6. Interesting Reads
“Toy injuries resulted in 185,000 visits to the emergency room and 11 deaths among children under the age of 15 in 2015, according to a report (PDF) released Thursday by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Cuts and bruises were the most common injuries, and the head and the face were the most affected areas of the body. Riding toys, specifically non-motorized scooters, were responsible for 45% of the toy-related deaths. The report comes just in time for the holiday shopping season. “We want consumers to enjoy their time, with holiday gifts being a source of joy rather than a source of pain,” Consumer Product Safety Commission spokeswoman Nikki Fleming said.”
(CNN)
“Researchers have developed a much needed alternative to bone grafts that could help alleviate the long-term hospitalization, disability, and considerable costs to the health system associated with non-healing fractures. Roughly 100,000 broken bones every year in the United States fail to heal properly, resulting in nonunion fractures, and more than 2 million bone grafts are performed around the world annually in attempts to treat these challenging injuries. Harvesting fresh bone from patients, however, is often painful and donated grafts from tissue banks frequently fail to integrate. Now, Maxim Bez and colleagues devised a two-step gene therapy method coupled with FDA-approved ultrasound and microbubbles that completely healed nonunion fractures in pigs within eight weeks of treatment.”
“The number of devices with digital assistants built-in will grow to over 7.5 billion in 2021, according to new forecasts by the research and consulting firm Ovum. That just surpasses the current world population, according to the US Census Bureau. In their analysis, Ovum breaks out the various digital assistants and discusses their past and future. In 2016, about 3.5 billion active devices were already on the market, says Ovum, and that number will grow quickly as more types of devices introduce digital assistants. For instance, most of the devices hosting digital assistants on them right now are phones, but with the rise of smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, smart TVs and connected cars, the territory for assistants to claim will only grow.”
(CNET)
“Facebook Messenger is getting a new look. No, it’s not getting rid of its Stories feature, Messenger Day, but is instead making a series a smaller changes to the way the content on its home screen is organized in an effort to speed navigation and help you pick up where you left off on your last visit. The update introduces new tabs to the top of Messenger’s main screen for moving between your messages, active contacts, and groups. In addition, the app will now push you to visit other areas by using a red dot on various sections and tabs to let you know when there’s activity.”
“The battle between the Google Home and the Amazon Echo keeps getting better and better. Yesterday, a year after Google first announced the Home and the Google Assistant, the search giant might have just shown the road map to put the Home ahead for good. To this point, the Google Home smart speaker has lagged behind Amazon’s competing Echo devices in terms of the things it can do. Amazon had a head start with Echo, bringing it to the market in 2014, and as a result, the Echo has more than 10,000 skills and works directly with dozens of internet connected hardware products. The Google Home only started with four device partners, but it has been catching up.”
(CNET)
“Which are the smartphones with the best earphones? It seems like the phones these days have gone far beyond their primary function – they are not used just for calling other users, but for many other features like internet access, social media, camera, audio player and so on. This technology is developing rapidly and every company is trying to offer smartphone models with better performances in order to satisfy the needs of their customers and attract new customers as well. Then, what do people love the most about their smartphone?”
“Which are the 10 least aerodynamic cars ever made? Do Fiat Multipla, the AMC Pacer or Pontiac Aztec belong on the list? Although those are some weird looking cars the answer is no, this is not the ugliest car competition. We are here to talk about the aerodynamics. So, what is the aerodynamic of a car and how it is measured? The aerodynamic of a car is expressed by so-called drag coefficient value, or Cd in short. The drag force of a moving car is parallel with the airflow, so the drag coefficient of a car is observed and measured in the wind tunnel. Drag coefficient describes how smoothly car passes the air during the drive, and it grows as the speed increases. So, the lower the Cd value is, the more aerodynamic a car is.”
