Changhong, a Chinese consumer electronics company, has released a new cell phone that can analyze the molecular properties of food, liquids, medicines, and more, CNET reports. The device is capable of reading body fat percentage, the quality of produce, and more.
Called the H2, the phone is fitted with a tiny, near-infrared spectrometer. Hold it over an object for a few moments, and the H2 will shine a light that penetrates its surface. The object’s molecules then bounce the light back to the phone, and the changed light is collected and analyzed in a database cloud.
The H2 is the first smartphone to harness this technology, which was developed by Israeli tech startup Consumer Physics. They originally created a small sensor called the SCiO, which worked in tandem with a subscription-based phone app. Consumer Physics joined forces with Changhong to make a phone with a small near-infrared spectrometer, pre-loaded with the requisite companion apps.
The technology isn’t 100 percent foolproof, The Verge points out. For example, you can’t use the H2 to scan just any object. Instead, the phone has separate apps for each type of item you scan, i.e. an app that can tell the sugar content in a piece of fruit, or apps that can tell you if your medicine is real, or how much body fat you have. Also, the H2’s measurements aren’t always consistent, or reliable.
The Changhong H2 was recently showcased at CES, an annual global consumer electronics and consumer technology tradeshow held in Las Vegas. The phone will soon be released in China, and it will arrive in the U.S. later this year. Its official price hasn’t been announced, but is expected to be set at nearly 3000 Chinese yuan ($430).
To paraphrase one famous and fish-tailed redhead: We’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty. We’ve got smileys and whatsits galore. You want pictures of trains? We’ve got like 20. But who cares? No big deal. We want more.
Little Mermaid (1989) parodies aside, the sentiment is very real: The redheads of the world are clamoring for emojis that look like them. As Emojipedia editor Jeremy Burge writes on his blog, the lack of redhead options has been a top complaint for the last few months. In response, Burge and the Emoji Subcommittee have drafted a proposal [PDF], which they’ll present next week during a meeting with the Unicode Technical Committee.
The proposal lays out two possible ways of rectifying this grievous problem. Unicode could create an emoji of a person with red hair. That emoji would work just like the blonde emoji, allowing users to customize for skin tone and gender.
It’s a simple solution that would be easy to implement, but there are some downsides. First, it keeps redheads as faces only and does not permit them to participate in any emoji activities like sports, cooking, or facepalming. Secondly, the subcommittee notes, “Creating a new human emoji for a single trait may not be desirable precedent.”
The second option is adding a pale skin/red hair option to skin color options, which would allow for redheaded facepalming but also incorrectly assumes that all redheads have pale skin.
Burge notes that the work to create the emoji might not be worth it, and that even an uproarious mob of redhead emoji users is still a pretty small group of people. He might be underestimating redheads’ natural gift for clamoring.
If the concept moves forward, we may be seeing redhead emojis by 2018.
In Australia, the dangers of snakes, spiders, and other venomous creatures may be far overblown in the popular imagination, as the BBC recently highlighted. The most dangerous animal in the country, in fact, is a more unassuming creature: the horse.
Research published in theInternal Medicine Journalexamined 42,000 hospital admissions for venomous stings and bites over the course of 13 years (2000–2013). Bees were the most dangerous, comprising 31 percent of hospital visits, while spider bites made up 30 percent and snake bites made up 15 percent.
And yet, as the BBC reports, none of the animals the researchers specifically studied was as deadly as the unassuming horse. Study author Ronelle Welton found during the research that horse-related injuries over the same period led to 74 deaths—more than all the animals in the study combined.
The study’s authors found that 64 people were killed by venomous stings or bites, the majority because of the subsequent allergic reaction. Despite the smaller number of snake bite hospitalizations, they were pretty deadly: Snake bites caused 27 of these deaths, the same as did bees and wasps. There were no deaths from spider bites.
Surprisingly, most of the fatalities occurred in cities, not while people were out in the wilderness. Most happened at home. It’s possible that people don’t seek medical care as urgently where healthcare options are plentiful, and can die very quickly from anaphylaxis. And people can develop bee allergies even if they didn’t develop a reaction to a previous sting. Only in 44 percent of fatalities from an allergic reaction related to an insect sting did the person get to the hospital before they died.
The lessons we can take from this are: Be extra careful around bees, and even more careful around the stable.
Accused criminals have used some wild excuses to explain away their crimes. Ethan Couch said he suffered from “affluenza.” Dan White blamed junk food (well, not exactly). But perhaps the most controversial defense to this day is dissociative identity disorder (DID)—previously known as multiple personality disorder.
There’s an enormous amount of suspicion surrounding dissociative identity disorder. Psychiatrists believe that people who suffer from this condition splinter their personality to deal with a trauma, often childhood abuse. By this definition, someone with DID could conceivably commit a horrific crime and not even know it—because one of their “multiples” or “alters” did it instead.
Skeptics believe criminals lie about having this disorder to avoid consequences, and it probably doesn’t help that characters in pulpy movies like Fight Club, Identity, and M. Night Shyamalan’s new film Split all have it. Still, some courts haveaccepted this plea, as three of these real-life cases show. But the other two prove that DID remains a highly contentious legal defense.
1. BILLY MILLIGAN
Most people trace the multiple personality defense back to Billy Milligan. Milligan was hauled into court in 1978 on several counts of rape, aggravated robbery, and kidnapping. His case soon garnered national attention when his lawyers pursued a plea of insanity, arguing that two different personalities had committed the crimes—not Milligan. This defense was highly unusual for the time, but it worked. Milligan was found not guilty, and the judge committed him to a psychiatric hospital. He escaped for four months in 1986, was released in 1991, and died from cancer in 2014.
Psychiatrists have suggested that Milligan had as many as 24 personalities, including a Yugoslavian munitions expert and a 3-year-old girl. Milligan’s life was also the subject of a nonfiction book, The Minds of Billy Milligan, which has long been in movie development. And if Leonardo DiCaprio has his way, he’ll be starring as Milligan.
2. JUANITA MAXWELL
Juanita Maxwell’s legal problems began in 1979, when she was charged with beating a 73-year-old woman to death. The murder occurred at the hotel where Maxwell worked as a maid and where the woman in question, Inez Kelly, lived. But Maxwell insisted that she hadn’t killed Kelly; her brasher personality, Wanda Weston, had. Whereas Maxwell came off as quiet and prim, Weston was chatty and bragged about smoking weed. She had no problem admitting on the witness stand that she had bludgeoned Kelly with a lamp, because the woman refused to return a pen. Maxwell’s transformation on the stand spooked onlookers, and the court found her not guilty by reason of insanity.
Maxwell was committed to a mental ward, with the full support of her husband, Sammy. Yet in 1988, soon after she was released, she landed in jail for robbing two banks in St. Petersburg, Florida. By that point, she had seven personalities, but Wanda was still pinned as the culprit of the crimes.
3. BILLY JOE HARRIS
When Billy Joe Harris was arrested in 2011, police called him “one of the most wanted men in Texas.” Others knew him as the “Twilight Rapist,” for his early morning assaults on elderly and disabled women. His DNA linked him to multiple attacks and burglaries spanning two years and several counties. Harris insisted he was not a serial rapist, though; rather, it was one of his alters.
According to Psychology Today, Dr. Colin Ross testified in court that he believed Harris had dissociative identity disorder, with reservations. He said he questioned Harris’s insanely high scores on the screening tests for DID—which were administered by the defense attorney, not Ross—and had caught Harris in lies about his personal life. Clearly, everyone else in the courtroom had suspicions, too. Some jurors suppressed laughter when Harris became “Bobby,” another one of his alleged personalities, on the stand. Worse still, he was recorded in a phone call to his girlfriend bragging about putting on a “good show” in court.
The judge tossed out Ross’s testimony and the jury convicted Harris. He received a life sentence, which he has tried to appeal—so far with no success.
4. DWAYNE WILSON
The case against Dwayne Wilson began on September 20, 2005, when his nephew, Paris, called the police. The boy explained that his uncle had stabbed him, his brother, his sister, and his mother in their New Jersey home. Paris was the only survivor.
When Wilson’s hearings commenced four years later, his lawyer argued that one of the defendant’s three personalities, “Kiko,” had actually committed the murders and that Wilson could not be held responsible for the crimes. But the judge rejected this argument and sentenced Wilson to 40 years in prison.
5. THOMAS HUSKEY
Thomas Huskey was known as “Zoo Man” among prostitutes in Tennessee, because he used to work in the elephant barn at Knoxville Zoo. But this whimsical nickname turned sinister when Huskey was charged with a string of murders. He confessed to killing four women, and was accused of raping and robbing two more. Police also recovered jewelry they believed Huskey had taken off his victims’ bodies as “souvenirs.” Huskey’s attorneys, however, insisted that their client had not confessed, kept trophies, or done anything wrong. The perpetrator was “Kyle,” his alternate personality.
The first jury to hear this case could not reach a consensus on the murder, and the prosecution eventually gave up those charges. But Huskey was convicted of the rapes he committed before the murders, and sentenced to 64 years in prison. The Knoxville News Sentinelcalled his case one of the most expensive in state history.
If your New Year’s resolution is to eat healthier, you should be taking control of your food—in the literal sense. A new study finds that if you serve yourself, you eat smaller portions of junk food and desserts, as the Science of Us and The Wall Street Journalreport. The study, led by USC marketing researcher Linda Hagen, found that the more people are physically involved in serving their food, the less interested they are in unhealthy snacks.
The researchers tested their hypothesis out over the course of five tests. In one, they invited students to help themselves to either dried fruit or Reese’s Pieces off a table. Sometimes, the table setup required students to scoop their own snack out of a bowl, while other times, the cups were already set out with 45-gram portions of the snack. The researchers later measured how much of the snacks in bowls or cups had been taken. In another test, people rated how healthy they felt after eating certain snacks, either pre-portioned or not.
Overall, the researchers found that participants were more inclined to choose large portions of unhealthy food if they didn’t portion the snacks out themselves. But there was no effect when people served themselves healthy food.
Eating choices affect how people see themselves, so when people choose to eat unhealthy foods, they feel bad about themselves. Previous research has found that eating in front of a mirror can help make people enjoy dessert less, since people have to confront their own choices in an immediate way. The researchers found that people felt less responsibility for their choices when served by someone else, and thus they felt better about eating unhealthy food.
However, slicing your own cake isn’t the only way to make healthier choices. Other studies have found the best way to increase self control is not to exercise greater willpower in the face of temptations but to take away those temptations altogether. So put away the pie. But if you must, don’t let anyone else slice it for you.
With virtual and augmented reality being introduced across television, sports, and video games, it’s only natural that the technology would be implemented for movies as well. As part of the marketing campaign for the upcoming sci-fi film Marjorie Prime, actor Jon Hamm will be recreated as a hologram at this month’s Sundance Film Festival. The hologram—a.k.a. #Holohamm—will debut at the after-party for the film’s festival premiere on January 23.
The hologram was created by 8i, a technology start-up that boasts, “Our proprietary technology transforms video from an array of cameras into a photo-realistic 3D hologram of a human that can be viewed from any angle, on any device for virtual, augmented or mixed reality.” The hologram is based on Hamm’s character from the movie, Walter Prime, who is also a hologram. Attendees will watch a demonstration of the hologram Hamm, who exists as a “VR experience and in mixed reality on a mobile device.”
“It is amazing to experience the future in the here and now,” Marjorie Prime producer Uri Singer said in a press release. “When we first started working on the movie, the script dictated that the holograms would be portrayed as a futuristic reality. Making an actual hologram, not only on film but one that can be experienced with VR/AR, attests to how present the future has become.”
Marjorie Prime is directed by Michael Almereyda and also stars Geena Davis, Lois Smith, and Tim Robbins. The movie is based on Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play of the same name. Here’s how Passage Pictures describes the film:
“’Marjorie Prime’ follows 86-year-old Marjorie (Lois Smith) who spends her final, ailing days with a computerized version of her deceased husband, Walter (Hamm). With the intent to recount their life together, Marjorie’s ‘Prime’ relies on the information from her and her kin to develop a more complex understanding of his history. As their interactions deepen, the family begins to develop ever diverging recounts of their lives, drawn into the chance to reconstruct the often painful past.”
Oreo-flavored Cadbury Creme Eggs, which already exist in the UK and Canada, are making their way to America—kind of. According to Thrillist, this February, the U.S. will get Oreo Eggs, a cookie-stuffed twist on the Creme Eggs Cadbury already sells.
Unlike the Cadbury Oreo Eggs available in the UK and Canada, these will not actually be Cadbury products, and won’t be made with Cadbury chocolate. (The two candy-makers do share a parent company, Mondelez International.)
Not impressed? For your quality-chocolate with Oreo fix, you might also want to check out Milka’s Oreo chocolate bars.
Just because you’re tired doesn’t mean your language has to be. With some help from our friends at the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), we’ve come up with 11 “tired” regional idioms for the next time you’re feeling all-gone, dragged out, done in, or just plain dusted.
1. ALL IN BUT ONE’S SHOESTRINGS
A phrase that means totally done in or hanging by a thread. Variations include all in but one’s shoelaces and all in but one’s bootstraps. This term is chiefly used in the North with quotes in DARE from Wisconsin, Vermont, Illinois, New York, and Washington.
2. POOHED OUT
This North Central and Upper Midwest expression means “to fail, grow weak or tired, come to nothing.” DARE notes that the “pooh” part might be a corruption of poop. Poop (out), meaning to break down or stop working, originated in the late 1920s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The sense of “to tire, exhaust” is from about 1931. The earliest quote in DARE of pooh out is from 1930 when the saying started as college slang and was particularly “common at Oberlin.”
3. WAGGED OUT
While to wig out means to freak out or get overly excited, to be wagged out or waggy is the opposite. This phrase is especially used in Maine and Massachusetts. A quote from 1877 says it means to be tired or worn out, “as if finished wagging.” A quote from 1968 suggests that waggy is more akin to feeling “mental or physical distress, agitation, discomfort, or illness,” and is similar to streaked, a term used chiefly in New England.
More weary out combos include beat out (especially used in New England), given out (used in the South and South Midland), pegged out (with quotes from Maine, Vermont, Arkansas, and Maryland), and puckered out, which is an alteration of tuckered out.
4. COOPERED UP
The next time you’re stiff, unable to move, or just plain exhausted, you can say you’re coopered up. A 1959 quote from Vermont History says the term is “from the days of barrel making or coopering.”
Other enervated idioms that use “up” include gone up, with quotes from Illinois, Iowa, Georgia, New York, and the Mississippi Valley, and janted up, with a quote from Kentucky.
5. AUSGESPIELT
Ausgespielt is the past participle of the German ausspielen, “to play out, play to the end.” In addition to meaning “very tired,” it might refer to something “finished” or “broken,” whether literally (“The potatoes are _____” or “My sewing machine is _____”) or figuratively (“If a man loses interest in a girl and stops seeing her,” the relationship is ausgespielt), according to quotes in DARE.
6. SHABBY
If you’ve got a touch of the blahs, you could say you’re feeling shabby. This term you might hear in the South is Scots in origin, says DARE, while shabby—meaning dingy, worn, or faded—might come from the German schäbig, meaning, you guessed it, “shabby.”
7. GOOPY
You could also say you’re feeling goopy, another term for general ickiness. It could also refer to something sticky or smeared, or weather that’s unpleasant. Another meaning for the word goopy, according to the OED, is stupid or “fatuously amorous.”
8. LIMBER
Limber doesn’t just mean flexible. In the South and South Midland, it might mean limp, weak, and exhausted, and is often used in the phrase limber as a dishrag.
9. FLAXED
You might get flaxed out from flaxing around. To flax (out) means to become tired or weary, while flax (around) means to hurry and bustle. Flax (out) has quotes from New England and Ohio, and flax (around) is chiefly used in the North and especially New England.
10. WHITE-EYED
White-eyed, meaning exhausted or worn out, might mainly be heard in the Appalachians. A quote from the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English says the phrase “began as a description of one who became faint from fieldwork in the sun and gets pale around the eyes and mouth.”
11. SENT FOR AND COULDN’T COME
Feeling indisposed? Out of sorts? Exhausted? You could say you’re feeling like you were sent for and couldn’t come. Used especially in the South and South Midland states, one 1993 quote likened the phrase to “what younger people nowadays call ‘a bad hair day.’”
There’s no question that frying bacon in a pan is the best way to prepare the world’s most delicious threat to your arteries. For the unmotivated, heading for the microwave runs a close second—but that often leads to a not-so-crispy product and a coating of grease inside your appliance.
A new alternative has arrived. It’s the Bacon Express, a $30 countertop device that seems destined for late-night television advertising. It’s manufactured by a company called Nostalgia Products.
The appliance has two reverse gull-wing doors that fold down to allow for the introduction of raw bacon slices that dangle over the middle heating element. Once the doors are closed, it takes only minutes to deliver up to six pieces to your plate, with the grease draining to a disposal tray below. Nostalgia asserts that their vertical cooking approach means a no-shrivel bacon experience.
Pair it with a grilled cheese toaster and you may begin to wonder why your modest bread toaster ever made you happy.
