Weirdest SciTech news of the week
You might think you don't need a bracelet to alert you when something -- or someone -- is getting on your nerves, but the makers of WellBe think you do.
The wearable heart rate tracker uses your physical pulse to take your emotional pulse. When it senses that your surroundings are causing a physiological stress reaction it will give you an electronic nudge to take a deep breath or take a walk outside.
WellBe is currently raising funds through an Indiegogo campaign.
Watch the video above and check out the full story on CNET.
Click through for more of this week's wacky science and tech news.
Out of this world weather
The search for Earth-like planets has consumed astronomers of late, with scores being found orbiting habitable zones of distant stars. Yet little is known about the weather on these alien worlds - until now.
"Despite the discovery of thousands of extra-solar planets, what these far-off worlds look like is still shrouded in mystery," Lisa Esteves, graduate student at the University of Toronto, who led a study of 14 exoplanets that appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Tuesday.
Using sensitive observations from the Kepler space telescope, Esteves and her colleagues found conditions might an extreme version of what earthlings are used to. These planets appear to have cloudy, overcast skies in the mornings and scorching heat in the afternoons, with temperatures reaching to 1,600 degrees Celsius, or 2,912 F.
Read the full story here.
Science star meets rockstars
Stephen Hawking is a scientific superstar. Now he's going to mix with rock stars, taking the stage at the UK's Glastonbury Festival.
Organizers said Tuesday that Hawking will make a "special guest appearance" at the Kidz Field during the festival, which runs June 24-28 in southwest England. It did not give details of his performance.
Read the full story here.
Eel robot, extraterrestrial undersea explorer
It is believed that under the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa there lies a vast subterranean ocean, and that this ocean could possibly sustain life within it. What could be more appropriate for plumbing those depths than an autonomous robot built to work -- and look -- like our own creatures of the deep?
A team of engineers from Cornell University has won a $100,000 grant from NASA to develop a squid- or lamprey-like autonomous robot that could explore the harsh and unknown conditions in Europa's subsurface ocean.
The soft, flexible marine rover would only use resources in its extraterrestrial environment to power itself through the water. Without having to rely on its own battery or other fuel source sent from Earth, or hard-to-come-by solar energy, the robot would use its electrodynamic tentacles to harvest energy from changing magnetic fields around it.
Read the full story here.
"Creepy" email app
A new app that pulls information off the Internet to improve the average email has even the creator calling the new technology "creepy." Drew D'Agostino is the man behind Crystal, something he calls the biggest thing to hit email since spellcheck.
"Crystal tells you how to communicate with anybody. And, to get that information, it detects information written by you, or about you online," D'Agostino told CBS News San Francisco's Betty Yu.
So, if you want to write an email to someone, Crystal will scour the Internet to find whatever public information is out there about that person and develop a character profile.
The app will then tell you how and what to write -- or not write -- coaching you toward an email worded specifically for someone else's communication style. On the website it explains, "When you write an email, Crystal tells you the words, phrases, style, and tone you should use to reach the recipient in the way that they like to communicate, rather than your own."
Read the full story here.
Chickens with dino noses
New research, published this week in the journal Evolution, reveals you can give rise to reptilian snouts simply by inhibiting a select few genes in chickens. Knock out the beak, and a snout pops up in its place.
Paleontologist Bhart-Anjan Bhullar and his colleagues set out to understand the genetic underpinnings of the evolutionary transformation that led to dinosaur snouts turning into bird beaks. They identified a "patch of gene expression right in the middle of the face" of chicken embryos. They then "took out the patch" and incubated the eggs. The embryos developed with a snout and palate similar to their dinosaur ancestors, such as Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx.
Read the full story here.
Next: A quartet of quasars
A rare quartet of quasars
A quartet of quasars has for the first time been found in close proximity, a discovery that could challenge ideas about how galaxies and galaxy clusters formed.
Believed to the nuclei of early galaxy formation, quasars are powered by the increase of matter onto a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy.
Quasars are exceedingly rare and are usually separated by hundreds of millions of light-years. The researchers estimate that the odds of discovering a quadruple quasar by chance are one in ten million.
Read the full story here.
Next: First warm-blooded fish
First warm-blooded fish
The car-tire-size opah is striking enough thanks to its rotund, silver body. But now, researchers have discovered something surprising about this deep-sea dweller: It's got warm blood.
That makes the opah (Lampris guttatus) the first warm-blooded fish ever discovered. Most fish are exotherms, meaning they require heat from the environment to stay toasty. The opah, as an endotherm, keeps its own temperature elevated even as it dives to chilly depths of 1,300 feet in temperate and tropical oceans around the world. It does this by constantly flapping its fins and with the help of its unique gills.
Read the full story here.