How City Noise Affects Public Health

Over the last year, Harvard PhD candidate Erica Walker has been cycling around Boston with a decibel meter. She’s determined to map out the city’s noise to see how it affects the public’s health. “Noise is insidious,” she tells The Atlantic. “It affects you acutely, but also longterm. This is something that people don’t really talk about, but something people really suffer from.” She eventually …

HTC + Under Armour’s HealthBox Fitness Tracking Set

A three-piece monitoring system that charts just about everything

In the age of quantifiable self, there are many devices offering an array of useful functionality. Fortunately, the UA HealthBox—developed by HTC and Under Armour—delivers one of the most comprehensive packages and, thus, plenty of data. The three-piece box includes a wearable fitness tracker (known as the UA Band) which measures sleep, resting heart rate, daily activity and the intensity of workouts; a UA Scale, …

NASA Begins Working on the Concorde Jet’s Successor

NASA has hired aerospace company Lockheed Martin to design a “low-boom” supersonic passenger plane that could become the successor to the famous Concorde jet. The “low-boom” specification of the design would require it to break the sound barrier with a “soft thump” rather than the boisterous boom supersonic flight is known for. It will be the first X-plane in NASA’s New Aviation Horizons initiative. Read …