Top TechTop Tech #24: Sensing Everything, Predicting Crime, Live Forever
Highlighting interesting or important innovations with long-term
promise.
Today’s Top Tech:
• Seeing everything: Scarab’s 16 sensors
• Police predict crime scenes
• Longer telomeres, longer life
Seeing everything: Scarab’s 16 sensors
“Quantification nerds,” as TechCrunch calls ’em, may get excited at an upcoming device that can measure just about everything: Scarab scrunches “more sensors than a high-end smartphone” into its wearable environment sensing device.
What are the 16 sensors?
UV
index sensor
carbon
monoxide detector
gamma
detector
noise
level detection circuit
three
axis magnetic field sensor
liquid
petroleum gas detector
nitrogen
dioxide detector
ozone
detector
thermometer
ambient
light sensor
relative
humidity sensor
digital
output barometer
gyroscope
3D
magnetometer
3D
accelerometer
GPS
module
A gamma detector?
The gathered data won’t be only for personal use: detailed noise pollution maps might be helpful to house buyers, granular local data can aid municipal authorities…
It’s crowdfunded on Kickstarter, and may sell for $129.
Police predict crime scenes with software
“Predictive policing” software tells cops where and when crimes are likely to happen based on the location, the nature of the crime and the time of day, Engadget reports. “The software knows that there’s a good chance that a burglary or gang slaying will lead to similar activity in a given area, or that you’ll see drunken fights outside of a dive bar in the early morning. Theoretically, police just have to patrol these areas more often to stop crime before it starts.”
Far-fetched? Nope — It’s already in use: Forbes reports that “Two or three times a day in almost 60 cities across America, thousands of police officers line up for roll call at the beginning of their shifts. They’re handed a marked-up map of their beat and told: Between calls, go to the little red boxes, each about half the size of a city block. The department’s crime analysts didn’t make these maps. They’re produced by PredPol.
The software “shovels historical crime data through a proprietary algorithm and spits out the 10 to 20 spots most likely to see crime over the next shift. If patrol officers spend only 5% to 15% of their shift in those boxes, PredPol says, they’ll stop more crime than they would using their own knowledge.”
The company itself says “Law enforcement agencies nationwide are facing budget freezes and deep cuts, requiring them to manage their resources more effectively while still responding to public demand for crime prevention and reduction. PredPol’s patent-pending technology forecasts highest risk times and places for future crimes. The program complements officers’ intuition by targeting place-based prediction areas, depicted in 500 feet by 500 feet boxes on maps, that are automatically generated for each shift of each day.”
Live forever with longer telomeres
There’s been plenty of talk in the last few years about lengthening your telomeres to extend your life — but now a study by Stanford University claims that indeed, “telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells.”
What’s more, “a new procedure can quickly and efficiently increase the length of human telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that are linked to aging and disease,” according to scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “Treated cells behave as if they are much younger than untreated cells, multiplying with abandon in the laboratory dish rather than stagnating or dying.”
Sign me up.
