Snapshot of Stories
Walking and texting is leading to a spate of collision-related injuries. Could a new app be the answer? We’ve all done it. You’re walking down the street and the familiar beep of an incoming text becomes too tempting to resist. As you start to fire off a quick reply – bam! You clash shoulders with a fellow pedestrian doing exactly the same. If you take YouTube as a benchmark, watching unsuspecting texters colliding with lamp-posts and dustbins is pretty hilarious – the modern day equivalent of slipping on a banana skin. But the consequences aren’t always a laughing matter. It is possible to sustain a really serious injury.” Alex Stoker is a Clinical Fellow in Emergency Medicine at Frimley Park Hospital, Surrey. “If it’s a tall object like a wall or a lamp-post that someone walks into, then one might expect facial injuries such as a broken nose or fractured cheekbone,” he told the BBC. “If on the other hand the collision results in falling over, then they’re much more liable to things like hand injuries and broken wrists. There’s a complete spectrum but it is possible to sustain a really serious injury.” A new app called CrashAlert aims to help save people from themselves. It involves using a distance-sensing camera to scan the path ahead and alert users to approaching obstacles. The camera acts like a second pair of eyes – looking forward while the user is looking down. CrashAlert is at prototype stage. Just as a Nintendo Wii or Xbox can detect where and how a player is moving, CrashAlert’s camera can interpret the location of objects on the street. When it senses something approaching, it flashes up a red square in a bar on top of the phone or tablet. The position of the square shows the direction of the obstacle – giving the user a chance to dodge out of the way. “What we observed in our experiments is that in 60% of cases, people avoided obstacles in a safer way. That’s up from 20% [without CrashAlert],” says CrashAlert’s inventor Dr Juan David Hincapié-Ramos from the University of Manitoba. What’s more, the device doesn’t distract the user from what they’re doing. Hincapié-Ramos’s tests showed it can be used alongside gaming or texting without any cost to performance.
An original Apple 1 computer from 1976 – one of only six still in working order – has sold at auction in Germany for more than 500,000 euros ($650,000). The Apple 1 was one of the first 50 built by Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs’ parents’ garage. The computer – consisting only of a motherboard, signed by Mr Wozniak – went to an anonymous buyer from Asia. Last year, an Apple 1 sold for 490,000 euros (£418,000; $633,000). Only about 200 Apple 1s were ever made. About 46 remain in existence, but only six of those are still in working order. Bob Luther, author of The First Apple, called the Apple 1 the “holy grail of collectable technology”. The one sold at auction in the German city of Cologne on Saturday was purchased together with an original monitor, tape-player, keyboard. The documentation was signed by Steve Jobs.
Songs Played
Frightened Rabbit – Backyard Skulls
Travis – Why Does It Always Rain On Me?
Sultains of Ping – Girlwatchin’
Public Service Broadcasting – Spitfire
The Strypes – Blue Collar Jane
Nik Kershaw – Don Quixote
Counting Crows feat. Vanessa Carlton – Big Yellow Taxi
Katy Perry – Hot ‘n’ Cold
S Club 7 – You
OMD – Dresden
Modjo – Lady (Hear Me Tonight)
Bob Sinclar fear Steve Edwards – World Hold On (Children Of The Sky)
Red Hot Chilli Peppers – By The Way
Dandy Warhols – Every Day Should Be A Holiday
Biffy Clyro – Biblical
Foo Fighters – Arlandria
Savage Garden – Affirmation
Anastacia – Left Outside Alone
Ben Folds Five – Do It Anyway
Good Natured – 5-HT
80s Hour
Erasure – Brother & Sister
Pet Shop Boys – West End Girls
Rockwell – Somebody’s Watching Me
Spandau Ballet – Communication
Phil Collins – You Can’t Hurry Love
Rod Stewart – Baby Jane
ABBA – The Winner Takes It All
Fleetwood Mac – Big Love
Curiosity Killed The Cat – Misfit
49ers – Touch Me
Billy Idol – White Wedding
Snippets from the week’s news, sliced, diced and processed for your convenience.
1. Eccles cakes should not be microwaved
2. Cockroach taste cells have evolved to outwit glucose traps
3. The creator of the GIF says it should be pronounced “jif”
4. The French call a walkie-talkie a talkie-walkie
5. Fungi’s favourite place to live on the body is the heel
6. The Borussia in Dortmund is the Latin name for Prussia but the team is said to have been named after the local brewery
7. Vitamin C can kill drug resistant TB
8. Neanderthal babies were weaned after 1.2 years
9. Changing the spelling of common names is known as kree8iv
10. The pigment gene SLC45A2 causes tigers to be white
