GET READY TO CHANGE THE WAY YOU TYPE WITH THIS AMAZING WEARABLE KEYBOARD
By Andy Boxall — May 12, 2016
In the near future, you may not need to touch your phone, tablet, or keyboard when you want to type. That’s the concept behind the Tap Strap, an amazing wearable Bluetooth keyboard that converts finger movements into key presses, so you can tap out messages using any surface as a virtual keyboard.
Don’t expect a visual prompt, or some laser-projected keyboard to guide you. It’s all done using gestures. You start by putting on the Tap Strap. It slides over your fingers like a glove, and is made from a soft smart-fabric that has sensors inside to analyze finger movements. It can go on either hand, or you can wear two for faster two-handed typing.
Tapping with each finger will see a character or number appear on the screen, and it’s possible to punctuate and insert special characters using different gestures. While Tap Systems, the company behind the Tap Strap, hasn’t said exactly how it works, a Bloomberg report says a single tap from each of your five fingers translates into a vowel, and combinations add consonants.
There are apparently 31 possible finger taps, and although an accuracy of 99 percent is promised, we expect a strong predictive text element to play a part of the Tap Strap’s typing skills. Most people struggle to remember more than handful of gestures, let alone 31. Tap Systems sees the Tap Strap as an alternative to voice control, emphasizing the privacy aspect of using gestures to type messages as one of its major benefits.
Bluetooth connectivity
The Tap Strap connects using Bluetooth, and therefore should operate with almost any mobile device, but the real advantage here could be for use with VR headsets. Anyone who has tried typing on the Gear VR — where you must look at each individual character on the screen — will know how laborious the process can be. Wear the Tap Strap, and you could tap out commands on your leg. It also negates the problem of how to type on a smartwatch’s small screen, and is already compatible with smart TVs, Windows and Mac OS X, plus Android and iOS devices.
Its use goes beyond virtual keyboard control, and Tap Systems founder Ran Poliakine envisages it being used for playing music on digital devices, and being incorporated into mixed reality hardware such as Microsoft’s HoloLens headset. To promote the Tap Strap’s multiple uses, a development kit and a reference design will be available to developers and hardware manufacturers.
If you’ve heard Poliakine’s name before, it’s because he also founded Powermat Technologies, one of the companies still battling for wireless charging supremacy. We’ve also seen various virtual alternative keyboards over the past years, but the Tap Strap seems to be the closest to becoming reality. It’s on its way out to selected beta testers right now, and the intention is for it to be on sale before the end of the year.
Even though the Apollo missions brought back to Earth huge amounts of data about the moon, it has remained an enigma for astronomers and scientists alike. Dr. Robert Jastrow, the first president of NASA’s Commission of Lunar Exploration called the moon “the Rosetta Stone of the planets.”
But what is it about the moon that fascinates everyone? Well, there are many people who firmly believe that Earth’s moon is actually a terraformed and engineer piece of hardware that has a 3-mile thick outer layer of dust and rocks. Beneath this layer, it is believed that the moon has a solid shell of around 20 miles made of highly resistant materials such as titanium, uranium 236, mica, neptunium 237. Definitely, elements that you would not expect to find “inside” the moon.
There are many UFOlogists around the world who speculate that the moon is actually a giant base where extraterrestrials survey mankind’s progress.
There are so many mysteries surrounding Earth’s moon that there are those who have proposed that the moon could be something entirely different.
Robin Brett, a scientist from NASA stated, “It seems easier to explain the non-existence of the Moon than its existence.”
Here are 7 Irregularities that suggest Earth’s Moon was engineered and might be a giant hollow base:
1) The Moon seems engineered. On November of 1969, NASA intentionally crashed a lunar module that caused an impact equivalent to one ton of TNT on the Moon. The shock waves built up and NASA scientists listened to what was happening on the Moon. Strangely, after impact, NASA scientists said that the Moon rang like a bell and the reverberation continued for thirty minutes. According to Ken Johnson, supervisor of the data and photo control department, the Moon not only rang like a bell but the whole Moon “wobbled” in such a precise way that it was “almost as though it had gigantic hydraulic damper struts inside it.
2) The Moon has elements it should not have. In the 1970’s Mikhail Vasin and Alexander Shcerbakov from the Soviet Academy of science wrote an article called: “Is the Moon the creation of Alien Intelligence?” It was a very interesting article that asked some important questions. How is it possible that the surface of the moon is so hard and why does it contain minerals like Titanium? Mysteriously, there are some lunar rocks that have been found to contain PROCESSED METALS, such as Brass, Mica and the elements of Uranium 236 and Neptunium 237 that have NEVER been found to occur naturally. Yet there are traces of them on the Moon. Uranium 236 is a radioactive nuclear waste which is found in spent nuclear and reprocessed Uranium. More interestingly, Neptunium 237 is a radioactive metallic element and a by-product of nuclear reactors and the production of Plutonium. You have to ask the question: What is happening on Earth’s Moon? From where are these elements and minerals coming from?
3) Earth’s Moon does not have a solid core like every other planetary object. Researchers are nearly 100 percent sure that the Moon is, in fact, hollow or has a very low-intensity interior. Strangely, the Moon’s concentration of mass is located at a series of points just below the surface.
4) The Moon is older than Earth. Our Moon is unlike any other satellite discovered in the known universe. Researchers know the Moon is 4.6 billion years old and that raises a lot of questions. This means that the moon is older than the Earth by nearly 800,000 years according to scientists.
5) Incredible orbit. Earth’s moon is the only moon in the solar system that has a stationary, nearly “perfect” circular orbit. It’s a fact that the Moon does not spin like a natural celestial body. In other words, our Moon does not share any characteristics with other moons found in our Solar System. If it wasn’t strange enough, from any point on the surface of our planet, only one side of the Moon is visible. What is the moon hiding?
6) Lunar rocks and titanium. There are some lunar rocks that have been found to contain ten times more titanium than “titanium rich” rocks on planet Earth. Here on Earth, we use Titanium in supersonic jets, deep diving submarines and spacecraft. It’s unexplainable. Dr Harold Urey, Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry said he was “terribly puzzled by the rocks astronauts found on the moon and their Titanium content. The samples were unimaginable and mind-blowing since researchers could not account for the presence of Titanium.
7) Precise position. If all of the above points did not get you to think differently about the Earth’s moon here are some more interesting things about the Moon. What is keeping the moon in its nearly perfect position? the moon has a precise altitude, course and speed, allowing it to “function” properly in regards of planet Earth.
Simply put the Moon should not be where it is currently. Everything points to the possibility that Earth’s moon was in fact placed into its current position in the distant past. The Moon’s unnatural orbit and irregular composition raise hundreds of questions that neither NASA scientists, astronomers or geologists are able to answer today. Despite all efforts to understand Earth’s “natural” satellite, the truth is that we have very little information about the Moon’s origin and purpose. What do you think the moon is? A nearly perfect natural occurrence? Or do the Moon’s origins surpass human understanding?
Ivan is a freelance writer, editor-in-chief of ancient-code.com, he also writes for EWAO, Share Knowledge, Svemir Online and Ancient Origins.History, Archaeology, Space and world’s mysteries are some of the topics he writes about.
I apologize for the delay. I had issues getting pictures from my phone to my computer. In any case, here are pictures taken primarily at my booth at Phoenix Comicon 2016. Thanks for all who stopped by and said hello!
Using the CRISPR gene-editing tool, scientists from Harvard University have developed a technique that permanently records data into living cells. Incredibly, the information imprinted onto these microorganisms can be passed down to the next generation.
CRISPR/Cas9 is turning into an incredibly versatile tool. The cheap and easy-to-use molecular editing system that burst onto the biotech scene only a few years ago is being used for a host of applications, includinggenetic engineering, RNA editing, disease modeling, and fighting retroviruses like HIV. And now, as described in a new Science paper, it can also be used to turn lowly microorganisms into veritable hard drives.
Scientists have actually done this before, but in a completely artificial way from start to finish. In these prior experiments, information was encoded into a DNA sequence, the DNA synthesized, and then that was it—all the information remained outside the realm of living organisms. In the new study, a Harvard research team led by geneticists Seth Shipman and Jeff Nivala went about DNA data storage in a completely different way.
“We write the information directly into the genome,” Nivala told Gizmodo. “While the overall amount of DNA data we have currently stored within a genome is relatively small compared to the completely synthetic DNA data storage systems, we think genome-based information storage has many potential advantages.” These advantages, he says, could include higher fidelity and the capability to directly interface with biology. For example, a bacterium could be taught to recognize, provide information, and even kill other microorganisms in its midst, or provide a record of genetic expression.
“Depending on how you calculate it, we stored between about 30 to 100 bytes of information,” said Nivala. “Which is quite high compared to the previous record set within a living cell, which was ~11 bits.”
To do it, the researchers used the bacteria’s built-in immune system—in the form of CRISPR—to write data directly onto the genome of the bacterial cells. This allowed the modified bacteria to pass on this customized information to the next generation, making this form of biological data storage extremely efficient and powerful.
Shipman and Nivala leveraged the power of bacteria’s built-in immune system, a.k.a. CRISPR, to make this possible. Whenever a virus attacks a bacterium, CRISPR diligently records the event in the DNA, which it can then reference in the event of a renewed viral attack. It does this by storing tiny sequences of the viral DNA itself, called spacers. In their experiment, the researchers wanted to see if these spacers could be added in a particular sequence, which would create a timeline of when these spacers were added.
The researchers figured that this temporal ordering of spacers could form the basis of a molecular recording device. During the experiment, loose segments of DNA were injected into a strain of E. coli bacteria equipped with CRISPR/cas9. But these bits of DNA weren’t arbitrary—they contained specific strings of data that contained specific sequences of letters chosen by the scientists. These segments were introduced one at a time, and the bacteria systematically integrated them in a linearly coherent manner to reflect the order in which they were introduced.
The researchers only added a few spacers to demonstrate their theory. But given that other spacers are available, there’s an absolutely staggering number of possible combinations.
“These experiments lay the foundations for a recording system that could be used to monitor molecular events that occur over long time periods,” said Nivala. “For instance, it could eventually help us answer questions like what happens to the gene regulation inside a cell as it goes from a healthy to disease state. Or it could also be used to record information on the cell’s outside environment, for example the presence of specific chemicals, toxins, or pathogens.”
Moving forward, the team would like boost the system so that data can be stored more completely at the level of single cells, instead of having to use a population of cells to encode/decode the information.
Michael Bradley - Time Traveler 
