flora

Why Metro now rules at Microsoft

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told you all you really need to know about the importance of the company's Metro user interface at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month.

Ballmer's keynote speech was a virtual Metro-palooza. He showed the sleek, tile-based interface in Windows Phones. And then he displayed it again in the upcoming Windows 8 operating system. It made another appearance in a demo of the released version of Xbox Live. The Metro rectangles even found their way in his Power Point slides.

"Metro will drive the new magic across all of our … Read more

Soon, we'll be wearing movies

Imagine: You're walking down the street at night. You turn a corner, and suddenly, coming your way, you see someone with "Avatar" playing on their jacket.

It's a futuristic notion, but according to the folks at open-source hardware maker Adafruit Industries, it's one that's just months away.

That's because Adafruit has just unveiled Flora, its brand-new Arduino and Arduino-compatible wearable electronics platform. Designed to give anyone the ability to craft a matrix of up to hundreds or someday, more than 1,000 small LED "pixels," Flora is meant to make it possible to easily craft custom wearable multi-LED pixel designs perfect for art events like Burning Man, or even the streets of whatever town you live in. … Read more

New social network connects people by gut flora

Earlier this year, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, published a study identifying genetic markers found in people's stomachs that appear related to obesity and other diseases.

After that, "I got between 50 and 100 e-mails from regular people having problems with the stomach or diarrhea and wondering if we can help them," Peer Bork, a biochemist at the lab, told Nature last week. "They were long e-mails. There must be a lot of frustrated people out there."

Given the interest level, Bork and his colleagues launched MyMicrobes, which could be … Read more