360 DEGREES Weblog

It’s monday morning and just looking for new entries. As i’m suffering from high bloodpressure myself this little new device might just be the solution. The Zona Plus is a blood pressure reducing isometric exerciser that was developed from technology used by the U.S. Air Force to improve F-16 pilots’ blood circulation. This exercise device claims to reduce your blood pressure without medication and clinical research by cardiovascular specialists shows the device lowers blood pressure in 90% of users who perform the therapy 12 minutes per day, five days a week. Simply hold the device and squeeze as hard as you can; the unit measures your maximum hand strength and calculates a target pressure that is 70% below your threshold. The handgrip then prompts you to maintain the target pressure, indicating when to squeeze harder or loosen your hold with audible tones and visual cues on the LCD. The price is $379.95, which might raise my blood pressure again.

Taking down to the deep ocean, it is the TyphoonHD4 camera that accompanied BBC filmmakers in their latest quest to reveal the life in blue waters. If we haven’t seen those mesmerizing, myth defying, nature defining series which these fellows over at BBC keep featuring, then we aren’t from the same planet. Thus, when we talk about their new documentary “South Pacific,” you can just guess what I am talking off, and because this $100,000 HD camera capable of capturing images about 20 times the normal HD camera (480fps if the standard HD cam shoots at 24fps), has been used in the same series, you can further relate to it. Capturing those huge waves underwater to such sublime slow motion and perfection, the camera was good enough to give Rudi Diesel (the cameramen) and us shots like never seen before.

Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it’s a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.
The eye he’s considering replacing is not a working one — it’s a prosthetic eye he’s worn for several years. Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around.
“If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?” he asks.
Spence, who calls himself the “eyeborg guy,” will not be restoring his vision. The camera won’t connect to his brain. What it will do is allow him to be a bionic man where technology fuses with the human body to become inseparable. In effect, he will become a “little brother,” someone who’s watching and recording every move of those in his field of vision.
If successful, Spence will become one of a growing number of lifecasters. From early webcam pioneer Jennifer Kaye Ringley, who created JenniCam, to Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, to commercial lifecasting ventures Ustream.tv and Justin.tv, many people use video and internet technology to record and broadcast every moment of their waking lives. But Spence is taking lifecasting a step further, with a bionic eye camera that is actually embedded in his body.
“The eyes are like no other part of the body,” says Spence. “It’s what you look into when you fall in love with somebody and [influences] whether you trust someone or not. Now with a video camera in there, it will change how people see and perceive me.”

Thanks WIRED

 

The realignment of our bio-tech reality has hit a new milestone courtesy a group of cloning scientistsfrom Japan. For the first time in human history the group managed to clone an animal from 16 year-old frozen animal tissue. The development makes wild scenarios such as the one seen in the filmJurassic Park, in which prehistoric animals are resurrected to co-exist with modern man, less sci-fi and closer to sci-fact.

The scientists managed to produce four healthy mice from the frozen tissue, raising the possibility that still undiscovered prehistoric mammals hidden in the arctic tundra may one day find their way into our present-day reality. Although the scientists confirm that cloning a human is far more difficult than cloning a mouse, this new turn in science opens the door to a new biological landscape that will prove hard to map with any real accuracy.