Imagine, going to the bathroom as a 30-year-old heart patient, looking into your mirror and instantly knowing your heart rate, blood pressure, and other vital measurements. This would mean doctors wouldn't have to attach any annoying external sensors to a patients body. This also saves work and precious time. A few minutes saved by this machine could mean the difference between life and death. This could be us in the very near future as Ming-Zher Poh improves what he calls the "Medical Mirror". Spending a year and a half into this project Ming-Zher Poh is hoping his invention well help others and people like himself to monitor their own health. When your heart beats, it sends a pulse of blood through the blood vessels in your body. And like most other objects, blood absorbs light. So when more of it travels through your body less of the light hitting your skin is reflected. A webcam behind a two way mirror can pick up these small fluctuations in reflected light. A computer program can then translate these into heart rate reading. This is essentially how Poh's Medical Mirror works. But this only works with a high resolution camera. Poh's and his team's next goal is to try to get a normal webcam to pick up these same fluctuations. This would let people with modern smartphones, i-pods, and laptops monitor their own heartbeats without attaching anything to their bodies. Poh is planning to bring this marvel in to the market after he finishes his Ph.D.

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NEW YORK TO L.A IN 41 MIN.

Countries all over the world are investing to build better, faster trains. How? Well there are essentially two types of trains right now in the present world. Conventional trains, and maglev type trains. Conventional involves steel-wheel-on-steel-track systems, that generally travel around 200 mph. Maglevs are a little faster and travel at speeds up to 270 mph. The magnetic repulsion between an onboard magnet and one embedded in the track itself is commonly what powers this type of train. This is where Robert Salter's idea with the RAND corporation comes in. In 1972, he proposed a "very high-speed" train called a "vactrain," he said this train would travel on magnetic rails similarly as "much as a surfboard rides the ocean's waves." This is where the similarity ends. Unlike the surfer, the train would be sealed in a vacuum. Therefore, not only not facing any rolling resistance from the rails, but also zero wind resistance from the atmosphere as well. Because of the fact that there is almost no resistance from anything, this train supposedly can travel significantly faster than any modern day trains. In fact, founder of et3 Daryl Oster proposed a maglev that could travel at speeds up to 4,000 miles per hour, able to zip from New York to Los Angeles in only 41 minutes. This train could very well be a very common type of train in Americas near future as well because, Vice President Joseph Biden announced recently in February that the U.S would invest $53 billion in high speed trains in the next 6 years. I cannot wait to get on a train like that!

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