Pebble just announced the Index 01, a smart ring for recording thoughts. It’s a little ring with a built-in microphone and that’s about it. The Index 01 is almost anti-tech in its simplicity. There’s no needless AI component shoehorned in, aside from speech-to-text. It’s a ring with a microphone that you whisper ideas into and I want one.
Here’s how it works. You get an idea while walking down the street, so you quietly whisper it into the ring. The ring sends the idea to a notes app or saves it for later review. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky calls this an “external memory” for the brain, but I call it a nice way to avoid having to dig the phone out of a pocket or bag just to utter something like “pizza, but for cats.”
The ring doesn’t record unless a button is pushed, so it won’t be listening in on private conversations, and it doesn’t require a paid subscription of any kind. It’s on the smaller side, about the size of a wedding band, and is water-resistant.
The battery also lasts for “years” and never needs to be charged. The ring is designed to be worn at all times, so users develop the muscle memory of holding down the little button when they have something to share. See what I mean? I want one, and I’ve quite literally never worn a ring in my life.
Pebble
Migicovsky says this is an open source product and that Pebble is “leaving the side door open for folks to customize.” He envisions people will integrate AI voice agents and that the ring will eventually work with stuff like ChatGPT, Beeper, Google and other services.
The Pebble Index 01 works with iPhone and Android and is available for preorder right now. It costs $75 during this preorder period, but the price jacks up to $99 when shipments start going out in March.
They say timing is everything, and treating cancer may be no exception. Researchers have found that simply shifting when people with cancer receive immunotherapy drugs could improve their survival, adding to evidence that our body’s internal clocks influence how well cancer treatments work.
The activity of our cells and tissues works on 24-hour cycles, known as circadian rhythms, which coordinate everything from hormone release to the timing of cell division and repair. These rhythms are often disrupted in cancer cells, which tend to divide continuously, rather than at set times.
This has prompted efforts to reduce the side effects of chemotherapy, which targets rapidly dividing cells, by administering it when healthy tissues are least active. Increasingly, however, researchers are exploring whether the effectiveness of cancer drugs might also be improved by giving them at particular times.
One such group of drugs is immune checkpoint inhibitors, which help immune T-cells recognise and attack tumours more effectively. “T-cells and other immune defenders are naturally more active in the morning; primed to respond,” says Seline Ismail-Sutton at Ysbyty Gwynedd hospital in Bangor, UK, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Administering immune checkpoint inhibitors during this window may amplify anti-tumour effects and enhance efficacy.”
Earlier this year, Zhe Huang at Central South University in Changsha, China, and his colleagues reported that giving the checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab alongside chemotherapy to people with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) before 11.30am was associated with nearly double the survival rate seen in those who received most of their treatment in the afternoon.
To investigate whether timing treatments around circadian rhythms – known as chronotherapy – might also benefit people with small cell lung cancer, a faster-growing and more aggressive form of the condition, the same team analysed data from 397 people treated with the checkpoint inhibitors atezolizumab or durvalumab alongside chemotherapy between 2019 and 2023.
“Compared with patients treated later in the day, those treated before 3pm had significantly longer progression‑free survival and overall survival,” says team member Yongchang Zhang, also at Central South University.
After adjusting for multiple confounding factors, earlier administration was associated with a 52 per cent lower risk of cancer progression and a 63 per cent lower risk of death.
Zhang believes this effect probably exists for other tumour types, pointing to hints from studies of renal cell carcinoma and melanoma. As to why this dosing regimen has this effect, the NSCLC trial showed that morning administration boosted circulating T-cell numbers and activation, while late-day dosing had the opposite effect. Studies in mice have also shown that tumour-infiltrating T-cells vary in function over 24 hours, and that the circadian clocks of nearby endothelial cells can regulate when immune cells enter tumours.
Although randomised controlled trials with larger sample sizes are needed, this study “further supports the growing number of reports from all over the world describing better results with early time of day of immunotherapy drugs administration,” says Pasquale Innominato at the University of Warwick, UK.
During covid-19, most of us became accustomed to conducting all sorts of business via video call, as well as struggling with the unavoidable technical problems associated with such digital interactions. New research, however, reveals that in certain situations, glitches can be more harmful than one might think.
Researchers found that audiovisual glitches during face-to-face video calls can trigger a feeling of “uncanniness,” even if they don’t impact the communicated information. Depending on the context, this can have serious implications for the outcome of the call. In potentially the most striking example, researchers associated disrupted online court hearings with lower likelihoods of individuals being granted criminal parole.
The danger zone
“The best feature of video calling is the fact that you basically feel like you’re together,” Jacqueline Rifkin, assistant professor of marketing and management communications at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, said in a university statement. “And so when there’s a glitch, you’re right in that danger zone where it’s almost perfect, but not quite—what has become known as the ‘uncanny valley.’ It triggers this switch in your brain where things feel just a little bit creepy,” she explained. She’s a co-first author of a study published December 3 in the journal Nature.
To investigate the matter, Rifkin and her colleagues analyzed previously held video conferences and conducted real-life experiments. They studied a database of over 1,600 “get-to-know-you” video calls that took place in 2020, after which participants took a survey including questions about interpersonal connection and any technical difficulties during the call. The data revealed that the connection was weaker between video callers who had experienced glitches, no matter what type of glitch and whether they had happened for one or both individuals.
Another analysis of transcript data from hundreds of virtual parole hearings in Kentucky in 2021 identified glitches in 32.6% of cases. Individuals whose hearings experienced glitches were granted parole 48% of the time, whereas those who didn’t have problematic calls were granted parole 60% of the time. Taking into account the individual’s or crime’s characteristics didn’t make a difference. Simply put, disrupted connections were associated with lower chances of individuals being granted parole.
“That was when we started feeling like, wow, there’s really something quite important to say here,” Rifkin explained.
Potential to further inequalities
Their experiments also confirmed that glitches during face-to-face video calls broke the illusion of in-person reality. In one, the team had over 3,000 participants watch job interview recordings similarly to how one would experience a video call. Glitches during the “calls” lowered the interviewee’s chances of being recommended for hire. Similarly, of the almost 500 participants who listened to healthcare advice in a replication of a virtual health consultation, 77% said they were confident in working with the professional during a smooth call, while only 61% were confident when they experienced connection problems on the call.
According to Rifkin, the feeling of uncanniness is difficult to ignore once it takes hold. “We tried a lot of different interventions, but we basically struggled to overcome it,” she explained. In short, their work indicates that small audiovisual issues during video calls result in negative consequences for interpersonal judgements. This could further inequalities among already disadvantaged groups, such as those with suboptimal internet connections.
We’ve been here before. Back in 2009, the idea was simple: upload without too much hassle. Somewhere along the way, file-sharing got complicated. Features piled up. Ads crept in. Settings multiplied. Privacy gone. We think it’s time to get back to the basics.
Spearheaded by Nalden, one of the original founders of WeTransfer, we’ve built Boomerang for people who believe sharing files should just be easy. We won’t use your data to train any AI models. We simply want to help you to share your files fast.
Built for Speed
Boomerang runs on Cloudflare’s global edge network, one of the fastest infrastructures on the planet. Your files upload and download from the server closest to you, whether you’re in Tokyo, Berlin, or São Paulo. We use modern web technologies including Hono, TypeScript, and Drizzle ORM because we believe the best tools make the best products.
A Canvas, Not a Control Panel
Boomerang has features; stuff you can customize, files you can manage, passwords, collaboration. But we approach design like a wireframe that actually works. A clean canvas where you paint only what you need.
[…]
File sharing hasn’t changed much, but web technology has transformed completely. We’re building Boomerang with the latest infrastructure: edge computing, distributed storage, global CDN delivery, because your files deserve better than legacy tech.
Easy-duz-it.
If you have any ideas, feedback or feature requests, simply reach out via email and we will get back to you. No bots, no AI. Just imperfectly human. hi@bmrng.me.
iFixit, the internet’s go-to for repair guides and spare parts, just launched a new mobile app with what sounds like a genuinely useful AI chatbot.
Starting today, iOS and Android users can download the iFixit app and chat directly with the new FixBot to get curated expert advice on how to fix everything from a cracked phone screen to a faulty dishwasher.
The team at iFixit says it spent two years building the chatbot, which utilizes a combination of AI models for its language, voice, and vision capabilities. What makes FixBot stand out from a general chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini is its laser focus on repairs. FixBot won’t answer questions that are not about fixing things, and it’s trained on iFixit’s 125,000 repair guides, community forums, and a huge repository of PDF manuals.
To use the bot, users can type or vocally explain their issue to the bot, or they can even just snap a photo of whatever needs fixing. FixBot will try to identify the device and model, then ask follow-up questions until it figures out the problem. The bot will then walk users through a step-by-step repair, pulling answers from the iFixIt library, even if that means surfacing something buried on page 500 of a PDF manual. It will also provide links to buy the spare parts you need. Along the way, users can ask FixBot questions. Its voice command features are also designed to help anyone who’s elbow-deep in a repair and can’t reach their phone.
