what's the buzz

Car system that can monitor your health

Researchers have been working with BMW on a project for their Mini Cooper line called Nigel – the system creates a log using 230 sensors in the vehicle of whatever happens inside.

Researchers from another branch of the USC School of Cinematic Arts - the Center for Body Computing, is on the project as well, hoping to add health monitoring features.
Through a docked smartphone, users can see all of the information Nigel collects, Discovery News reported.

So far, it can tell you things like how often you use your turn signal or when you use your sunroof, which are indicators of your driving habits and temperature preferences.
Leslie Saxon, chief of cardiovascular medicine at USC, told CoExist that she believes this technology could reach a point where pollution sensors, GPS and oxygen content sensors could let drivers know important things about the environment they’re driving in and how it might be affecting their health.

If health-monitoring sensors are added, the system could keep track of things like your heart rate and let you know when that rate changes throughout the day.

Now, a clothes hanger that makes laundry history

This one is for those who hate doing laundry and find it monotonous!
A new innovative designer hanger that contains specialised charcoal capsules to freshen-up clothes when you are too lazy to give them a full wash has been developed.
The clothes hanger has a filtered glass chamber filled with charcoal which is processed with oxygen allowing it to function as a powerful odour eliminator, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.

The Bye Bye Laundry hanger has been developed by British designer Lisa Marie Bengtsson.

The environment-friendly hanger has a filtered glass chamber located at the top, where the activated charcoal lies and is processed with oxygen to allow it to function as an extremely powerful and effective odour eliminator.However, the sole function of the hanger is to absorb odour and it doesn’t help with spills on the cloth.

Activated charcoal is carbon that has been treated with oxygen which results in a highly porous material that absorbs the odour.

Big collisions make galaxies denser

Using gravitational “lenses” in space, astronomers have discovered that the centres of the biggest galaxies are growing denser, which is an evidence of repeated collisions and mergers by massive galaxies with 100 billion stars.

“We found that during the last 6 billion years, the matter that makes up massive elliptical galaxies is getting more concentrated toward the centres of those galaxies. This is evidence that big galaxies are crashing into other big galaxies to make even bigger galaxies,” Adam Bolton, principal author of the study, said.

“Most recent studies have indicated that these massive galaxies primarily grow by eating lots of smaller galaxies. “We’re suggesting that major collisions between massive galaxies are just as important as those many small snacks,” he said.

The new study by researchers from the University of Utah was conducted by Bolton’s team from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III using the survey’s 2.5-meter optical telescope at Apache Point, N.M., and the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.  The telescopes were used to observe and analyze 79 “gravitational lenses,” which are galaxies between Earth and more distant galaxies.

A lens galaxy’s gravity bends light from a more distant galaxy, creating a ring or partial ring of light around the lens galaxy. The size of the ring was used to determine the mass of each lens galaxy, and the speed of stars was used to calculate the concentration of mass in each lens galaxy.

The new study deals with the biggest, most massive kind of galaxies, known as massive elliptical galaxies, which each contain about 100 billion stars. Counting unseen “dark matter,” they contain the mass of 1 trillion stars like our Sun.

“They are the end products of all the collisions and mergers of previous generations of galaxies, perhaps hundreds of collisions,” Bolton said.  Despite recent evidence from other studies that massive elliptical galaxies grow by eating much smaller galaxies, Bolton’s previous computer simulations showed that collisions between large galaxies are the only galaxy mergers that lead, over time, to increased mass density on the centre of massive elliptical galaxies.