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Wednesday, 26 November 2014
ARTS
‘Viber’ Messaging app now Lets You peek in on CeLebritY Chatter
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VIA WIRED.COM
ESSAGING and voice call app Viber has launched Public Chats, a new feature that allows users to discover, share and interact with conversations, communities and content on mobile. Public Chats are live discussions between celebrities and personalities that Viber users can follow. They offer a new kind of social experience – tapping into live conversations as they happen. Anyone on Viber can follow as many of these chats as they like on their mobile device. Conversations are multi-media and include text, photos, audio, video, stickers, web links and more. Users can invite friends to follow the Public Chats that interest them, and can share content. It’s not altogether different from what celebrities are already doing on sites like Twitter and Facebook, but Talmon Marco, founder and CEO of Viber believes that because Viber lets the average user in on actual conversations, the content will feel a lot more real. More importantly, however, it’s something Marco hopes will help differentiate Viber from other companies like WhatsApp, Kik, and WeChat, which are all jockeying for the lead in the growing messaging app market. Over the last few years, the messaging app space has grown crowded, and the competitors in the space
have grown more and more alike. Now, it seems, the main thing that distinguishes them is the number of users they have. That’s no small thing for a messaging platform, which is only useful to people when most of their contacts are using it too. By this measure, WhatsApp is by far the most successful, with some 600 million monthly active users worldwide. Viber, by contrast, has 210 million. Which is why Marco, who sold the company to Japan-
ese internet company Rakuten for $900 million earlier this year, is constantly on the lookout for features that will encourage more users to switch platforms. Original content, he believes, could do just that. “We don’t necessarily envision making money directly out of public chats,” he says. “But this is something for our users to do , and at the same time, we think it will bring additional users and show them what Viber can be used for.”
LOVE TO HATE? : YOUR ‘FRENEMIES’ ARE HARMING YOUR HEALTH, STUDY SAYS COURTESY MAIL ONLINE We may have more frenemies - people we both love and hate - than we realise, and they may be harming our health, researchers have warned. Experts say on average about half of our social network consists of people we have, as they put it, an ‘ambivalent relationship’ with. They say the stress of these relationships is harming our health. ‘It is rare to encounter someone who doesn’t have at least one ambivalent relationship,’ Julianne HoltLunstad at Brigham Young University in Utah, told the BBC. They found, as expected, highly ‘aversive’ persons such as an unreasonable boss raised blood pressure more than the ‘supportive’ group. However, blood pressure actually rose the most for the ambivalent ties, such as an overbearing parent. Further research by Holt-Lunstad showed that blood pressure rose even when the participants were merely exposed to subliminal triggers that reminded them of the ‘ambivalent’ social contact, like flashing the person’s name on a screen. ‘Even when the other person is just in another room in the lab, they have higher blood pressure and higher levels of anxiety,’ Holt-Lunstad told the BBC. ‘It’s just the anticipation of having to interact with them.’
Previously a Danish study also found worries, conflicts and demands in relationships with friends, family and neighbors may contribute to an earlier death. Men and people without jobs seemed to be the most vulnerable, Rikke Lund, a public health researcher at the University of Copenhagen, and her colleagues found. ‘Conflicts, especially, were associated with higher mortality risk regardless of whom was the source of the conflict,’ the authors write. ‘Worries and demands were only associated with mortality risk if they were related to partner or children.’ The health-protecting effects of support from a social network and close connections with family and friends are widely recognized, Lund’s team writes in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. ‘Less is known about the health consequences of stressful aspects of social relations, such as conflicts, worries and demands,’ they write. HoltLunstad doesn’t want people to get the impression from this study that ending all imperfect relationships is the right thing to do. ‘Not all relationships are equal - we need to be careful about the negative aspects as well,’ she said. ‘We know that social isolation is bad for us as well,’ she said. ‘They’re probably both bad and that’s why it might be important to foster the positive aspects rather than just focusing on cutting people out of your life.’
ContaCt Lenses with buiLt-in Video CouLd be 3d printed in future BY NEW SCIENCTIST Who needs Glass when you’ve got contact lenses that can display video and even detect health problems? What’s more, lenses with these capabilities could one day be created using a 3D printer. Most of today’s 3D printers work with scraps of plastic or metal and turn them into simple objects. But Michael McAlpine at Princeton University and his colleagues have developed a 3D printer that can make a five-layered contact lens, one which emits light into the wearer’s eyes. The lens is a transparent polymer with several components embedded inside: nanoscale quantum dot light-emitting diodes, wiring made from silver nanoparticles, and organic polymers that could act as parts of electrical circuits. The trickiest part, McAlpine says, was working out which chemical solvents would deposit each layer best, leaving them dry enough for the next layer to adhere. Another challenge was the fact that everyone has uniquely shaped eyeballs. The team scanned the contact lens constantly with two cameras to ensure the final shape matched the user’s prescription. The work was funded by the US Air Force, which hopes to use such lenses to display in-flight data. Replacing the LEDs with light sensors could also reveal the state of the wearer’s retina and possibly monitor pilot health without invasive implants. They could also be replaced with sensors that detect chemical biomarkers of fatigue in eye fluids, McAlpine suggests. “Planes have sensors for the state of everything, except the most important thing: the pilot’s exhaustion level,” he says. Taking the system out of the lab and into the cockpit won’t be easy, however, says physicist Raymond Murray at Imperial College London. He thinks the 3D printed LED display is interesting, but notes that the voltage it needs to switch on is still too high to use in a commercial contact lens. In addition, the team needs to ensure the devices have no adverse effects on the body – the materials that make quantum dots, such as cadmium selenide, have known health risks.
GOOGLE’S LATEST: A SPOON THAT STEADIES TREMORS AGENCIES Google has developed a spoon to aid those suffering from Parkinson’s. Using hundreds of algorithms, they allow people with essential tremors and Parkinson’s Disease to eat without spilling. The technology senses how a hand is shaking and makes instant adjustments to stay balanced. In clinical trials, the Liftware spoons reduced shaking of the spoon bowl by an average of 76 percent. “We want to help people in their daily lives today and hopefully increase understanding of disease in the long run,” said Google spokesperson Katelin Jabbari. Other adaptive devices have been developed to help people with tremors — rocker knives, weighted utensils, pen grips. But until now, experts say, technology has not been used in this way. “It’s totally novel,” said UC San Francisco Medical Center neurologist Dr. Jill Ostrem who specializes in movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease and es-
sential tremors. She helped advise the inventors, and says the device has been a remarkable asset for some of her patients. “I have some patients who couldn’t eat independently, they had to be fed, and now they can eat on their own,” she said. “It doesn’t cure the disease, they still have tremor, but it’s a very positive change.” Google got into the no-shake utensil business in September, acquiring a small, National of Institutes of Healthfunded startup called Lift Labs for an undisclosed sum. More than 10 million people worldwide, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s mother, have essential tremors or Parkinson’s disease. Brin has said he also has a mutation associated with higher rates of the Parkinson’s and has donated more than $50 million to research for a cure, although Jabbari said the Lift Labs acquisition was not related. Lift Lab founder Anupam Pathak said moving from a small, four-person startup in San Francisco to the vast
Google campus in Mountain View has freed him up to be more creative as he explores how to apply the technology even more broadly. His team works at the search giant’s division called Google(x) Life Sciences, which is also developing a smart contact lens that measures glucose levels in tears for diabetics and is researching how nanoparticles in blood might help detect diseases. Joining Google has been motivating, said Pathak, but his focus remains on people who are now able to eat independently with his device. “If you build something with your hands and it has that sort of an impact, it’s the greatest feeling ever,” he said. “As an engineer who likes to build things, that’s the most validating thing that can happen.” Pathak said they also hope to add sensors to the spoons to help medical researchers and providers better understand, measure and alleviate tremors. Shirin Vala, 65, of Oakland, has had
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an essential tremor for about a decade. She was at her monthly Essential Tremor group at a San Ramon medical clinic earlier this year when researchers developing the device introduced the idea and asked if anyone was interested in helping them. As it was refined, she tried it out and gave them feedback. And when they hit the market at $295 apiece, she bought one. Without the spoon, Vala said eating was really a challenge because her hands trembled so hard food fell off the utensils before she could eat it. “I was shaking and I had a hard time to keep the food on a spoon, especially soup or something like an olive or tomatoes or something. It is very embarrassing. It’s very frustrating,” she said. The spoon definitely improved her situation. “I was surprised that I held the food in there so much better. It makes eating much easier, especially if I’m out at a restaurant,” she said.