A vending kiosk company in Wisconsin plans to implant a microchip into each of 50 willing employees so they can more easily open doors, buy snacks, log in to computers, and use office equipment The bizarre experiment conducted by Three Square Market will make it the first U.S. business to implant chips in its workers.

“Eventually, this technology will become standardized allowing you to use this as your passport, public transit, all purchasing opportunities, etc.,” 32M CEO Todd Westby said in a company press release.

Each participating employee will have the RFID and NFC-based chips implanted between their thumb and forefinger. The devices are no larger than a grain of rice and are capable of storing and recognizing small amounts of digital information. Similar products are found in transit cards, pet trackers, and even some passports. NFC is also found in smartphones and most commonly used to purchase items at stores or vending machines.

A company representative explained how someone can use their chip to buy snacks from its kiosks, or “micro markets.”

“We’ll come up, scan the item. We’ll hit pay with a credit card, and it’s asking to swipe my proximity payment now. I’ll hold my hand up, just like my cell phone, and it’ll pay for my product.”
​
It’s important to point out that no one is required to get the implant, and the company claims there is no GPS tracking inside. Three Square Market will pay for each of the tiny $300 devices and will start chipping its workers at a company party on Aug. 1.

Apple CEO Tim Cook made a surprise appearance at a Cisco event in Las Vegas recently, revealing plans to help businesses with discounts on cyber-security insurance if they use products from both companies. Following the event, Cisco announced another outcome of its Apple partnership, the Cisco Security Connector app for iPhone and iPad.

"The thinking we share here is that if your enterprise or company is using Cisco and Apple, that the combination of these should make that insurance cost significantly less," Cook said according to Reuters. "This is something we're going to spend some energy on. You should reap that benefit."

The Security Connector app will launch this fall, and offer "security functionality from Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Clarity in a single app," Cisco said. Specifically, the app will aid in the investigation of incidents, block people from connecting to malicious websites, and encrypt DNS requests.

Organizations will have to deploy the app via a mobile device management platform — most likely Cisco's Meraki Systems Manager. Before this fall, organizations will be able to test Security Connector by way of a beta program.
​
Apple and Cisco first announced their collaboration in Aug. 2015, intended to ensure iPhones and iPads were optimized for Cisco networks, and vice versa.

Wireless charging can be a great convenience, cutting out the need to carry cords and plugs around in case your phone's battery dies. Today, though, it requires a phone be stationary and in contact with a charging pad.

Wireless charging at a distance could make life easier not just for people with smartphones, and for drones and electric vehicles, but also for patients with electronic medical implants.

Researchers at Stanford have now developed a highly efficient technique that enables wireless power transfer at a few feet and in motion.

The work builds on "magnetic resonance coupling" in which electricity passes through an oscillating magnetic field created by a pair of transmitting and receiving coils. The best result can be achieved if each coil is at a fixed distance and positioned at an optimal angle.

However, as the Stanford researchers detail in a new paper, their new "robust" wireless power transfer system enables a steady charge at variable distances of up to few feet and, impressively, doesn't require manual tuning as the distance and angles between the two change.

The technique was developed by Stanford electrical engineer researchers Sid Assawaworrarit, Xiaofang Yu and Shanhui Fan.

While it has the potential to bring significant improvements to electric vehicles, there are several limitations. The researchers have only demonstrated it working at a charge sufficient to keep a tiny LED lit, and the demonstration system is not a practical size yet.

The demo video shows a barbell-like contraption with two large disc-shaped cardboard boxes with a transmitter and receiver inside each. The LED attached to the receiver stays lit as the receiver slides further away from the transmitter and starts to fade after 75cm/29.5 inches. The power transfer stops fully at about a meter away.

To bypass tuning obstacles, the researchers switched the transmitter's radio-frequency source for a voltage amplifier and feedback resistor, according to Stanford.
​
"Adding the amplifier allows power to be very efficiently transferred across most of the three-foot range and despite the changing orientation of the receiving coil," explained Assawaworrarit.

HEIF is the new photo format that Apple is using to replace JPEG. And it probably will replace JPEGs, because the iPhone is the most popular, most-used camera in the world, and as of iOS 11, most iPhones will be switching from JPEG to HEIF.

But what is HEIF? What makes it better than JPEG? And what difference will it make?

HEIF (High-Efficiency Image Format) is the still-image version of the HVEC (H.265) video format. Its main advantage is that photos saved in HEIF are roughly half the size of JPEGs, and of better quality. That means you can store twice as many photos on your smartphone before filling it up or, said another way; you can keep all the photos you have while freeing up a ton of gigabytes on your smartphone.

Why? Because image compression has gotten a lot better than it was when JPEG was born in 1992. Apple’s newest operating systems (MacOS High Sierra and iOS 11) feature built-in support for HVEC, and therefore HEIF, which means images can be encoded and decoded super-fast, without stressing the system or the battery.

HEIF offers other advantages over JPEG. For starters, it is not so much a file format as a container for files. A JPEG is a single image, but a HEIF can be a single image or a sequence of images.

This makes HEIF perfect for Apple’s Live Photos, but also makes it a potential replacement for GIF images on all platforms. HEIF also supports transparency, and image color up to 16 bits, versus JPEG’s measly 8-bit color.

In practice, this means that HEIF can capture all the extended color range provided by the camera’s 10-bit color output. In other words, you will no longer see ugly banding across a blue sky.

HEIF is also good for editing. A HEIF image can be rotated and cropped without altering the image or resaving it. This makes such edits undoable at any time in the future.

Right now, we live in a JPEG world. To fit in, iOS 11 will convert its HEIF images to JPEGs upon export — for sharing to non-iOS devices, for example, or for passing images to apps that don’t support HEIF. As a user, you will notice nothing. All the work will be done behind the scenes.

Photos will take up less space while looking better. They will upload and download to and from your iCloud Photo Library much faster. And, if the rest of the world adopts HEIF in place of JPEGs, then the whole web will operate more quickly.

It’s important to note that HEIF isn’t an Apple-owned technology at all, any more than JPEG. JPEG has been around for a quarter of a century. It’s as established as a file format gets. But it’s also due for retirement. HEIF is a suitable heir, and may just usurp JPEG thanks to the massive iOS user base. Hopefully, the most controversial thing about HEIF will be — like GIF — its pronunciation.
​
For an in-depth look at the technical details of HEIF, you should read Kelly Thompson’s excellent piece for 500px.

Sometime in the last century, most professionals discovered that face-to-face meetings with clients weren't always necessary — or even desirable. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects and scores of other professional service providers discovered the phone. Then they unearthed email. Then video conferencing.
But not doctors. Most doctors today communicate with their patients the same way the Greek physician Galen did 2,000 years ago: one on one, in person.

Why is that?

One reason is unwise legislation. Another is resistance to change by the American Medical Association and state medical societies. A third reason is Medicare, whose payment practices tend to be copied by most employers and private insurers. But the biggest problem is that rank-and-file doctors have been unwilling to step into the modern age.

Thanks to the most recent legislative session, Texas became the last state in the union to allow physicians to consult by phone with patients they have never met. And that only came about after a long, hard struggle.

Take the case of Teladoc, a Dallas-based firm that provides telephone consultations to nearly 11 million patients nationwide. Say you are on a business trip and your allergy prescription runs out. You put in a call to Teladoc, and within 30 minutes you get a call back from a doctor who has access to your medical records. After a brief consultation, the doctor prescribes the medication you need.

Teladoc estimates that one-third of physician consultations don't require the doctor to be physically present. Further, a typical phone consultation costs about $40 to $50, compared with $130 for a family physician visit or $1,500 for a trip to the emergency room.

Great service? You would think so. But the Texas Medical Board (acting like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Texas Medical Association) tried to put Teladoc out of business and might have succeeded had the company not spent six years in a protracted court battle.

Telemedicine doesn't just lower costs. It has the potential to save lives.

Suppose you are a patient in an intensive care ward in southern Minnesota or parts of Iowa and Wisconsin. There is a chance that your vital signs are not being monitored by the staff of the hospital where you are. Instead, they could be monitored by the clinical staff of the Mayo Clinic, miles away. The Mayo Clinic's eICU (electronic intensive care unit) currently oversees 73 beds in remote locations.

Mayo provides expertise that is not available in local community hospitals. How a stroke is treated and how quickly it is treated have an enormous impact on patient recovery. With telemedicine, patients get access to the best that Mayo has to offer.

So who could be against this? The American Medical Association for one. The federal government for another. The official position of the AMA is that doctors must be physically present to deliver appropriate care. For the most part, Medicare payment policies follow AMA guidelines.

Technology is on its way, whether organized medicine likes it or not. Patients in 14 states can now download an app made by a Silicon Valley firm called Lemonaid Health. Customers fill out a questionnaire on eight simple health concerns, including sinusitis, birth control and acid reflux. These are reviewed by a doctor who can write a prescription — all for a fee of $15.

Health Tap, another startup company, offers an artificial intelligence product that allows patients to submit their symptoms and then get options on what to do next. Like an Uber for healthcare, the company connects patients to 107,000 doctors who are willing to answer general health questions.

A third California company makes a $200 iPhone attachment that operates like an otoscope. Parents can use it to look inside their child's ear, take a photo, send it to a doctor-on-demand and, for $49, get a diagnosis — potentially saving an expensive trip to the emergency room.
​
A brand-new world awaits us. Patients are ahead of most doctors in getting there.