Taking the level of personal care to the next pinnacle is a pocket sized gadget that detects when you are stinking and lets you know. Yes, that used to be what you mother told you, but now apparently you can know when you are stinking even if she’s not around to tell you so.

A Japanese company, Konica Minolta, has come up with this gadget to end what they term “Smell Harassment” at work. The stink detector looks like a tape recorder and can connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth using an app.

Kunkun Body, as the detector is called, can let you know that you stink in four location. These are near the head, behind the ear, under the armpits and around the feet. Apparently the Japanese are very sensitive to offensive smell and the office workers who annoy others with their noxious aromas have a specific term, Sumehara.

It seems that the number one work etiquette  concern is body smell. So the company decided to conduct a science experiment to create the gadget. It is part of a set of self care products that have been crowd funded. The company has no plans to sell the device outside Japan at present.

As humans become more and more obsessed with their health, it fuels the health and fitness industry. One of the most popular current trends is being able to track your fitness through sensors. A common product which helps do this is the Fitbit.

You can count the steps you have taken, the distance you have covered, the rate of your heart and just how many hours of sleep you have had at night. All you have to do is ensure that you are wearing the fitness tracker all through the day and night, and of course that you charge it regularly.

Now researchers at Harvard University have come up with a highly sensitive soft capacitive sensor made out of silicon and paired it with a stretchy fabric that moves and flexes along with the muscles of the body. The combination has allowed them to come up with a fabric which can literally turn into a fitness tracker.

Professor Conor Walsh said that they were excited about this sensor as by leveraging textiles in its construction it is inherently suitable for integration with fabric to make smart robotic apparel. So will the end product of this science experiment be a pair of pajamas that double up as a Fitbit?

Making your password as secure as possible has led to all kinds of new technology being developed. From encryption of typed alpha-numeral passwords, to face recognition software and further on to bio metric fingerprints and voice tones, just about everything as been explored as a security measure.

One of the more popular trends right now is using brainwave-sensing headsets, also known as EEG or electroencephalograph headsets. These are used to control robotic toys and play video games using only the power of your brainwaves. You literally think a direction and it will be followed.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have come up with a potential problem with these EEG headsets. They say that data can be stolen from a user who is wearing them. Suppose that the person logs into their bank account while wearing the headset, it is possible for a hacker to get the brainwaves and decode the password.

The security and privacy threats that can arise from the use of an EEG headset need to be examined and eliminated as their popularity begins to grow. Maybe it should the subject of another science study which can help provide solutions to this rather unique problem.

Our life today is a lot more sedentary than what it was just a couple of decades ago. Humans have begun working on computers and hardly walking around. The levels of inactivity during the day are constantly increasing. This is unfortunately not good news for the body, which tends to be seriously affected by this trend.

Studies are constantly being conducted to evaluate the effect of inactivity on human health. Some people have gone so far as to call sitting the new smoking, in the sense that the inactivity may be just as detrimental to your health as cigarettes were to a previous generation of chain smokers.

A scientific study being conducted by the researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California is considering the state of health of people across 100 countries. Results show that more than five million people die annually from causes that are associated with inactivity. That is a highly disturbing pattern.

Try to avoid sitting still for long periods of time. Even if you must work on a computer for long hours take short breaks where you get up from the chair and walk around for five minutes. Do stretches for your back and ensure that you get some alternative physical exercise in the day as well.

Spiders are known for spinning webs to catch their food. However they also have to travel the area of the web in order to reach their prey. Not to mention making trips up and down the wall on a single strand of the web. Does that mean that spiders also tend to lose control and spin rapidly when descending?

Unlike rappelling for humans where the rope may send the person spinning out of control when twisted, a spider will never spin out of control on it’s thread. This is because the drag-line from the web hardly twists unlike materials such as synthetic fibers that ropes are made out of, or even human hair.

Experiments conducted by the scientists at the American Institute of Physics have found that the material of a spider’s web is unlike any other material found in nature. It has the ability to partially yield when twisted allowing it to remove nearly 75% of the potential energy created by the movement.

Naturally the oscillation is also reduced. This allows it to quickly dissipate the energy which other cause the spider to spin down the drag-line as it moves from the ceiling to the floor. This science study shows that it is nearly impossible for a spider to spin out of control.