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Samsung’s latest Unpacked event has taken place and with it a whole new series of AI-powered Galaxy products have been unveiled, including the launch of the all-new wearable Galaxy Ring.
The passive health tracker for your finger will pull together your data to give you an overall Energy Score, a Sleep Score, as well as personalised wellness tips based on your health goals.
Two new folding phones were also revealed, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Z Fold 6 as well as a new extreme sport-focused Galaxy Watch Ultra to rival the Apple Watch Ultra..
Ever fancied speeding up the clock? Ruth Ogden, Professor of the Psychology of Time at Liverpool John Moores University, discusses her study which has shown that looking forward to Christmas or Ramadan ‘can accelerate our sense of time’.
Although the research was focused on big calendar dates like Christmas and Ramadan, Professor Ogden says that it may well apply to smaller occasions too, such as going out for dinner or meeting up with a friend.
It could also help us draw conclusions about what this means when we have a negative event coming up too.
Research suggests night owls have superior brain function than morning people.
Dr Raha West, NIHR Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Surgery & Cancer at Imperial College London, and lead author of the study, explains how they used data on thousands to examine the “intricate relationships” between sleep duration, quality and chronotype - which is categorised in the study as “morningness,” “eveningness” or “intermediate”.
Participants underwent tests which examined their intelligence, reasoning skills, reaction times and memory.
And the rest
Nasa finds icy ‘super-Earth’ that could be home to alien life and Microsoft is hiking Xbox Game Pass prices by up to 25%.
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Here’s a fully automated transcript of today’s episode:
Hi, I'm Rochelle Travers, and this is The Standard's Tech and Science Daily podcast.
Coming up, how you can speed up your concept of time.
Now, let's get into it.
Samsung's latest Unpacked Event has taken place, and with it a whole new series of AI-powered Galaxy products have been unveiled, including the launch of the all-new wearable Galaxy Ring.
The passive help tracker for your finger will pull together your data to give you an overall energy score, a sleep score, as well as personalised wellness tips based on your health goals.
Interestingly, you'll be able to perform double pinch gestures to help take photos remotely and snooze or stop alarms.
And like a smartwatch, you'll get inactivity alerts if you've been sitting down for too long.
Two new folding phones were also revealed, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Z Fold 6, as well as a new extreme sport-focused Galaxy Watch Ultra to rival the Apple Watch Ultra.
Now, ever fancy trying to speed up the clock?
Well, listen up.
A study has found that looking forward to Christmas or Ramadan can actually speed up our sense of time.
We found that over 70% of people in the UK and in Iraq felt like annual events such as Christmas and Ramadan came around more quickly each year.
So people feel like these events are occurring more quickly than they imagine, even though they know they happen every year.
That's Ruth Ogden, professor of the psychology of time at Liverpool John Moores University and lead author of the study.
They carried out a survey of more than 1,600 adults in the UK and Iraq in which they asked participants about their memory function, how much they enjoyed Christmas and or Ramadan, how much they thought about time and for information about their daily lives.
What we found was that people were more likely to feel like time was accelerating towards Christmas and Ramadan if they really looked forward to those events, if they thought about time a lot, but interestingly, if they had a bad memory function, so specifically an inability or a reduced ability to plan for future events.
So the people who struggled to remember what they needed to do in the future felt more like Christmas was coming around more quickly each year.
Although the research was focused on big calendar dates like Christmas and Ramadan, Professor Ogden says it may well apply to smaller occasions too, such as going out for dinner or meeting up with a friend.
It could also help us draw conclusions about what this means when we have a negative event coming up too.
You think about any negative events in your life.
Like, a great example is when you're waiting for medical test results in a hospital, or you're waiting for your doctor to call you back, or you're waiting for a scan.
The time between you knowing you have to have this test and you getting the result, it really drags, it goes by really slowly.
We think this happens because you're super stressed, but also because you only focus on getting the information.
So, it really disrupts the things that you do in your life.
You don't do the normal things that you would do to distract yourself from the passage of time.
And that really slows how we experience time.
Professor Ogden says that there are things you can do if you want to feel like you have more control over your sense of time.
Maintain a routine.
So, when we lose our routine, we feel lost in time.
So, keeping a schedule, keeping track of what you're supposed to be doing and when you're supposed to be doing it is a really good way of holding you in time.
Time distorts the most when we feel really extreme emotions that you'll have heard of like the idea of time slowing down during car crashes.
Daily life is full of stresses and strains.
So, trying to remain calm, trying to see things in perspective will help time to stop whacking and waning.
So, I think one of the most important things to remember from our study is that people who struggle to remember what to do in future events are more likely to feel like time was passing by quickly.
So, if you want to experience a slower, more calm pace of time, you need to be aware of the planning that you need to do and you need to keep on top of the tasks that are required for future events.
The findings are published in the Journal Plos One.
New research suggests that night owls have superior brain function than morning people.
What we already know about this topic is we know that sleep quality can affect your cognitive abilities and we do know both really short or long sleep duration can be detrimental to your cognitive function.
That's Dr.Raha West, Clinical Research Fellow at Imperial College London and Lead Author of the study.
But what we don't know as much about is whether your biological clock, which is what we call chronotype, whether you are more of an early riser or night owl, whether that has an association with how you perform in the cognitive test.
The team examined data on thousands of people from the UK Biobank study to examine the intricate relationships between sleep duration, quality and chronotype, which is categorised in the study as morningness, eveningness or intermediate.
Participants underwent tests which examined their intelligence, reasoning skills, reaction times and memory.
The researchers analysed data on almost 27,000 people, comparing how well they performed on these tests to their self-reported sleep duration, sleep pattern and sleep quality.
In the population that we studied, we found that the evening type people seem to perform better on the cognitive tests.
But I must emphasise that our study involved the older adults because the data sets include participants age 40 and above and the average age is around 71, 72.
Those who got between seven and nine hours of sleep each night appeared to perform best on the tests.
And the academics also found that night owls and those classified as intermediate had superior cognitive function.
However, Dr. Raha was keen to stress that these findings don't mean that anyone should be trying to alter their natural sleeping patterns though.
While we found the evening type perform better in the test, our finding is more of an association rather than the causalities.
I think everyone should aim for the right amount of sleep, of good quality sleep, not too short, not too long, but also to recognise their peak cognitive time and take advantage of that.
Let's go to the ads.
Coming up, the planet that could have alien life and Microsoft hikes up its Xbox Game Pass prices.
Welcome back.
NASA scientists have found an icy super-earth that could be home to alien life.
New research into the planet known as LHS 1140b has shown that it may have an atmosphere and perhaps even liquid water, so it could be one of the more promising places to search for life.
LHS 1140b orbits around a low-mass red dwarf star that is about a fifth the size of our own sun.
Scientists are particularly excited because they believe it could be in the Goldilocks zone, where it's neither too close or too far from its star, meaning it might have liquid water.
And finally, bad news for gamers, Microsoft is hiking up Xbox Game Pass prices by up to 25%.
The gaming giant which purchased studio Activision Blizzard for a record $69 billion in 2023, says monthly charges for PC Game Pass will rise by two pounds to nine pounds 99, while its premium service, Ultimate, will go up by two pounds to 14 pounds 99 per month.
It's also replacing its standard subscription tier on Xbox consoles in September, meaning Xbox gamers will now have to subscribe to Game Pass Ultimate if they want to access new games on the day they're released.
It comes after Microsoft announced that its most anticipated new title, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, would be available straight away to Game Pass subscribers.
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