Reality Bites
Microsoft’s cloud-based Office suite, Office 365, was first announced back in October 2010. Following a limited beta test conducted with a few select businesses, Microsoft has now opened up the beta program to the public. Individuals that are interested in participating may visit the Office 365 webpage.
Office 365 is a…
Viewsonic’s G Tablet may not have made much of splash when it debuted last fall, but it’s certainly been picking up a bit of steam as of late. A recent price drop brought its cost down to just $280, and hackers have even managed to overclock its processor to 1.4GHz and get it running CyanogenMod 7 to boot. Now Viewsonic itself has given the tablet a further boost, with a new firmware update bringing support for both Flash and USB peripherals, which can apparently also be used with a docking station. The update’s of the over-the-air variety, and should be waiting for you if you haven’t turned on your G Tablet in the past few days.
Viewsonic G Tablet gets firmware update with Flash, USB peripheral support originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Apr 2011 01:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Well, it’s official: Sitting all day is bad for you.
It makes you fat.
It makes you weak.
It makes you more likely to keel over dead.
How do we know?
Because “inactivity researchers” have finally cracked the code.
Specifically, they have figured out why some people get fat when they eat too much and other people don’t get fat, even when they eat the same amount:
The people who get fat get fat because they sit around all day. The people who don’t get fat don’t sit around as much.
Importantly, the difference between the fatties and the non-fatties in the study had nothing to do with exercise. None of the folks in the “inactivity” study were allowed to exercise. The folks who didn’t get fat didn’t exercise–they just didn’t spend as much time sitting. Instead, they stood. They walked. They took stairs instead of elevators. They fidgeted. Etc.
And sitting doesn’t just make you fat. It makes you sick, too.
Why is sitting so bad for you? Per James Vlahos in the New York Times, here’s what happens when you sit:
Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” [inactivity researcher Marc] Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.
Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary.
Over a lifetime, sitting really can kill you:
Another bummer: You can't counter the harmful effects of sitting by exercising once in a while. You actually have to stop sitting. Or at least start moving around more.
So get off your ass!
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![Not shown: the approximately 30,000 identical, vaguely hysterical articles titled "WHITE PEOPLE IN [THE US/BRITAIN] TO BECOME MINORITY BY [YEAR]!", which came up for basically any year I put in.](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/future_timeline.png "Not shown: the approximately 30,000 identical, vaguely hysterical articles titled \"WHITE PEOPLE IN [THE US/BRITAIN] TO BECOME MINORITY BY [YEAR]!\", which came up for basically any year I put in.")
ASUS Eee Pad Slider making the jump from Tegra 2 to Atom Z670? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Honestly, we were a little bit worried that Samsung’s rail-thin Galaxy Tab 10.1 was a mockup — you know, seeing as how Sammy never turned it on — but fast-forward to today and there’s a working model in Tinhte.vn‘s capable arms. Yes, the Vietnamese site that’s been leaking delicious Apple prototypes — not to mention the HP TouchPad’s SIM slot — found the 0.33-inch thin slate at an unnamed Samsung booth, powered it up, and proceeded to dive into the sticky-sweet mess of Android 3.0 and iPad 2 comparisons that such a discovery affords. You’ll find all that and some Angry Birds in the video immediately above.
[Thanks, Nate]
Samsung’s super slender Galaxy Tab 10.1 snacks on some Honeycomb (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Apr 2011 15:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
With the plethora of acronyms and creative spellings available to the modern text messaging user, it seems only logical that knowledge of the actual spellings would be forgotten. And yet, against all odds, text messaging can actually improve spelling abilities. More »
We’ve seen robots that perform brain surgery and lasers that cook tumors, and now a team of researchers are well on their way to bringing mobility to the battle against brain cancer. The NovoTTF-100A, which just received FDA approval, is basically a set of insulated electrodes, attached to an electronic box, that pumps low intensity electrical fields to the site of a freshly diagnosed GBM (glioblastoma multiforme) tumor. The fields, known as Tumor Treatment Fields (TTF), play off the electrically charged elements of cancer cells to stunt the tumor’s growth, and may in some cases actually reverse it. A recent test of the system showed comparable results to chemotherapy, without the usual lineup of side effects, including nausea, anemia, fatigue, and infection. Given, patients using the system are expected to wear the thing continuously, but we’d say walking around with a cap full of electrodes is a small price to pay for giving cancer the boot. Full PR after the break.
Continue reading Portable brain tumor treatment system kills cancer while you take out the trash
Portable brain tumor treatment system kills cancer while you take out the trash originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Apr 2011 03:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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via http://i.imgur.com/VgUQ3.jpg
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Rumor has it that HP is preparing to enter the cloud-based music storage fray. A reader at PreCentral sent in what purports to be a confidential PowerPoint presentation indicating the TouchPad will launch with an HP-branded music and movie store, as well as a smart syncing service that caches frequently accessed media for local playback. This may very well be the “Music Synergy” that SVP Steven McArthur mentioned to us. Amazon has already launched such an app and it’s all but official that Google is planning the same thing, so it only makes sense that the company would want to imbue webOS with similar powers. We can’t verify these claims ourselves and the slide above is clearly a wonky Photoshop job, but it’s would hardly be surprising after snatching up Melodeo and the streaming music service Nutsie. And, while webOS and Android are working to banish the quaint ritual of plugging your cellphone into a computer, we can only imagine what the Lala team is up to — maybe Jobs has them washing his turtlenecks.
HP may bless webOS with cloud-syncing music store originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 18:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
We’ve seen some pretty fancy cans in our time, but perhaps none as tricked out as Kohler’s latest $6,400 john. The Numi does just about everything for you, aside from the stuff that, well, only you can do. Looking something akin to a fancy pop-top waste bin, Numi comes complete with a self-opening and closing lid so you never have to touch the toilet seat; a self-cleaning bidet with adjustable controls for temperature and water pressure; heating elements to keep your toes and tush toasty; an illuminated panel for nighttime rendezvous; a built-in speaker system that connects to a remote docking station to ensure only you know exactly what you’re doing in there; and a deodorizing element that sucks air from the bowl through a charcoal filter. Of course, no connected appliance would be complete without a touchscreen, and the Numi’s no exception; it has a touch panel remote that you can use to set to your specifications. Now, that’s what we call a porcelain throne. Check out the ridiculously lavish promo video after the break.
Continue reading Kohler’s Numi $6,400 high-tech toilet does most of the dirty work for you (video)
Kohler’s Numi $6,400 high-tech toilet does most of the dirty work for you (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 17:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
“Unlike lasers, HPM beams don’t need a lot of accuracy. With a fan [of HPM energy] you can target 10-30 small boats. If you can knock out 50-75% of the engines in a swarm, you can then concentrate on the remainder with lasers or kinetic [cannons].”
To develop better defenses against such attacks, the contractor received $150,000 from the Air Force to test-fire microwaves at military computers. No word on whether said defenses involve generous use of tin foil.
US government contractor developing ‘microwave gun,’ Hot Pockets tremble originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 16:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Android: SwipePad for Android is a simple way to get to your often used apps quickly no matter what your doing. More »
How do you tell a guy is into you when he’s, uh, into you? No less authority than The Onion shows us in this decidedly NSFW faux-morning show segment. Full video, with lots of sexy sex sex words, lies directly ahead: More »
We don’t know too much about the next version of Office, let alone Outlook, but a user over on The Hot Fix has discovered something interesting. A user by the name of “fivestar” posted pictures of what is supposedly Outlook.Next, and it appears the interface has had an entire Metro…
When it comes to computing, our general philosophy at Maximum PC is that bigger is better. More, speed, more memory, more power—as far as hardware goes, there's no such things as excess. Software, though… Software's a little different. Big, feature-packed utilities and applications are great, but we prefer apps that show a little restraint. More »
We’re sure there are still scores of lifelong book lovers whose paper tomes we can pry from their cold, dead fingers, but the evidence strongly suggests that plenty of others are rapidly warming to their shiny new e-readers. US sales of e-books generated about $90.3 million in revenue in February — roughly triple the sales reported in the same month last year. To boot, they were the dominant format for trade titles, a category that includes adult and children’s works. Meanwhile, printed books declined 34 percent and 16 percent in those respective areas, with gentler, single-digit drops for education and religious titles. That follows strong January sales and echoes what Amazon said about e-books outselling print versions two to one. To be fair, of course, February is a time of year when people who received e-readers during the holidays load ’em up with bestsellers — you know, to keep them entertained during spring break.
Continue reading E-book sales triple year-over-year, paper books decline in every category
E-book sales triple year-over-year, paper books decline in every category originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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You may not have ever thought about it, but the far-too-often-used keyboard combination of Control + Alt + Delete had to have been brought into existence by some random coder at some point in technological history. But wait, it wasn’t just a random coder. The keystroke combo is attributed to [David Bradley]. He was one of the original designers of the IBM Personal Computer. You can even hear his own recount of the story in the video after the break.
He came up with the idea after growing weary of waiting for the Power-On Self Test (POST) routine to finish during each reboot of his software testing regiment. We remember the old days of slow hardware and can understand his frustration at the lost time. He decided to throw in a shortcut that allowed the software to reboot without power cycling the hardware. The original implementation used CTRL-ALT-ESC, but was later changed so that one frustrated keyboard mash couldn’t accidentally reboot the system.
[via Gizmodo]
[Image Source: Wikimedia Commons]
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Yesterday HP Canada put up their registration page for their new “TouchPad” tablet. This runs webOS, has a 10.1-inch display, 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The only hint of it being available was sometime this Summer and no price points. We received a tip from a retail outlet presentation slide that points to the TouchPad […]
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