App Delivers 'Virtual Placebo' to Improve Your Health

Researchers from PlaceboEffect.com are raising funds through Indiegogo to create an app that administers a virtual placebo. No pills, no doctors — just pictures.

Here's how it works: You begin the experience by choosing which lifestyle aspect you'd like to change — say, quitting smoking or decreasing stress — before scheduling an alarm-like reminder to "take it" each day. Then, you can personalize it further by choosing exactly what you'll be taking (it doesn't need to be a picture of a pill)

The whole idea is to create a comfortable "happy place" to achieve the proper effect. With the right mindset, the group says, the act of routinely pressing buttons and watching your smartphone's screen will be equivalent to physically swallowing a sugar pill. Read more...

Robot Alarm Clock Dances by Your Bedside

If you've tried every alarm clock app and gadget under the sun but waking up on time still proves difficult, a beside companion that dances and talks might do the trick.

No, it's not a human, it's a robot.

Southern California-based Nuts and Voltz has developed a working prototype for an iPhone- and iPod-compatible robot alarm clock that wakes you up in quite a unique way. The clock is called tim-E (pronounced "Timmy"), and you really only get a feel for its rambunctious personality by seeing it in action, as in the video above.

That's because tim-E talks weather and traffic out loud and can dance to your iPhone or iPod music. Choose to wake up to your own music or to tim-E's banter. The device even lives up to its "alarm clock with attitude" branding, since it can pose brain teasers to make sure you don't fall back asleep. You can also record voice reminders, which could be useful to take note of to-do lists or other random ideas that might pop into your mind at night. Read more...

Does Tumblr Lose Its Cool If It's Acquired?

In the news business, when you start seeing enough reports about something, it usually means that at least part of those reports are true. That's why the media and tech worlds are in such a tizzy today, with multiple reports surfacing that Yahoo is close to acquiring Tumblr for as much as $1 billion.

Now even more reports are starting to suggest that Google, Facebook and even Microsoft are all also showing interest in the microblogging service

It makes sense that acquisition talks are circling around Tumblr. The company has taken more than $125 million in venture funding since 2007 and investors want to see a return on that investment. Meanwhile, Tumblr continues to try to find itself a business model — including native mobile advertising — without alienating its users. Read more...

Learn About Overfishing With This Interactive Web Aquarium

The human race has had a profound effect on the planet. Unfortunately, it hasn't always been positive. One of the overlooked issues we've caused is overfishing. By fishing too much, we have diminished the population of fish in a way that, according to many scientists, can even threaten oceanic ecosystems

To highlight this issue, which is often poorly understood by the general public, Sam Slover, a 28-year-old student at the New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program has designed an interactive web aquarium that lets users see how the fish population has changed from 1910 until 2010. Read more...

Manager Uses Urban Dictionary to Defend UFC Fighter's Gay Twitter Slur

This isn't exactly your textbook bit of damage control PR

UFC fighter Nate Diaz (above) was suspended by the mixed martial arts body on Thursday night for earlier in the week using a gay slur against another fighter. That's typically where a manager or someone else would step in and get the athlete to apologize and talk about the perils of using inappropriate, insensitive language, right?

Wrong

Instead, Diaz's manager Mike Kogan directed offended parties to the slang terminology website Urban Dictionary to justify the slur

Diaz drew his suspension for a since-deleted tweet in which he criticized another fighter for taking bonus money that would have gone to fighter Pat Healy until Healy was ruled ineligible for the purse because of a positive marijuana test Read more...