Study: If Your Team Has Too Many Superstars, Performance Will Suffer
In collaborative professional sports, too many elite players can detract from a team’s overall performance, according to a recent study.
What I’m Reading
Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Blocks, the awesome modular smartwatch, is one step closer to reality
Blocks, the company currently working on modular smartwatches that will one day work with iPhone and Android handsets, is getting closer to launching its first gadget. The company has announced an exclusive membership program that will let 1,000 interested users be the first to preorder version 1 the Blocks smartwatch for the cheapest available price.
The Google Doctor Is a Reminder of How Badly the Internet Does Real Medicine
Let’s be honest: Healthcare on the internet still doesn’t work. Two decades since the dawn of the web, you’d think the best tool ever invented for connecting people with information—and each other—would offer better ways to practice medicine. Instead, a Google search for nearly any health issue results in a cascade of SEO-optimized link bait—symptom […]
The post The Google Doctor Is a Reminder of How Badly the Internet Does Real Medicine appeared first on WIRED.
Over 200,000 Women Have Used Their Smartphones To Help Them Get Pregnant
Want to get pregnant? Avoid getting pregnant? There’s an app for that – actually multiple apps, some of them with amazing track records.
And now one of them is turning your iPhone into a data collection device that helps monitor fertility – known as an oral fertility thermometer.
Perhaps the best-known fertility app in the tech world is Glow, founded by PayPal mafia member Max Levchin.
Glow recently made news when the just-over-a-year-old startup announced it had raised $17 million in venture investment and now employs 22 people. It says it has already helped 25,000 women get pregnant.
But that’s nothing compared to the track record claimed by fertility app competitor Ovuline, which launched it’s app, Ovia before Glow, in June, 2012.
Ovia has now been downloaded about 1 million times, and has helped about 175,000 women get pregnant, according to recent stats the company shared with Business Insider
Ovia is currently helping women get pregnant at a rate of over 20,000 a month, it says. These stats come from when users of the app report pregnancies.
Some of these apps continue to be helpful during pregency, too. For instance, Ovia can alert a woman if things are normal or not. For instance, it can suggest she get tested for anemia if she reports feeling really tired. It also collects data from a bunch of other fitness devices like Fitbit, the Aria smart scale, or the Withings blood pressure monitor. And Glow offers Glow Nurture, which helps pregnant women track their health, too.
But these apps are beginning to do even more to turn your smartphone into a birth control device.
Fertility app maker Kindara has gone to the next step. Instead of asking women to manually enter data an app, it is about to launch a basal body temperature thermometer called Wink, which automatically links with the phone and the app.
A rise in a woman’s basal temp, taken when she wakes up in the morning, indicates the time is right to start a family … or to avoid starting one.
Wink is expected to ship in Spring 2015 for about $129, though women can pre-order it now for $79.
Here’s a video that shows Wink in action.
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Awesome new time-lapse technique bends the spacetime fabric
Photographer Julian Tryba sent us this crazy time-lapse of Boston which, actually, is not a time-lapse but a layer-lapse: The objects in each sequence—buildings, vehicles, the sky—run at different speeds and times than others. That’s because he has layered them, animating each layer separately.
