Latest Updates

Science:

Research Shows: Risk of Marijuana’s ‘gateway effect’ Overblown

By Sasha Holburn posted September 2, 2010, 9:15 am | 0

New research from the University of New Hampshire shows that the “gateway effect” of marijuana – that teenagers who use marijuana are more likely to move on to harder illicit drugs as young adults – is overblown.

Whether teenagers who smoked pot will use other illicit drugs as young adults has more to do with life factors such as employment status and stress, according to the new research. In fact, the strongest predictor of whether someone will use other illicit drugs is their race/ethnicity, not whether they ever used marijuana.

Conducted by UNH associate professors of sociology Karen Van Gundy and Cesar Rebellon, the research appears in the September 2010, issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior in the article, “A Life-course Perspective on the ‘Gateway Hypothesis.’ “

“In light of these findings, we urge U.S. drug control policymakers to consider stress and life-course approaches in their pursuit of solutions to the ‘drug problem,’ ” Van Gundy and Rebellon say.

The researchers used survey data from 1,286 young adults who attended Miami-Dade public schools in the 1990s. Within the final sample, 26 percent of the respondents are African American, 44 percent are Hispanic, and 30 percent are non-Hispanic white.

Continue reading Research Shows: Risk of Marijuana’s ‘gateway effect’ Overblown

Social:

Zillow Partners with Apartments.com to Serve Apartment Listings

By Alan Tilghman posted September 1, 2010, 8:59 am | 0

Zillow.com® and Apartments.com™, two of the nation’s leading online destinations for real estate and multifamily housing, respectively, today announced a partnership to bring the Apartments.com national database of 90,000 managed apartment rental listings to Zillow®. Apartments.com rental listings include comprehensive home details, photos, floorplans, and property manager contact information – bringing the full search experience from Apartments.com to Zillow.

Listings from Apartments.com will receive exposure to Zillow’s 12 million monthly visitors(i), nearly two million of whom are currently renters. This syndication brings the total number of rental listings for single-family homes and apartments on Zillow.com to 150,000.

In addition to being displayed on Zillow, Apartments.com rental listings will also appear on the Zillow Mobile application, which has been downloaded more than two million times and is the most popular real estate application on the iPhone®, Android®, iPad™, and Windows® Mobile platforms.

“Zillow offers an unmatched user experience for home shoppers who are renting, deciding whether to rent or buy, or shopping for a home to buy. This partnership deepens Zillow’s footprint in the rental search industry, and gives Zillow users access to a new category of managed apartment rental listings,” said Chloe Harford, Zillow’s vice president of mortgages and new ventures.

Continue reading Zillow Partners with Apartments.com to Serve Apartment Listings

Around The Web

last update: September 3, 2010

Social:

Google to Unveil “Priority Inbox” for Gmail

By Ryan Deal posted August 31, 2010, 11:51 am | 0

Google is set to unveil a new feature to its Gmail service that aims to separate a user’s important emails from the ones that do not get read often.

The new feature called “Priority Inbox” will help users focus on messages that matter without having to set up complex rules, Google said in its official blog.

The Priority Inbox application splits the inbox into three sections: ‘Important and unread’, ‘Starred’ and ‘Everything Else’.

“As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to,” the company said.

Google said Priority Inbox will roll out to all Gmail users, including those who use Google Apps, over the next week.

Continue reading Google to Unveil “Priority Inbox” for Gmail

Gadgets:

Bottle Opener iPhone Case

By Ryan Deal posted August 30, 2010, 10:29 am | 0

So you have an iPhone AND you’re a lush? Well then, this bottle opener equipped iPhone case is perfect for you. You’ll be able to open a beer while you’re talking on the phone, playing Angry Birds, or searching for new apps. Right now the iBottleOpener is only available for the iPhone 3G and 3Gs, but I would imagine the case for the iPhone 4 is right around the corner.

Continue reading Bottle Opener iPhone Case

Science:

Oil-Eating Microbes Consume Oil Plume

By Kurt Black posted August 30, 2010, 9:24 am | 0

It’s no doubt the massive oil spill in the Gulf was the worst we’ve ever seen and has destroyed much of the ecosystem of the area including companies that depend on the health of the area in order to continue to conduct business. However, scientists have found that petroleum-eating bacteria was plentiful in the clouds of oil that drifted for months following the April 20th incident.

This bacteria which has been consuming oil seeping from the seafloor for ages seems to have increased their own metabolic machinery to consume more of the oil quite efficiently. The result has been a natural cleanup mechanism that can reduce the amount of oil by half about every three days or so.

Continue reading Oil-Eating Microbes Consume Oil Plume

  • Follow TechVert

Gadgets:

PR2 Robot Draws a Self-Portrait

By Ryan Deal posted August 27, 2010, 9:46 am | 0

Robots are great. They’re continually challenging and proving how robotics can help us move toward a smarter society. And then of course there’s the beer-fetching and game-playing robots we’ve come to love. Now, Willow Garage’s PR2 robot has been given a pen, and with it, it drew a pretty good self-portrait.

Check out the video:

Continue reading PR2 Robot Draws a Self-Portrait

Gadgets:

USB Wall Socket

By Ryan Deal posted August 26, 2010, 11:52 am | 0

These days, the iPhone and other devices that we interact with most are USB friendly and often times, USB dependent. So it’s no wonder some genius decided to develop a wall socket equipped with USB ports. Not only does this wall socket allow you to charge devices using USB, but it also potentially doubles the number of things you can power from a single wall socket. Bonus!

The best part is that this socket retrofit can be installed easily on any existing wall outlet. All you’ve got to do is swap them out. Oh, and no need to worry about the vampire effect. The USB ports will only draw power if something is plugged in.

The USB Wall Socket can be preordered here.





Social:

You Can Now Make Calls from Gmail

By Alan Tilghman posted August 26, 2010, 11:07 am | 0

Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.

Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.

Continue reading You Can Now Make Calls from Gmail

More on TechVert