The Q-Collar draws inspiration from a woodpecker, may help prevent concussions

Why it matters to you

Devices like the Q-Collar may be the answer to the problem of brain-related injuries across all sports.

While player-related safety across all sports is focused on protecting athletes’ heads with better helmets, a small, almost unseen device could provide an answer on how to better prevent brain-related injuries.

The Neuroshield, as it is marketed and sold in Canada, is called the Q-Collar in the U.S. It is going through human trials while under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before it can see commercial release stateside. The device draws biomimicry inspiration from a woodpecker ,wrapping around the user’s neck as a way to increase blood volume (like an airbag) in the skull to help stabilize the brain when it’s impacted by sudden movement.

The idea came from the mind Dr. David Smith, and was developed with Connecticut-based Q30 Innovations after Smith spent nine months studying woodpeckeras and other animals that are capable of withstanding repeated high-impact blows to the head. Among his discoveries was that nature developed a way for certain animals to change the pressure inside of their head.

“It’s just unbelievable to see what nature evolution has done to bring the tongue up over the top of its beak, up over the top of its skull back around the back underneath its ears,” Smith told ESPN about the woodpecker’s ability to use its tongue to change its cranial pressure.

But the device still has its detractors. Eric Nauman, a professor of biomedical engineering and basic medical science at Purdue University, has his doubts on whether or not the Q-Collar is beneficial.

“We actually did not pursue this one because we had concerns about the idea of pressing on the [jugular] vein, especially in an uncontrolled way,” he told ESPN. “I would just be too nervous something bad is going to happen.”

Although it has yet to see widespread use, Carolina Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly is the first known NFL player to wear the device, although given its experimental stage, he can’t say much about it, according to The Charlotte Observer. Kuechly began wearing the device this season after missing six games in 2016 with a concussion. Despite wearing the device during the 2017 season, Kuechly suffered another concussion during a game on Thursday, October 12.

While football players are the most obvious sector to potentially make use of the device, it may see adoption across all sports and workplaces. NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski, for one, wants to test it out.

“If Q-Collar does what the company believes it can do,” Keselowski told SportsTechie, “it will change the face of sports dramatically.”

The top 6 internet hoaxes, from sex in space to fake time travelers

While “fake news” has been the buzzword of choice lately, the notion certainly isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination. From Piltdown Man to Ponzi schemes, hoaxes and fraud are tied into the very fabric our truly wonderful and haphazard existence on this space rock. The Internet simply helped exponentially increase the scale at which even the most baseless, unverifiable, and even impossible claims could exploit human gullibility.

It’s no secret at this point that the World Wide Web goblet overfloweth with grifts and misinformation. (In fact, Kickstarter recently hired a Common Sense Specialist to minimize fraudulent campaigns — because in the year 2017, the very real occupation of Meme Translator simply wasn’t enough.) With every click, share, and “like” —  inadvertent or not (we’re looking at you @TedCruz) — each of us has the unique ability to do our little part in seeing to it that the truth is buried beneath a mountain of misinformation. Be it a secret NASA-sanctioned space sex study that unfortunately never happened to a rare banana-borne flesh-eating pandemic, here are the best internet hoaxes that somehow got our virtual goat.

NASA’s secret space sex program

Of course, NASA, the same agency that purportedly faked the moon landings and has systematically hidden all verifiable evidence that we, in fact, live on a flat disc and not a sphere, would make this list of hoax perpetrators. In 1989, a leaked NASA report known as Document 12-571-3570 explained in great detail a program aboard space shuttle mission STS-75 that was designed to test the most effective zero-gravity reproduction methods. As racy as zero-gravity sex looked in the television show The Expanse, coitus in the final frontier would actually be pretty awkward — for everyone, according to Paul Root Wolpe, the director of Emory University’s Center for Ethics and the first Chief of Bioethics for NASA.

“One of the things that gravity helps us do is stay together, so sex in microgravity might actually be more difficult because you’re going to have to make sure that you’re always holding each other so you don’t drift apart,” he said.

To minimize Newton’s Laws of Motion (in the Ocean) — an object in motion will stay in motion unless thrusted upon by another astronaut in the name of science — NASA apparently placed astronauts in an inflatable bubble and used some sort of elastic band to keep astronauts from “drifting” during said deed. The document was widely shared online and was even used as a legitimate source in Pierre Kohler’s novel The Final Mission, prompting NASA to publicly deny the report. Alas.

Time travelers

While Emmett Lathrop “Doc” Brown, may have used a little suspect plutonium, a flux capacitor, and a souped-up DeLorean to bend space and time in The Back to The Future films, humanity met yet another time traveler, John Titor, in 2000, this one cruising the space time continuum in a 1967 Corvette.

Titor first appeared on a message board, claiming that he was from the year 2036 and was part of a specialized military task forced stationed in Tampa, Florida. He said his mission was to return to the 1970s to get his hands on an IBM 5100 computer, but he was making a quantum pit stop in 2000 for “personal reasons.” Over the course of several months, Titor went to great lengths to post many words about his time machine without actually saying anything at all. He even posted an illustrative user manual of the machine that looks more or less like a sophisticated furnace.

“My ‘time’ machine is a stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two top-spin dual-positive singularities that produce a standard off-set Tipler sinusoid,” he said. (What’s a Tipler sinusoid? If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.)

The whole story gained enough traction that the man claiming to be John Titor was even interviewed on a globally streamed radio program. Just as mysteriously as Titor appeared, he vanished, but before Titor blasted off with his ornate box and Speak & Spell, he did leave us with a list of dates and prophecies for the years ahead. He claimed a civil war stemming from unrest in 2004 would eventually divide the U.S. into five separate factions and a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would take place in 2015.

Fortunately, none of these prophesies came to fruition, although it could be argued that Titor unraveled the cosmic fabric of our realm with his very being, and for that we are forever thankful to ol’ time-hoppin’ Johnny Tampa.

Kremvax hoax

All semantics and technical distinctions aside, the Kremvax incident may be the first hoax ever perpetrated on the internet. (For all intents and purposes, the hoax occurred on the Usenet network — an early iteration of the pre-internet internet.) In 1984, computer programmer and internet pioneer Piet Beertema took it upon himself to hoodwink Americans on Usenet into thinking the Soviet Union was attempting to connect to the computer communications system.

Beertema logged onto multiple Usenet boards and uploaded a message that seemingly came from Konstantin Chernenko, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. What reinforced the whole sham was the fact that the message appeared to be sent from a pseudo-Kremlin server (kremvax.UUCP). If Usenet, in fact, had any network connectivity to the Eastern Bloc, this breach would pose a direct threat to U.S. national security.

The immediate results on the American side of things was utter shock, disbelief, and paranoia. It didn’t take long before the Pentagon started looking into the charade and soon after Beertema revealed himself as the wizard behind the digital curtain. Got him!

15 days of darkness

In late 2015, the highly reputable website NewsWatch33 ran an article titled “NASA Confirms Earth Will Experience 15 Days of Complete Darkness in November 2015.” Not long after publication, the internet was abuzz with astronomically impossible terror. Per the article, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden had issued a 1,000-page memorandum on a worldwide blackout, citing something about Jupiter, Venus, and “planetary alignment theory.” You know, space stuff. Sadly, the report gained enough traction on the Interweb that former NASA scientist Marshall Shepherd penned an article to settle the brouhaha. Thankfully, the fortnight of no light never was.

How to charge an iPod with an onion

From the Orgone to the Gravgen, free energy devices and the like have been peddled by charlatans and confidence men for centuries. Needless to say, some grifts never die and, as the saying goes, a sucker is born every minute. While many of us are familiar with the timeless Potato clock, fewer of us may be privy to the powers of the onion.

In 2008, a video claimed that an electrolyte-enhanced beverage and a medium-size onion (use a larger onion if you prefer speedier recharge times)  could recharge an iPod via a standard USB cable. Viewers were prompted to puncture the onion with a screwdriver and then let the vegetable steep in the electrolytes for 30 minutes. They were them prompted to forcibly shove the USB end of the charging cable into the onion and voilà, instant energy. Makes sense, right? Right.

According to the experts in this video, this electrolyte-soaked onion should be able to charge your iPod for 15 to 20 minutes (that is assuming, the onion has absorbed about one cup of electrolyte solution). After garnering more than seven million views on YouTube, the gumshoes at ABC rolled up their sleeves to test the hypothesis in pursuit of a George Polk Award for journalistic excellence. Fun Fact: No, you can’t actually charge anything with an All Sport soaked onion. Not even a little bit.

Flesh-eating bananas

In 1999, as both the new Willennium and apocalyptic Y2K glitch loomed, tensions were high. The last thing anyone needed as they approached their unknown fate was yet another baseless reason to be marginally paranoid. In comes a suspect email straight from an anonymous source at the nondescript Manheim Research Institute about a shipments of bananas en route to the U.S. from Costa Rica containing flesh-eating bacteria.

The e-mail claimed these bananas — infected with a bacteria causing necrotizing fasciitis — had “decimated the monkey population in Costa Rica,” and would soon be on the shelves in supermarkets across the U.S. The whole sham got so big the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eventually acknowledged the prospect of such an event.

“Theoretically, it’s possible,” stated a CDC spokesman. “But, to our knowledge, the so-called flesh-eating bacteria have not been transmitted via banana.”

The skeptics, however, will surely read in between those heavily lawyered lines. Nonetheless, this hoax was so heated that the International Banana Association (IBA) — yes, that’s apparently a thing — had to step in. Banana czar Tim Debus of the IBA placed such a prank on par with “internet terrorism.”

“When we first heard about it in January, it sounded too unbelievable to be believable,” proclaimed Debus. “But when you’re talking about a food product, people will err on the side of caution.”

To the best of our knowledge, to date, no one has died as a result of this potential bandemic. Crisis averted — for now.

6 ways humankind might accidentally bring about the ‘techpocalypse’

Why it matters to you

They may sound like scenarios from a Michael Crichton thriller, but here are six plausible ways that technology could bring down life as we know it.

Here in 2017, technology’s pretty great. It’s helping us live longer, healthier lives, with more access to education and entertainment, and tools like artificial intelligence and gene-editing are providing new ways to solve major problems. But not everything about technology is swell. As the cultural theorist Paul Virilio once noted, the inventor of the ship is also the inventor of the shipwreck. In other words, no matter how good technology might look, there’s always something that can go wrong.

On that cheery note, here are six of the most likely ways we might spring the techpocalypse on ourselves.

Superintelligent A.I. takes over

Universal Pictures

The arrival of superintelligence and the technological singularity is based on the assumption that it’s possible for A.I. to one day possess abilities greater than our own. Compared to humans who are limited by biological evolution, machines could then improve and redesign themselves at an ever increasing pace; becoming smarter all the time. At this point, enormous changes would inevitably take place in human society — which have the possibility of posing an existential risk to humankind.

It’s impossible to predict how an entity more intelligence than us would behave, but the results could be anything from machines wiping out humanity, Terminator-style, to enslaving the world’s population. Heck, combine artificial intelligence with nanotechnology and you might get a scenario like…

Transforming the world into grey goo

RIJASOLO/AFP/Getty Images

The words “grey goo” are rarely associated with positive life experiences. This particular hypothesis is one which has arisen with the advance of nanotechnology, in which self-replicating nanotechnology consumes all the matter on our planet.

It was first proposed by nanotechnology expert Kim Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation, in which he writes that: “Imagine … a replicator floating in a bottle of chemicals, making copies of itself… The first replicator assembles a copy in one thousand seconds, the two replicators then build two more in the next thousand seconds, the four build another four, and the eight build another eight. At the end of 10 hours, there are not 36 new replicators, but over 68 billion. In less than a day, they would weigh a ton; in less than two days, they would outweigh the Earth; in another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the sun and all the planets combined – if the bottle of chemicals hadn’t run dry long before.”

The idea was shocking enough that it prompted the U.K.’s future monarch Prince Charles to call the Royal Society to investigate it. Right now the technology for self-replicating nanobots doesn’t exist. But, hey, there’s always tomorrow!

Depleting our planet’s natural resources

A combination of growing human population levels and new controversial ways of extracting our planet’s natural resources, such as fracking, could add up to disaster. While there’s a worldwide push toward using renewable energy sources — and scientists are showing an ever increasing interest in the prospect of colonizing other planets — the possibility of somehow depleting our natural mineral resources is certainly a risk factor to be wary of.

Massive cyber attack

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

This one isn’t so much about physically destroying the world as it is about leveling governments, crashing economies, and generally obliterating society as we know it. From the large scale hacks we’ve seen in recent years, it’s pretty clear just how destructive giant coordinated hacking attacks can be.

A major cyber attack could pollute water plants, switch off our power, and bring travel to a shuddering halt. It could also result in the leak of sensitive classified information, wipe trillions of dollars off the stock market or personal bank accounts, or take down telecommunication networks.

Add in humanity’s looting-and-pillaging tendency to behave badly once the veneer of polite society is gone, and you wouldn’t necessarily need a James Bond-style villain holding the world’s nuclear weapons to ransom for this to cause unimaginable chaos around the globe.

Experimental technology goes wrong

Frederic Pitchal/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images

With projects such as Switzerland’s super-powered particle accelerator the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and New York’s spin-polarized proton collider the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), scientists are interested in unlocking some pretty deep secrets of physics, concerning the nature of matter, dark energy, and other high-energy experiments.

Not helped by various techno-thriller writers, this has raised plenty of concern about doomsday scenarios, such as the accidental (or purposeful) creation of a manmade black hole, an unstable “strangelet” particle, false vacuum states, or something else entirely.

The possibility of this happening is present, although the odds are very, very, very long. Our favorite quip about this came from Frank Close, professor of physics at the U.K.’s University of Oxford, who likened one such scenario to the odds of, “winning the major prize on the lottery three weeks in succession.” The problem, he said, is that people believe it is possible to win the lottery three weeks in succession.

We go to war using high-tech weapons

Sadly, the entry on this list which could already happen from a technological perspective is this one. Mankind currently has the ability to end pretty much all life on Earth, courtesy of its enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons. The two most nuclear-armed states are the U.S. and Russia, which have around 15,000 warheads between them.

More recently, another threat that has arisen in warfare is the arrival of fully automated weapons systems. Referred to as the “third revolution in warfare” in a 2017 open letter signed by Elon Musk of Tesla and Mustafa Suleyman of Google, the threat of autonomous weapons is that they will allow armed conflict to be fought at greater scales than ever, and at a timescale faster than humans can possibly comprehend.

Remember the 1983 movie WarGames? Picture that scenario, with less Matthew Broderick and more advanced weaponry.

Nintendo Power Glove gets new life as a retro HTC Vive VR controller

Why it matters to you

A retro game controller from the ’90s realizes its true potential, thanks to the creative minds at Teague Labs.

“I love the Power Glove … it’s so bad.”

So said the evil villain Lucas in the 1989 video game movie The Wizard. The new Nintendo peripheral was prominently featured in the film, but it may have been a few decades ahead of its time. The eight-bit processors of the early consoles were ill-equipped to handle the rigors of virtual reality (VR), and the Power Glove never caught on because it was clumsy, difficult to use, and worked with very few games.

Now the wizards at Teague Labs have breathed new life into this arcane bit of video game trivia by designing a true Power Glove VR controller. With Power Gloves readily available on the second-hand market, they set about realizing the dream of this often-mocked accessory.

They mounted an Arduino Due and a Vive tracker on the glove where the buttons would normally go, added a custom shield, and interfaced it with the tracker to make it compatible with the HTC Vive VR system. It created a more natural interaction than the conventional controller. “Holding virtual objects, touching mock-up screens, and pointing at things just feels a lot better when using the dexterity of one’s fingers instead of trying to use a fixed wand,” the engineers explained at their site.

They also got better results with the Power Glove than the Vive controller for on-screen touch interactions. “With the Power Glove and a second tracker mounted to the backside of an acrylic iPad, we were able to simulate more natural interactions with an iPad in VR,” they noted. “The overall experience improves dramatically when using the glove. The acrylic iPad even provides the same haptic feedback as a tablet would.”

If you’re interested in a more technical explanation (or you’d like to build one of your own), all of their files are available for download at GitHub.

In the first application Teague created for their do-it-yourself peripheral, you can shoot lightning by making a fist. Then they made a prototype “game” where you fought off incoming waves of rocks, paper, and scissors. “The game is still in an early stage, but it’s already a lot of fun to play!” they said.

As the advertising tagline for the Power Glove put it, “Everything else is child’s play.”

Android 8.0 Oreo beta is now available for OnePlus 3/3T users

OnePlus has released Oreo for the 3 and 3T as part of the Open Beta program.

Early access programs can be a cool way to experience new features, so long as you don’t mind a few bugs. The same is true for OnePlus’s Open Beta program, which brings early features to some of its phones. As part of that program, the company is trialing Android 8.0 Oreo before rolling it out to all of its users later in the year.

Known issues with this build include:

• Fingerprint actions may be slower than you are used to.
• Shortcut to access Google Photos is unavailable
• Some stability issues with NFC and Bluetooth
• Performance and compatibility of 3rd party apps will continue to be optimized

In the 30 minutes I’ve been using Oreo on my OnePlus 3T, I haven’t encountered any of these problems. In addition to staple Oreo features such as notification channels and colored media notifications, OnePlus has also tweaked the quick settings and updated the phone to the September 2017 security patch.

For those already in the Open Beta program, you should see the update from the settings menu. Those that have not enrolled in the Open Beta can download will be able to follow the installation instructions here.

Are you going to try Oreo on the OnePlus 3 or 3T? Let us know down below!

OnePlus 3T and OnePlus 3

• OnePlus 3T review: Rekindling a love story
• OnePlus 3T vs. OnePlus 3: What’s the difference?
• OnePlus 3T specs
• Latest OnePlus 3 news
• Discuss OnePlus 3T and 3 in the forums

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Huawei Mate 10 Lite reported to have four cameras, 18:9 display, €379 price

Because three cameras are so early 2017.

Although we’re getting dangerously close to the end of 2017, that doesn’t mean we’ve seen all of the major smartphone releases for the year. Huawei is scheduled to host a press event on October 16 to unveil its latest product offerings, and we’ve already heard and seen a lot about the upcoming Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro. However, new information has recently surfaced regarding a third Mate 10 device – the Mate 10 Lite.

Huawei Mate 10 Lite

As you’d expect, the Mate 10 Lite is the least powerful of all the Mate 10 smartphones that’ll be announced this coming Monday. Despite that, this is not a cheap or feature-lacking device. Just like the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro, the Mate 10 Lite will come equipped with an 18:9 display. The bezels surrounding the 5.9-inch 1080 x 2160 display aren’t quite as thin as what’s found on the Mate 10 Pro, but they’re still considerably smaller than the Pixel 2’s massive forehead and chin.

The phone should be powered by Huawei’s Kirin 659 processor that’s clocked at 2.36GHz, 4GB of RAM, and a decently-sized 3,340 mAh battery. There’s also 64GB of internal storage, rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, and Android 8.0 Oreo with EMUI 5.1 layered over it.

In regards to cameras, this is where the Mate 10 Lite should really shine. Like a lot of other handsets released this year, the Mate 10 Lite features two cameras on the back – including a 16MP main sensor and a second 2MP one. Althgouh that might not be particularly exciting, the Mate 10 Lite kicks things up a notch by also being outfitted with two front-facing cameras. The front of the phone will house a 13MP and 2MP sensor, and this (combined with a toning flash) will supposedly allow for bokeh portrait shots with two people in the frame.

Following its announcement on October 16, the Mate 10 Lite is expected to go on sale about a month later for €379 (about $455 USD).

Dual cameras are the future, and the Huawei Mate 9 does it really well