Outdoors + Tech newsletter – April 29, 2019

Outdoors + Tech news articles, blog posts and research papers for April 29, 2019

 

bracelets


Apple Watch Series 4 vs. Galaxy Watch Active: What’s the best smartwatch?

CNET, Vanessa Hand Orellana and Lexy Savvides from

… For the price, it’s hard to go past the Galaxy Watch Active, especially considering compatibility across Android and iOS. It offers a great range of fitness features, a comfortable fit for smaller wrists especially and a strong showing in battery life. But for iPhone users who are already deeply tied into Apple’s ecosystem, the ease of use, tracking accuracy and heart-related health features of the Apple Watch Series 4 are hard to beat (even if you do pay double the price compared to the Samsung watch). Having LTE as an option is also a bonus, especially for those who want the added reassurance of being connected on runs without taking their phone.

 

The Dark Side of Fitness Tracking

Medium, Elemental, Caroline Cox from

… Since the first Bluetooth headset sold in 2000, the wearable tech industry has been hard at work inserting itself into our daily lives. And by all accounts, it’s working: The number of connected wearable devices worldwide is expected to jump to 1.1 billion or more by 2022, and some experts predict that fitness trackers will generate more than $3 billion in global revenue by that same year.

But for many people, donning a health-focused device each day isn’t necessarily a good thing. Research suggests that even if you don’t ditch your tracker after the first few months, it can be difficult to develop a healthy, effective relationship with the device that’s monitoring your calories, steps, and minutes of sleep. In one study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, overweight participants who wore fitness trackers each day lost less weight than those who didn’t. In another, people who wore them for a full year were no healthier than they’d been at the start of the study. On the other end of the spectrum, users can become too obsessed with the data their devices are collecting, leading them to self-diagnose problems that don’t exist; they can get so invested in their stats that it drains any enjoyment from previously pleasant activities; and, in some cases, fitness trackers can even exacerbate disordered eating behaviors.

 

Suunto vs Garmin: How to Decide Which GPS Watch Is Better

RunToTheFinish blog, Amanda Brooks from

… I pondered and researched the two for months trying to decide which one to buy. I was getting sucked in my a lot of marketing hype and about to commit the sin of over buying…so I thought I’d help out anyone else who might be in a similar situation.

How to Choose the Best GPS Watch for Running

Before your head explodes trying to choose between the two brands, know this: both Garmin and Suunto make great, high quality watches. You can’t go wrong with either.

 

non-wrist wearable


Wearables and water resistance ratings, what you need to know

Gadgets & Wearables, Marko Maslakovic from

The characteristic of water-resistance can often be a deciding factor when choosing a wearable device. However, if anyone tells you a watch or fitness tracker is fully waterproof, its a lie. Because at a certain level of water pressure, every wearable will begin to leak. This is why regulation prohibits wearables to be marked as waterproof. Such a thing doesn’t exist.

Much confusion remains regarding the various degrees of water-resistancy. Are you safe using your fitness device in the shower or in the rain? Will the device continue to function if you go into the swimming pool with it?

 

Sleep diagnostic patch maker raises $9.3M Series A

MobiHealthNews, Dave Muoio from

Onera Health, an at-home sleep diagnostics startup spun out of research center imec, has raised $9.3 million in Series A funding. The round led by Jazz Pharmaceuticals and imec.xpand, with additional participation from imec, BOM and other unnamed investors. … Onera’s in-development diagnostic platform is centered on disposable monitor patches. The product is pitched as an alternative to bulky clinical sensors, as the patches are unobtrusive and can be applied and worn at home.

 

It’s 2019 – where’s my supersuit?

The Conversation, Karl Zelik from

… Over the last three years, the research team I lead has been developing a clothing-like exoskeleton, which might be more aptly described as mechanized clothing, a spring-powered exosuit or even just a supersuit. It consists of a vest and shorts made of common clothing materials, plus assistive fabric elastic bands and a switch that lets the wearer turn the suit’s assistance on or off.

 

software


Bluetooth Direction Finding – A Technical Overview

Bluetooth SiG from

In this comprehensive overview, Bluetooth® Developer Relations Manager Martin Woolley examines the new direction finding feature included in the latest version of the Bluetooth Core Specification. Download this in-depth technical paper and learn the details behind how two new Bluetooth direction finding methods can enable location services solutions that support high-accuracy direction finding.

 

The “Fitness for Good” Movement – atlasGo

Garmin Blog from

atlasGO, the application that lets users unlock funds for charitable donations or raise awareness for a cause through fitness activities, is now available for Garmin users. For every run, walk, or bike ride, people with a Garmin device can now link their activities with the click of a button in the atlasGO app, and convert their miles for good.

 

Strava vs Nike Run Club: Which Is a Better Running App

Guiding Tech, Gaurav Bidasaria from

… 1. Interface

Both Strava and Nike Run Club have been designed well with a clean and functional interface. They are easy to use, and you can begin your run immediately. Strava is more about the community and everyone in your contacts and Facebook who is using the app to record their run. That’s why the first thing you see is the Feed (this can be changed in Settings to Record screen). Scroll a little, and you will see recent runs by your friends.

 

hardware


Validity and reliability of a standalone low-end 50-Hz GNSS receiver during running.

Biology of Sport journal from

The aim of the investigation was to verify the validity and reliability of a low-end 50-Hz Global Navigation Satellite System receiver (GNSSr) for different soccer-specific run distances and average speed assessments. Six soccer players were assessed on two different days while performing eight different running paths with changes of direction for a final total of 44 runs. During the runs, each participant was equipped with the GNSSr, while the time for each single run was recorded using a photocell gate. Reference vs. receiver assessment correspondences for distance and average speed were evaluated by calculating the standard error of the estimate (SEE), coefficient of variation (CV), and mean bias. Residual vs. predicted value comparison was performed by means of Bland-Altman plots. Finally, calculating the intra-class correlations coefficient (ICC) assessed the test-retest reliability of the measurement. Receiver distance assessment showed an SEE of 0.52 m (0.73%), and mean bias of 0.06 m. Receiver average speed assessment showed an SEE of 0.02 m·s-1 (0.74%) and mean bias of 0.001 m·s-1. The Bland-Altman plot showed a small difference between the two assessments with the 95% limits of agreement=±1.08 m/0.046 m·s-1. Receiver distance/speed assessment was found to be reliable, with ICC=0.999. In spite of its low cost, the new low-end GNSSr provides valid and reliable assessments of distance and average speed for young adults performing several standardized running actions of differing lengths within delimited setup spaces. [full text]

 

Garmin Edge 830 Cycling GPS In-Depth Review

Ray Maker, DC Rainmaker blog from

If you’re looking for new Garmin cycling products – there’s no bigger day than today. The company has just dropped three new products: The Edge 830 (this review), the less expensive Edge 530 (review here), and a set of new dual ANT+/Bluetooth Smart Speed & Cadence sensors (review coming up momentarily). While it’d be easy to assume the two new Edge units are merely incremental updates, the reality seems to be quite different. Sure, the user interface shares a number of similarities – but under the covers there’s simply a boatload of new features.

The new units dive deep into both the road bike realm and mountain bike territory with new functions that I suspect both crowds will find useful.

 

gear


Sneaker Brands Making Running Shoes for The Future

HYPEBEAST, Jason Dike from

Running is more popular than ever. The amount of marathons hosted each year throughout the globe grew by 40.43% between 2008 and 2018, with races in Asia having grown by over 250%. And with this growth comes extra demands from runners — whether they’re running around the block or competing in the Olympics — who need footwear that matches their needs. So how are companies keeping up?

The biggest innovations in sneakers have always been primarily driven by running shoes, with brands constantly one-upping each other with the latest technology. Whether it’s Nike’s Air Max bubble of the ‘90s or the race for the most cushioning humanly possible, running shoes have frequently led the way for new innovations.

It’s for this reason that ASICS developed its Institute for Sports Science (ISS) in Kobe, Japan. Founded in 1985, the space — a mammoth building on the outskirts of the business-led city — provides a peek into the brand’s creation process.

 

Reviewed: Black Diamond Alex Honnold Signature Spatula

REI Co-op Journal, Aer Parris from

… This affordably priced ($15), lightweight spatula is built for a wide variety of tasks, from turning delicate fillets to scraping the blackened remains off your skillet when your PocketRocket’s flame blasted the poor fish too fast (yes, we have packed out fish; no, we don’t recommend it).

 

The Science Behind Nike’s New ZoomX Vaporfly Next% Marathon Shoe

WIRED, Science, Robbie Gonzalez from

At Sunday’s London Marathon, Eliud Kipchoge, the greatest marathoner on Earth, will toe the line in what could become the most controversial shoe his sport has ever known: Nike’s ZoomX Vaporfly Next%.

Long anticipated by the sort of runner who devotes his free time to scouring Facebook groups, Instagram pages, and online message boards for news about foams, colorways, heel-toe offsets, and inventory restocks (and who is willing to part with hundreds of dollars to gain a competitive edge), the Next%, which was unveiled this week, is the successor to Nike’s Vaporfly 4%—a shoe the company claims can make runners four percent more efficient on their feet, translating to precious minutes over the course of a race like the marathon.

 

materials


Engineers create ‘lifelike’ material with artificial metabolism

Cornell University, Cornell Chronicle from

As a genetic material, DNA is responsible for all known life. But DNA is also a polymer. Tapping into the unique nature of the molecule, Cornell engineers have created simple machines constructed of biomaterials with properties of living things.

Using what they call DASH (DNA-based Assembly and Synthesis of Hierarchical) materials, Cornell engineers constructed a DNA material with capabilities of metabolism, in addition to self-assembly and organization – three key traits of life.

“We are introducing a brand-new, lifelike material concept powered by its very own artificial metabolism. We are not making something that’s alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before,” said Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

 

New fiber-shaped supercapacitor for wearable electronics

EurekAlert! Science News, South China Press from

Fiber electrodes, as the key part of fiber-shaped supercapacitors for wearable electronics, are widely explored on the basis of carbon nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene fibers due to their high mechanical strength, electrical conductivity and specific surface area. The incorporation of carbon nanomaterials with other pseudocapacitive materials is a common strategy to improve the electrochemical properties of resulting fiber-shaped supercapacitors. However, the pseudocapacitance is far from fully developed especially at high rate owing to the insufficient electron supply and ion accessibility during electrochemical reactions. Hence developing new fiber electrodes is very important to realize efficient electron supply and ion accessibility simultaneously in one single fiber.

 

FSU-developed foam could offer NFL players powerful protection against head injuries

Florida State University News from

A next-generation foam technology developed by engineers at Florida State University could soon be a key component in safer and more effective football helmets, thanks to a new grant from the National Football League’s Play Smart. Play Safe. health and safety initiative.

The technology, called auxetic foam, was invented by Changchun Zeng, an associate professor in the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and a researcher in FSU’s High-Performance Materials Institute (HPMI). Zeng said the foam’s advanced properties make it ideally suited to the critical and complex demands of a professional football helmet.

 

stories


For College Students, One Negative Behavior Can Domino Into Lack of Sleep and Poor Grades

Sleep Review from

One negative behavior such as substance abuse or heavy alcohol drinking can lead college students toward a vicious cycle of poor lifestyle choices, lack of sleep, mental distress and low grades, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

“We used a robust data-mining technique to identify associations between mental distress in college students with substance abuse, sleep, social behaviors, academic attitude and behaviors, and GPA (short-term and long-term as reflective of academic performance),” says Lina Begdache, PhD, assistant professor of Health and Wellness Studies at Binghamton University, in a release. “Positive behaviors such as abstinence from substance use, studious attitudes, and responsibility toward work and family are reflective of a brain chemistry profile that supports mood and maturation of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. The latter matures last and supports impulse and emotional control as well as rationalization of thoughts.

 

The secrets of sports recovery

The Guardian, Nic Fleming from

For most of the 20th century, getting fitter just involved training harder. However, today’s elite athletes, weekend warriors and even recreational gym-goers know that they have to consider not just their workouts but their bodies’ recovery from them too, especially if they want to get stronger or faster. From cryotherapy and stretching to protein shakes and compression tights, we are bombarded with suggestions on how to speed the soothing of our aches and pains. It can, however, be hard to know what works best. Sports scientists don’t have all the answers, but they can help those trying to beat their personal bests, bulk up or just stay fit to sort the restorative strategies from the recovery snake oil.

 

The Best Speed Climbers Dash up Walls With a Time-Saving Move

WIRED, Science, Robbie Gonzalez from

… A two-time Youth National Speed Climbing Champion, Fishman, who is only 16, is one of the fastest speed climbers in America, with a personal best of 6.38 seconds. That puts him in good standing to compete for a spot on the US climbing team at 2024’s Summer Games. The sport will make its Olympic debut in 2020 in Tokyo. There, athletes from around the world will compete in three disciplines: Lead climbing, wherein climbers scale tall, overhanging walls with a rope they use to anchor themselves along a route; bouldering, in which competitors strive to complete relatively short but arduous climbs close to the ground; and speed climbing, Fishman’s specialty: a race between two climbers up identical 15-meter walls.

 

biking


Sea Otter 2019: The News From America’s Bicycle Show

GearJunkie, Berne Broudy from

Sea Otter might be my favorite place where brands launch new products. It’s no stuffy trade show in the basement of a convention center. It’s an outdoor event with bike brands, journalists, pro athletes, and loads of consumers. People who just love to ride bikes, see new products, race, buy and sell, camp, and hang out get together and have fun.

 

Walmart Says Its High-End Viathon Bikes Will Grow Cycling

GearJunkie, Berne Broudy from

Are bike shops scary, elitist, and unwelcoming? Walmart thinks so, and the retail juggernaut is betting its customers do too.

 

data


Grand tour fuelling – Professionals in Nutrition for Exercise and Sport

PINES, James Morton and Marc Fell from

The cycling grand tours (the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta España) represent the pinnacle of the cycling road season. Each grand tour comprises 21 daily stages (~200 km or 4 to 5 hours per stage) with only 2 to 3 days of rest, that is, 80 to 100 hours of competition during which riders must cover 3500 to 4000 km with climbing distances ranging from 40-50,000 metres. These races are competed over different types of stages and terrains usually comprising flat stages, mountain stages and time-trials. The demanding nature of these events prove them to be some of the most gruelling events in sport with recent research reporting that grand tour cyclists expend a staggering ~7700 kcals per day during the Giro d’Italia (Plasqui et al. 2019). Additionally, riders have the added challenge of completing tough blocks of back-to-back mountain and summit finish stages alongside the extreme environmental conditions of changing ambient temperatures and altitudes. Given the formidable challenges associated with these races, nutrition can therefore play a pivotal role in the success of riders with the focus being around the challenges of optimal fuelling and recovery, weight management and illness prevention.

 

How living on the wrong side of a time zone can be hazardous to your health

The Washington Post, Christopher Ingraham from

Sleep scientist Matthew Walker has observed that “human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain.” We stay up late to watch our favorite TV shows. We wake up early to get to work or school on time. And twice a year we change our clocks, to the bewilderment of our circadian rhythms.

We also set up conflicts between our natural and social clocks in other, less obvious ways, a fact underscored in research published this month in the Journal of Health Economics. It turns out, the study found, that living on the wrong side of a time zone’s boundary can have negative consequences on a person’s health and wallet.

 

AI identifies skiing techniques through pole data

VentureBeat, Kyle Wiggers from

AI has lots of useful applications. Take video game design, for example — machine learning systems can generate 3D environments in seconds from a handful of variables. In the civil engineering realm, sophisticated algorithms are being used to coordinate traffic signals with ride-sharing routes.

But what about snowsports? In a newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv.org (“Identifying cross country skiing techniques using power meters in ski poles“), a team of scientists hailing from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden describes AI that distinguishes among ski techniques from data collected by sensor-packed ski poles. They believe it could help coaches and athletes to analyze things like training load and racing efforts, and to make adjustments accordingly in real time.

 

public lands


An Otherworldly Tribute to the Southwest’s Public Lands

Adventure Journal from

Well this is extraordinarily beautiful. Filmmaker Andrew Studer wanted to compose a love letter to America’s public lands in the Southwest, so his film, Space to Roam, turns the Southwest into a distant planet. He’s also selling still prints from the project on his website, if you’re so inclined. In the meantime, enjoy his stunning film. [video, 3:07]

 

Climate Change Is Already Making It Harder To Spend Time Outdoors

BuzzFeed News, Wudan Yan from

People move to the Pacific Northwest to be near incredible natural beauty. But each year, wildfires and rising temperatures are making it harder to go outside.

 

Commentary: The untold story of our public lands and carbon pollution

The Salt Lake Tribune, Susan Atkinson from

As a westerner who loves hiking and the outdoors, I take comfort in the fact that approximately one-fifth of the U.S. landmass is dedicated as public lands. Utah’s public lands span approximately 63% of the state. I visualize our vast, pristine wilderness areas as refuges for plant and wildlife habitats to thrive while under the protection of our government’s federal and state agencies.

I was shocked to learn nothing could be further from the truth.

Data recently released by The Wilderness Society confirm that drilling and mining on American public lands sizably contribute to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. If you collected all public lands in the U.S., and made them into their own country, they would rank fifth in the world for fossil fuel emissions, just behind Russia.

 

energy


Need More Energy Storage? Just Hit ‘Print’

Drexel University, DrexelNow from

Researchers from Drexel University and Trinity College in Ireland, have created ink for an inkjet printer from a highly conductive type of two-dimensional material called MXene. Recent findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that the ink can be used to print flexible energy storage components, such as supercapacitors, in any size or shape.

 

Sodium batteries are one step closer to saving you from a mobile phone fire

Science, Robert F. Service from

Solid-state batteries, which use solids instead of liquids to ferry ions through their core, are attracting billions in investment, thanks to their potential for reducing battery fires. Now, researchers have created a solid-state sodium battery with a record capacity to store charge and a flexible electrode that allows recharging hundreds of times. What’s more, the battery’s use of sodium instead of expensive lithium could enable the development of cheaper energy storage devices for everything from small wearable electronics to solar and wind farms.

 

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