After you’ve spent two hours on a flight watching Pirates of the Caribbean with your iPhone clutched between your sweaty hands, trying to keep your thumbs off Johnny Depp’s face, this is the type of product you might dreamed up in a fit of frustration, too. It’s simple, obvious, not especially clever, but at the end of the day, you probably can’t help uttering the well worn expression when you see it.
“I wish I had thought of that.”
The Seskimo Crabble is simply a portable stand for your portable phone or personal media player. Unfold it, set the phone in its soft silicon grip, and you can watch videos from your desk, table, or airline food tray, hands free. Just open the angle wider to adjust the viewing angle to whatever’s ideal.
Besides the iPhone, it supports a range of other phones and media players including many iPods, the BlackBerry Curve 8900, HTC Touch, LG Cookie, Renoir and Viewty, Samsung’s Pixon, Soul and Tocco, and a whole range of Sony Ericsson phones.
Though we wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple pushing a white plastic version of it in the Apple store for $20, this one’s $5, which makes it a pretty good deal for frequent movie watchers, as far as we’re concerned. They come in both black and translucent blue. More details are available via Seskimo.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.