New iPhone app checks your heart rate by reading your face

Aerobic fitness is one of the best ways to get — and stay — in shape. It requires getting your heart rate up, bt it's also important to keep track of your pulse so that it stays within a helpful range and you don't end up oveur-doing it. A new app from a pair of MIT graduates can help you do it using only your iPhone or iPod touch.

Rather than rely on a cumbersome sensor band, the Cardiio app (download for iPhone) uses the iPhone's front-facing iSight camera to scan your face and determine your pulse. This works because as your heart rate increases, more blood is pumped to your face, and as it is the amount of ambient light your face reflects decreases. The Cardiio app is able to detect these variations in reflectiveness and use them to determine your pulse within three beats per minutes, according to its creators, husband and wife PhD team Ming-Zer and Yukkee Poh.

The app sells for $4.99 and user reviews on the iTunes Store are largely very positive so far, with comments praising its accuracy and ease-of-use. Now, if only they could come up with an app that could scan our faces and display our cholesterol levels, we'd be all set.

Genius Robotic Airplane Flies In Tight Spaces

Students in MIT's Robust Robotics program have defied the laws of airplanes.

They have created a robotic airplane that can fly at high speeds, through obstacles, using only on-board sensors. And it's doing all that without benefit of GPS. The students set out to create "autonomous plane navigation in confined spaces," and that's exactly what they did.

Using a laser rangefinder, the plane calculates 15 different variables while in flight -- keeping it from crashing into things.

The MIT researchers completed a serious of flight tests around pillars in the parking garage under their labs. The plane worked like a charm -- gliding and threading, almost blindly, around the structures.

Android technology

Android is a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computer. It is developed by the open handset alliance, led by Google.

Google financially backed the initial developer of the software, Android Inc., and later purchased it in 2005. The unveiling of the Android distribution in 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 86 hardware, software, and telecommunicationcompanies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google releases the Android code as open-source, under the Apache License. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is tasked with the maintenance and further development of Android.

Android has a large community of developers writing applications ("apps") that extend the functionality of the devices. Developers write primarily in a customized version of Java. Apps can be downloaded from third-party sites or through online stores such as Google Play (formerly Android Market), the app store run by Google. In June 2012, there were more than 600,000 apps available for Android, and the estimated number of applications downloaded from Google Play was 20 billion.

Android became the world’s leading smartphone platform at the end of 2010. For the first quarter of 2012, Android had a 59% smartphone market share worldwide. At the half of 2012, there were 400 million devices activated and 1 million activations per day. Analysts point to the advantage to Android of being a multi-channel, multi-carrier OS.