Nest Learning Thermostat

The folks over at engadget are reporting on the "nest", a learning thermostat that is made by the creators of the iPhone.

According to Nest, the thermostat takes about a week to start picking up on your routine, at which point it adjusts the temperature accordingly. It knows, for instance, that the whole family's out of the house by 9am, and that people start trickling back in around four in the afternoon. That's all thanks to a collection of six sensors, which keep tabs on metrics like temperature, ambient light, humidity and motion -- whether it's fingers about to touch the display or people passing in and out of the room.

Uses wifi, works with your pc or iphone/pad, priced around $250, very slick!

Update:
It is COOL (I got one!)
Unfortunately, it's so cool that Honeywell wants to sue it out of existence. 

Derek Deville's Qu8k

Derek Deville, built a 8" diameter, ~14 foot rocket, that went 121,000 feet (~23 miles) up into space to capture Carmack's $5k "100kft Micro Prize".

Top speed of the rocket was 3,200ft/s (2,181 mph) and it's all on video:


(BTW, it landed only 3 miles from the launch site.) More on this at HuffPo and Gizmo.

FoldIt!

As NPR's On the Media points out about Foldit, a "new online game [that] helps solve medical mysteries".

Using a game available to anyone online called Foldit, gamers successfully built a model of an enzyme crucial to understanding how many diseases, such as AIDS, do their damage. Solving the crystal structure of the M-PMV retroviral protease has stumped scientists for more than ten years.

Foldit is available for MAC, Windows and Linux. (no phone apps yet.) See more at their wiki. ...Funny, it wasn't even a full year after Jane McGonigal lectured at TED that "Gaming can make a better world", and sure enough, here's proof of that!

On the heals of this is phylo, a crowd sourcing game to solve multiple sequence alignment issues with RNA/DNA. Slashdot points out how "gamers playing Phylo have beaten a state-of-the-art program at aligning regions of 521 disease-associated genes form different species"

Portlands Voodoo Donuts!

No.. Ive never been there, but I gotsta go!

A local Portland Organ donuts shop is getting really good reviews for their speciality creations.  You name it, they got it!  (and I'm betting they have others you never thought of....

 

In other related news, Scientific American, with the help of thevisualMD has a very interesting spread on "A Graphic Look at Obesity--Inside and Out".