seen which shows that the Garmin Forerunner 945 is to be released very soon ie by the end of May 2019 and possibly in mid-April.
A new meta-analysis published in JMIR revealed that while fitness apps modestly increase physical activity, the average observed step count between app users and nonusers did not reach statistical significance.
Activity-detecting wearables aren’t exactly novel — the Apple Watch, Fitbit’s lineup of fitness wearables, and countless smartwatches running Google’s WearOS interpret movements to determine whether you’re, say, jogging rather than walking. But many of the algorithmic models underlying their features need lots of human-generated training data, and typically they can’t make use of that data if it isn’t labeled by hand.
Fortunately, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a labor-saving solution they say could save valuable time. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org (“Few-Shot Learning-Based Human Activity Recognition“), they describe a few-shot learning technique — a technique to teach an AI model with a small amount of labeled training data by transferring knowledge from relevant tasks — optimized for wearable sensor-based activity recognition.
On my first day of spring break, I woke up to way more emails than necessary and a flurry of activity on my social media. Acquaintances from near and far wrote about “patriarchy,” “NASA seems to have a history of lady issues” and posted emojis of sad faces and encouragement to my students to fix the situation.
The situation in question was NASA’s cancellation of an all-female spacewalk, citing the lack of a spacesuit in the right size.
I’m the director of the Sports Product Design Graduate Program at the University of Oregon, and equality in product design is my jam. Playing soccer as a Title IX athlete led me to the goal of my life’s work. Although we were breaking boundaries as female athletes, the products we wore were made for men and did not fit our bodies. There were no sport bras, so we played in the bras we wore to school with underwires and no sweat management. Although we were allowed and encouraged to play, we did not feel like we belonged. No one made products for us.
Every year we see radical new designs that continue to redefine what a running shoe is and how they look and perform.
This is an exciting time to be a runner. Not long ago, every brand seemed to make the same shoe, with minor modifications year after year. Then came the great disruption, a battering of the status quo from minimalism, maximalism, innovative new materials and an increasingly overwhelming body of research that says shoes don’t work like we used to think they worked. Now, every year we see radical new designs. Here are five exciting new models that win our recognition for their innovation.
Every time I slip on a rain jacket, I give thanks that we no longer have to wrap ourselves in smelly seal skin or bulky rubber slickers to stay dry. Advances in weatherproof textiles and apparel design mean that rain jackets today are more comfortable and watertight than ever before. But depending on the climate and your level of activity, sorting through different styles, technologies, and waterproofing ratings can be confusing.
To help, I tested over a dozen different waterproof rain jackets through a long, wet Pacific Northwestern winter. I also consulted Amber Williams, a consumer science educator and lecturer in textile science and pattern making at Utah State University’s outdoor product design department, for advice on how to pick the best rain jacket possible.
The North Face announced FUTURELIGHT fabric with bombastic fanfare at the start of this year. It made bold claims about changing the state of waterproof-breathable fabrics. But is it really the future of jackets, or is FUTURELIGHT just marketing hype? We put it to the test to find out.
Affixed to the center of the creative board inside Under Armour’s R&D lab was a yellow post-it note with a simple phrase: “Originators of Performance.” The words serve as a reminder of the company’s genesis.
Under Armour’s first product, a moisture-wicking T-shirt, revolutionized the sports apparel industry. Now the company hopes its latest innovation, Rush, will have a similarly seismic impact on performance. Naturally occurring minerals woven into the fabric capture a body’s own heat and transmit that energy back via far infrared radiation. That process aims to dilate blood vessels and improve oxygen delivery, and is designed to offer athletes a small boost in competition and training.
Combine two rows of fine teeth that lock together, a slider and a tab, and all of a sudden you have a quick way of securely closing a bag, jacket or pair of pants – a zipper. These handy, everyday devices were invented in the United States more than a century ago but are now global. They are manufactured in many places, sewn or glued in place pretty much everywhere and used absolutely everywhere. But however humble and ubiquitous the zipper may seem, it currently carries a Japanese passport with a lot of Chinese visas. To learn more, let’s zip through a historical overview, a few pieces of international-trade theory and a look at the ongoing market battle.
Over 2,000 local elementary students in the Bend-La Pine, Sisters, Crook County, Culver and Jefferson County school districts will be equipped to enjoy summer activities more safely, thanks to a regional community partnership between The Center Foundation, First Interstate Bank, Summit Medical Group Oregon, and BendBroadband.
These local organizations have teamed up with the school districts to expand The Center Foundation’s Train Your Brain program, a two month-long initiative to educate every third grader in our region about brain injury prevention and the importance of helmet safety.
Don’t forget the helmet. A recent nationwide study finds that 25 children are rushed to emergency rooms every hour due to injuries occurring while riding a bicycle.
Using data from an injury database maintained by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital looked at statistics recorded between January 2006 and December 2015. They found more than 2.2 million children aged five to 17 were treated at an American hospital for injuries related to riding a bicycle.
Virginia Tech, Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics from
In collaboration with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, we have rated a total of 54 bike helmets using the STAR evaluation system. Our bicycle helmet impact tests evaluate a helmet’s ability to reduce linear acceleration and rotational velocity of the head resulting from a range of impacts a cyclist might experience. Helmets with more stars provide a reduction in concussion risk for these impacts compared to helmets with less stars.
When President Trump reduced the size of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument by more than 1.1 million acres, his administration assured the public “important objects of scientific or historic interest” would still be protected.
Many areas the Trump administration removed from Bears Ears are rich in uranium and oil deposits and may eventually become more accessible to developers. They had been off-limits under Barack Obama’s 2016 proclamation creating the monument.
And many sites significant to the Native American governments that lobbied Obama to designate the monument now lie outside the redrawn boundaries.
… Under the Obama administration, the park service took on climate change as a kind of combat mission. A quote from then-National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis is still emblazoned across a number of agency websites: “I believe climate change is fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced.” Three years ago, a memo sent to directors and managers of every region of the park service confessed that “some goals described in our current planning documents reflect concepts of ‘naturalness’ that are increasingly difficult to define in a world shaped by an altered climate.”
Those realizations were already upending the park service and its affiliated agencies when the nation elected its new president, Donald Trump, who has famously called climate change a “hoax.” Since arriving in Washington, the administration has been busy erasing references to climate science on federal websites, and in June, Trump officially withdrew from the Paris climate accord, a landmark global pact reached just two years ago. Several of Trump’s cabinet members and nominees have coyly hedged on their views regarding climate science — including former congressman Ryan Zinke, whom Trump has put in charge of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the park service.
Meanwhile, the agency’s 22,000 olive-and-gray-clad rangers, scientists, and other staff have recently acquired a near-mythical reputation as a cadre of outlaws fighting to avenge assaults on climate science. The internet and social media buzzed with enthusiasm when Badlands National Park’s Twitter account “went rogue” and posted a series of facts about global carbon dioxide concentrations, and spoof national park Twitter accounts proliferated under names like @BadHombreNPS and @AltNatParkSer.
Rice University, Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology from
Rice University researchers literally have a solution to deal with the glut of used lithium-ion batteries left behind by the ever-increasing demand for electric vehicles, cellphones and other electronic devices.
The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan used an environmentally friendly deep eutectic solvent to extract valuable elements from the metal oxides commonly used as cathodes in lithium-ion batteries. The goal, researchers said, is to curtail the use of harsh processes to recycle batteries and keep them out of landfills.
The solvent, made of commodity products choline chloride and ethylene glycol, extracted more than 90 percent of cobalt from powdered compounds, and a smaller but still significant amount from used batteries.
In an advance that could accelerate battery development and improve manufacturing, scientists have found how to accurately predict the useful lifespan of lithium-ion batteries, used in devices from mobile phones to electric cars.