Hey Microsoft, Google, Apple, Where Are Our Smarthomes

This week's release of an operating system for your home by Microsoft has thrown a spotlight on a near-future where our homes are more like live-in computers. Microsoft has definite ideas, but Google and Apple have also been long looking at smarthome tech ... and it seems like living in each type of home would feel very different.

HomeOS is an almost inevitable innovation, you may guess from reading MS's blog post about this week's news: "It is no secret that homes are ever-increasing hotbeds of new technology such as set-top boxes, game consoles, wireless routers, home automation devices, tablets, smart phones, and security cameras." Pulling all these different systems together into one cohesive whole is a simple and obvious solution, MS suggests, because all this disparate innovation is "breeding heterogeneity and complexity that frustrates even technically savvy users' attempts to improve day-to-day life by implementing functionality that uses these devices in combination." We won't argue with MS here, and neither will you if you've ever had to fix an Xbox red ring of death or delve deeply into the working code of Windows to fix some critical error in your PC.

But all joking aside, MS's idea makes great sense. By giving your various smart devices a common management system, everything becomes simpler to keep up to date, to fix, to share files between and so on. Plus this way you're virus-proof, running the best eco-management software. MS also imagined a HomeStore app ecosystem in support of it all, with choice over which apps you use to run which parts of your home, or which functionality to add. It's even testing it out in some real homes, and the ideas--while not up to the sci-fi standards of, for example, smarthome SARAH from Eureka--are impressive

Meanwhile, Google is also busy contemplating the notion of a smarthome and last year at Google I/O revealed Android@Home--an ecosystem for managing your home and its connected devices, right down to your exercise bike, your lamps, and thermostats, basically every electric thing in your home.

The Google invention involves having your entire home becoming an Android accessory, completely controllable from an Android device like a tablet or a "hub," managed by simple apps and connected over wireless links.

And Apple? Apple's smarthome plans aren't quite so developed, though they're perhaps a little more eco-friendly because the company has been busy patenting a smarthome energy management system that uses intelligent powerline networking to measure and control which devices are consuming power in your home and then command them via a device like an iPad.

But Apple's secretive in its future plans, and it's also busy fleshing-out its iCloud system, which could, pretty easily, form the spine of a future Apple smarthome, connecting all your Apple products (perhaps even your TV?) to third-party thermostats, light switches and so on, all perhaps controlled by a Siri voice interface.

We dream, of course, but we think the role of Apple would be rather different in an iHouse compared to its rivals' systems: Apple would perhaps be most comfortable building the devices and specifying how they connect to form a coherent whole system--with the actual "work" done by third-party apps and appliances like Nest--versus actually designing an entire home operating system. A slightly different position to Google and Microsoft, perhaps, but one that still lets the company collect data on users' habits and thus tweak the system (and maybe not even sell targeted advertising to them while they brush their teeth in the way, we guess, Google would like to).

Whoever ends up making a success of it, the reasons why this tech is likely to take off are threefold: It's more environmentally friendly through intelligent device and power managment; it's an enabling technology that should allow us to live our lives more easily and perhaps more efficiently; and it's absolutely cool, the inevitable end point of our current obsession with digitizing our lives. We've been promised this sort of tech since the 1950s too... it surely must be due soon! The only question for consumers may be: Would you rather live in a Windows home, an Android home, or an Apple home?

McAfee Founder Arrested in Belize on Bogus Charges

McAfee founder and anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee has reportedly been arrested in Belize on an unlicensed gun charge he claims was concocted. Members of the country's Gang Suppression Unit (GSU) collared McAfee after raiding his home and research facility on Wednesday, Channel 5 Belize reported earlier this week.

The 66-year-old McAfee described his arrest in a statement to Channel 5. He said 30 GSU officers carrying automatic weapons appeared on the Orange Walk Town compound in northwestern Belize where he lives and works at about 6 a.m., and claimed to have a warrant to search the premises.

The officers used sledgehammers to "break the doors of the buildings—none of them were locked, but they just went and broke them in any case," McAfee said. He and 11 others on the compound were handcuffed and made to wait outside in the sun, where they were held for 14 hours without food or water, he claimed.

The GSU "murdered my dog in cold blood," McAfee said, as "a warning to us that this is serious, don't mess with us."

McAfee was eventually arrested for having an unlicensed firearm, a charge he claimed was "bogus." He said that at the beginning of the raid, a GSU officer took all of the licenses for the guns used for security on the compound but one of the went "missing" when the officer was checking licenses against the guns they found on the site.

The software tycoon has a reputation as a philanthropist in Belize, according to Channel 5. He reportedly donated a $1.2 million boat to the Belize Coast Guard in 2009 and gave cash and charitable gifts to other institutions in the country, including the police.

McAfee claimed in the statement given to Channel 5 that he was harassed and arrested by the GSU because an Orange Walk district politician had pressured him for similar monetary gifts, but he had refused.

"It began, innocently enough, with my refusal to donate to the local political boss of the district where I lived in Orange Walk and I have given at least $2 million dollars in gifts to the police departments in Orange Walk, San Pedro, Belize City, to the village of Carmelita, the City of Orange Walk," McAfee said.

"I have started programs to feed children, I've helped mothers whose husbands have simply disappeared. I am an old man, I am 66. I have a fair amount of money and not much to do," he said. "So I spend it where I think it will do good. And I don't ever invest in politics. I don't donate to any political party, I don't have any political affiliations."

"And I refused to donate and the gentleman expected you know, I've given a million dollars to the police department, so he should get a huge chunk and he got nothing," he continued.

McAfee said he was detained until 2 a.m. on Thursday at a police station and only released after his embassy intervened.

"The entire day was an incredible nightmare," he said. "This is clearly a military dictatorship where people are allowed to go and harass citizens based on rumor alone and treat them as if they are guilty before any evidence whatsoever is obtained. It is astonishing, it is beyond belief and I intended not to let this stand. I will not stand idly by to let this happen to me."

Belize is a former British colony and the only country in Central America where English is the official language. McAfee was born in England but raised in Virginia, where he attended college, and went on to work as a programmer for NASA, Univac, Xerox, and Lockheed before founding anti-virus developer Network Associates, which eventually became McAfee.

McAfee, whose personal fortune of $100 million was reportedly decimated during the global economic recession, founded a new company based in Belize in 2010. QuorumEx seeks to develop better ways to combat pathogenic bacteria through anti-quorum sensing medicines.

Intel acquired that software security company McAfee founded for $7.68 billion in 2010

iPad Makes Up 95 Percent of Tablet Web Traffic

The iPad secured 68 percent of the tablet market during the first quarter, according to recent stats, so it should come as no surprise that most of tablet-based Internet traffic is coming from Apple's gadget.

But just how much traffic? According to data from Chitika, the iPad accounts for almost 95 percent of all tablet Web traffic.

"In conducting this analysis, we queried our vast ad network for impressions stemming from a tablet of any sort. From there we sorted our data into categories of the various tablet devices," the company said in a Friday blog post. "As we had hypothesized, the iPad was overwhelmingly dominant versus the competition."

What about the remaining 5 percent? The Samsung Galaxy Tab made up 1.22 percent, followed by the Asus Transformer Prime, Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry Playbook, Amazon Kindle Fire, and the Barnes & Noble Nook, which landed at 0.53 percent (click chart below for more).

"In defense of the Nook, it is used primarily as an e-reader, with the capabilities of a tablet," Chitika said.

Though NPD DisplaySearch said this week that Apple's tablet market share will drop to about 50 percent in the next five years, Chitika said manufacturers will be "hard pressed to find a way to overthrow the seemingly omnipotent Apple."

"Not only do they offer a great product they have the undying devotion of their enthusiasts," Chitika continued. "Thus far Apple's iPad offering has been able to thwart any attempt by competitors to develop a rival (or even equivalent product). Apple produces a product that is both aesthetically pleasing and technologically robust."

Rivals can't just throw in the towel, though. "Increasing market share will be imperative for all tablet producers in the future if they want to remain competitive," Chitika said. "The tablet has become an increasingly popular computing device and it seems evident that this trend will be persistent in the future."

Chitika suggested focusing on Asia, which has a "penchant for Android operating systems."

The DisplaySearch report estimated that shoppers will soon choose tablets over laptops.

"As the market matures and competitors become better attuned to consumer preferences and find opportunities to break new ground, we expect the landscape to change dramatically, giving consumers more choices, which will drive demand for more devices," Richard Shim, NPD DisplaySearch senior analyst, said in a statement.

Sleeping more than 8 hours a night may help you stay slim

Melbourne, May 1 (ANI): Adding a few hours sleep to your night may prevent you from gaining weight.

A new study has found that sleeping more than nine hours a night appears to suppress genetic factors that lead to weight gain.

In contrast, getting too little sleep seems to have the opposite effect.

Previous research has shown an association between poor sleep and obesity, but the new findings reveal a complex interaction between sleep and genetic factors linked to body weight.

Scientists made the discovery after studying 1088 pairs of identical and non-identical twins.

Twin studies help researchers unravel genetic and environmental influences. Only identical twins share the same genes, and are therefore subject to the same genetic effects, so differences between them are likely to be due to environmental factors.

The study found heritability of body mass index (BMI) - a measurement relating weight and height - was twice as high for short than for long sleepers.

For twins sleeping less than seven hours a night, genetic factors accounted for 70 per cent of differences in BMI. In twins averaging more than nine hours' sleep, only 32 per cent of weight variations could be attributed to genes.

''The results suggest that shorter sleep provides a more permissive environment for the expression of obesity related genes," WAtoday quoted Nathaniel Watson, from the University of Washington, who led the US study, as saying.

''Or it may be that extended sleep is protective by suppressing expression of obesity genes," he stated.

The scientists suggested hectic modern western lifestyles might contribute to obesity.

''Modern society with its ubiquitous technology often can cause misalignment between sleep need and sleep actualisation. This frequently has adverse consequences for cognitive (mental) function and metabolic, cardiovascular, and immunologic health," they wrote.

''Indeed, over the past century habitual sleep duration has dropped 1.5 hours per night and since 2001 the percentage of US adults getting at least eight hours of sleep per night on weeknights has fallen from 38 per cent to 27 per cent.

''Evidence is mounting that chronically reduced sleep times are associated with obesity," they added.

Sleep may influence weight by affecting hormones, glucose metabolism and inflammation, they said.

Some studies have associated long sleep duration with heart disease, insulin resistence (a precursor to diabetes) and early death.

''We did not observe this in our sample, but our sample is much younger than those used in studies that established these adverse associations,'' the researchers noted.

The findings were published on Monday in the journal, Sleep. (ANI)

Potential dark side of diets high in beta carotene revealed

Washington, May 2 (ANI): Consumption of excessive amounts of beta-carotene, a naturally occurring pigment that gives colour to foods such as carrots, sweet potatoes and certain greens, may be hazardous to health, suggests a new study.

This antioxidant also converts to vitamin A, and foods and supplements are the only sources for this essential nutrient.

But scientists at Ohio State University have found that certain molecules that derive from beta-carotene have an opposite effect in the body: They actually block some actions of vitamin A, which is critical to human vision, bone and skin health, metabolism and immune function.

Because these molecules derive from beta-carotene, researchers predict that a large amount of this antioxidant is accompanied by a larger amount of these anti-vitamin-A molecules, as well.

Vitamin A provides its health benefits by activating hundreds of genes. This means that if compounds contained in a typical source of the vitamin are actually lowering its activity instead of promoting its benefits, too much beta-carotene could paradoxically result in too little vitamin A.

The findings also might explain why, in a decades-old clinical trial, more people who were heavily supplemented with beta-carotene ended up with lung cancer than did research participants who took no beta-carotene at all. The trial was ended early because of that unexpected outcome.

The scientists aren't recommending against eating foods high in beta-carotene, and they are continuing their studies to determine what environmental and biological conditions are most likely to lead to these molecules' production.

"We determined that these compounds are in foods, they're present under normal circumstances, and they're pretty routinely found in blood in humans, and therefore they may represent a dark side of beta-carotene," said Earl Harrison, Dean's Distinguished Professor of Human Nutrition at Ohio State and lead author of the study.

"These materials definitely have anti-vitamin-A properties, and they could basically disrupt or at least affect the whole body metabolism and action of vitamin A. But we have to study them further to know for sure," Harrison stated.

Previous research has already established that when beta-carotene is metabolised, it is broken in half by an enzyme, which produces two vitamin A molecules.

In this new study, the Ohio State researchers showed that some of these molecules are produced when beta-carotene is broken in a different place by processes that are not yet fully understood and act to antagonize vitamin A.

For this work, Harrison joined forces with co-authors Robert Curley, professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy, and Steven Schwartz, professor of food science and technology, both at Ohio State.

Curley manufactured a series of beta-carotene-derived molecules in the lab that match those that exist in nature. The researchers then exposed these molecules to conditions mimicking their metabolism and action in the body.

Of the 11 synthetic molecules produced, five appeared to function as inhibitors of vitamin A action based on how they interacted with receptors that would normally launch the function of vitamin A molecules.

"The original idea was that maybe these compounds work the way vitamin A works, by activating what are called retinoic acid receptors. What we found was they don't activate those receptors. Instead, they inhibit activation of the receptor by retinoic acid," Curley said.

"From a drug point of view, vitamin A would be called an agonist that activates a particular pathway, and these are antagonists. They compete for the site where the agonist binds, but they don't activate the site. They inhibit the activation that would normally be expected to occur.

"These materials definitely have anti-vitamin-A properties, and they could basically disrupt or at least affect the whole body metabolism and action of vitamin A," he added.

Once that role was defined, the researchers sought to determine how prevalent these molecular components might be in the human body. Analyzing blood samples obtained from six healthy human volunteers, the scientists in the Schwartz lab found that some of these anti-vitamin-A molecules were present in every sample studied, suggesting that they are a common product of beta-carotene metabolism.

The compounds also have been found previously in cantaloupe and other orange-fleshed melons, suggesting humans might even absorb these molecules directly from their diet.

The study is scheduled for publication in the May 4, 2012, issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. (ANI)