Insert Coin meet Melon, a headband that'll help you learn to focus

    The quantified self movement’s gaining steam, with companies creating all sorts of gadgets to track our activity levels, sleeping habits and even what’s going on inside our heads. Melon’s an EEG headband that taps into your brain’s inner workings to show you how well you maintain mental focus. We actually saw Melon’s prototype predecessor last year when it was called Axio, and while this new band packs largely the same components, the design’s been refined to a much thinner profile. As before, its got a trio of electrodes for sensing brainwaves, a NeuroSky chip for filtering out extraneous electrical noise and Bluetooth 4.0 for offloading data wirelessly. It sends data to iPhones (Android’s in development) running the Melon app, which translates that info into a focus graph — generally speaking, the higher the neural activity in your pre-frontal cortex, the higher your level of focus. Users then input contextual data tags like time of day, type of activity and the surrounding environmental conditions to allow them to track variables that may affect their focus.

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    Source: Kickstarter

    Cast AR handson with Jeri Ellsworth at Maker Faire 2013

    When Valve‘s first hardware hire, Jeri Ellsworth, tweeted back in February that she was fired from the company, we were disappointed but also intrigued by what she meant by “time for new exciting projects.” Well we finally saw what she’s been up to here at at Maker Faire 2013. It’s called Cast AR, and it’s a pair of 3D augmented-reality glasses that she and former Valve programmer Rick Johnson were working on at Valve before they left.

    The model we saw is still in the early prototype stages, but the concepts are already in place. Perched atop a pair of active shutter glasses are a couple of miniature LCD projectors, which bounce images from a connected computer onto a special reflective surface at a 120Hz refresh rate. A camera module sits on the eyewear’s bridge and monitors an array of infrared LEDs embedded in the reflective surface. This allows for quick and accurate head tracking. Join us after the break for our impressions and our video interview with Jeri Ellsworth.

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    Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.

    Altweek 51613

    If we’re to find a common thread in this week’s collection of stories, it’d be nature’s guiding hand. How it inspires science, how we seek to imitate it, and how unnatural the future of policing could be. This is alt-week,

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    Dell Ophelia USB Android stick to ship in July, priced at $100

    We know that “wherefore art thou?” was about Romeo, but if your question was for (Dell’s) Ophelia, then it’s likely more “when art thou.” The answer? July. The Android pendrive / USB computer we saw back at CES may be one of many, but distinctive thanks to its mainstream PC-maker origins. We’re still lacking a lot of the specifics, other than that there’s WiFi, Bluetooth, Wyse PocketCloud integration, plus, of course, HDMI and Android 4.something. There will likely be a few enterprise-friendly features too (administration tools, remote wiping) reports PC World. As usual, developers will get their hands on them first, with — interestingly — some cable and telecoms companies potentially stocking it too — though no specifics at this time. So, the $100 Dell might not be the portable you’d love for this price, but maybe the USB PC finally crossing over?

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    Source: PC World

    Sprint closes deal to buy US Cellular spectrum, adds 420,000 new customers

    Sprint was clearly hungry for capacity when it bought spectrum from US Cellular last fall, and it’s at last getting its fill — some of it, at least — by closing the deal today. The carrier has officially taken possession of 20MHz in airwaves across Midwestern cities like Champaign, Chicago and South Bend, as well as 10MHz in St. Louis. The customer handover isn’t quite as grandiose as was mentioned in November, however: Sprint is ultimately adopting 420,000 US Cellular customers, rather than the originally claimed 585,000. It should be a relatively bump-free transition, no matter who’s included in the group. Sprint expects the switch to take several months, and it’s keeping the US Cellular network active while customers go hunting for discounted phones.

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    Source: Sprint