Two researchers, Dr. Domenico Vicinanza of Anglia Ruskin University and Dr. Genevieve Williams, have “sonified” a video of the 5,000th Martian sunrise captured by the Mars rover, Opportunity. The music is a representation of the experience of seeing the sun rise over the red dunes as light pierces the planet’s atmosphere.

It’s beautiful.

From the release:

Researchers created the piece of music by scanning a picture from left to right, pixel by pixel, and looking at brightness and colour information and combining them with terrain elevation. They used algorithms to assign each element a specific pitch and melody.

The quiet, slow harmonies are a consequence of the dark background and the brighter, higher pitched sounds towards the middle of the piece are created by the sonification of the bright sun disk.

Given that you are literally watching the sun rise over the sands of Mars thanks to the efforts of a little multi-wheeled robot and you can now hear the musical equivalent of this amazing breakthrough, it’s pretty hard to feel that humanity is heading toward a dark place. The next breakthrough, I suspect, will happen when we’re able to send human orchestra up there to recreate it with real instruments.

I’ll admit that I’ve been caught up in the Bose hype. I’ve worn qBoseSony WH-1000XM3, a pair of wireless/wired cans that truly give everything else I’ve tried a bad name.

These $349 headphones come with a USB cable, audio cable, international audio adapter, and a compact case that holds the whole thing in a tight package. The headphones also support Bluetooth and will automatically swap to wired mode when you insert the headphone cable. The WH-1000XM3s support full noise cancellation that turns even the noisiest situation into a blissful escape. An ambient audio feature lets you listen to external sounds at the touch of a button and there is even a “Quick Attention” feature that turns the headphones down instantly when you need to speak to someone. Sony touts 30 hours battery life on one charge, a claim that I won’t refute as I haven’t recharged these things after multiple flights and they’re still going strong.

In short, these things are great.

Sony likes to brand all of its features and these headphones are no exception. The cans contain a “HD Noise-Canceling Processor QN1″ that run two 1.57 ” drivers that can handle up to 40 kHz. Something called a SENSE ENGINE notices what you are doing – walking, sitting, talking – and automatically changes the audio and noise reduction. Finally, the headphones offer multiple styles including stages, clubs, and outdoor stages. I doubt many will use or notice these features but they’re nice to have.

How do they sound? First, understand that these are not audiophile headphones. You get nice separation, great sound stage, and high quality audio out of these things but mostly you’ll be listening wirelessly to music on your phone or listening to awful audio being blasted out of your seatback entertainment system. Put garbage in, as they say, and you get garbage out. That said, I found these headphones superior to nearly every other model I’ve tested recently, including my Bose QuietComfort 35 IIs. The Sony models were bright and crisp and sounded great with noise canceling on or off. I also tested the headphones in loud environments including cafes and at home with lots of ambient audio playing. The ambient audio immediately disappeared when I turned on noise canceling, leaving only great sound.

They charge via USB and easily pair with any Bluetooth device instantly.

Now for some quibbles. The WH-1000XM3 has no physical power switch, a feature that lets you ensure your headphones are completely off. This single feature could mean the difference between a good flight and a bad flight. Further, the power button is right next to and the same size as the noise cancelation button. This makes it hard to tap this button if you’re wearing the headphones.

Thankfully, the headphones work when turned off, a feature that many lower-end noise canceling models lack. This means you can still listen to headphones if the battery is dead. I also noticed a bit of a bass heaviness in the WH-1000XM3s, but that could be a relic of using the fairly flat Bose headphones for so long.

The headphones also have some fairly cryptic touch features on the right cup including a call and music pause feature that works when you tap the sensitive surface. You can swipe through songs and turn the audio up and down and change the soundstage with a little button next to the power button.

Sony produces excellent audio products and these are no exception. I fly nearly every week these days and find myself reaching for these headphones over anything else I have in my extensive test collection. Time will tell if these cans survive the rigors of travel but given the price and the build quality I wouldn’t be surprised if these headphones are nestled in my backpack for years to come. Now I just have to break up with my Bose and I just know there will be drama.

Chris Hays and Mark Jeffrey wanted to create a way for everyone to be able to tell their loved ones if they were in trouble. Their first product, Guardian Circle, did just that, netting a mention a few years ago. Now the same team is truly decentralizing alerts with a new token called, obviously, Guardium.

The plan is to create an ad hoc network of helpers and first responders. “Guardium and Guardian Circle together open the emergency response grid to vetted citizens, private response and compatible devices for the very first time,” write the founders. “Providing an economic framework on our global distributed emergency response network; Guardium brings first responders to the 4 billion people on the planet without government-sponsored emergency response.”

Because the product already works, the team is taking on the token sale as a new challenge.

“We’re serial entrepreneurs — both of us have been venture-backed in the past by names like SoftBank and Intel, and we’ve been senior execs in companies backed by Sequoia and Elon Musk. Transitioning to the token sale-backed universe has been an interesting study in contrasts,” said Hays. “There are a number of ‘panic button apps’ — but without exception, all of them have forgotten ‘the second half of the problem’ — organizing the response. Getting people who do not know one another into instant communication and location sharing during an emergency — the importance of that cannot be overstated.”

The founders found that their idea wasn’t fundable in the valley. After all, what VC wants to help people when they can invest in Snapchat? Instead, Hays and Jeffrey are aiming bigger.

“We’re rebooting the world’s safety grid,” said Hays. “We’re creating a new global public utility. And we want it to service everyone, everywhere on earth. Although it is a very big vision, and it is a capitalist, multibillion dollar ecosystem that we’re chasing — it’s still a very different vision, and not the one venture capitalists are looking for.”

The token works to create a flash mob of help. Guard tokens pay first responders and dispatchers and “cities, campuses, and resorts stake $GUARD to access Alerts created within their geofenced borders,” allowing local folks to help immediately. They’ve sold half of their hard cap of $10 million thus far.

While tokens are always an iffy investment, this team has produced product and, more important, it’s clear they’ll never raise venture. A token, no matter how it’s used in the future, seems like a solid solution.

Chris Hays and Mark Jeffrey wanted to create a way for everyone to be able to tell their loved ones if they were in trouble. Their first product, Guardian Circle, did just that, netting a mention a few years ago. Now the same team is truly decentralizing alerts with a new token called, obviously, Guardium.

The plan is to create an ad hoc network of helpers and first responders. “Guardium and Guardian Circle together open the emergency response grid to vetted citizens, private response and compatible devices for the very first time,” write the founders. “Providing an economic framework on our global distributed emergency response network; Guardium brings first responders to the 4 billion people on the planet without government-sponsored emergency response.”

Because the product already works, the team is taking on the token sale as a new challenge.

“We’re serial entrepreneurs — both of us have been venture-backed in the past by names like SoftBank and Intel, and we’ve been senior execs in companies backed by Sequoia and Elon Musk. Transitioning to the token sale-backed universe has been an interesting study in contrasts,” said Hays. “There are a number of ‘panic button apps’ — but without exception, all of them have forgotten ‘the second half of the problem’ — organizing the response. Getting people who do not know one another into instant communication and location sharing during an emergency — the importance of that cannot be overstated.”

The founders found that their idea wasn’t fundable in the valley. After all, what VC wants to help people when they can invest in Snapchat? Instead, Hays and Jeffrey are aiming bigger.

“We’re rebooting the world’s safety grid,” said Hays. “We’re creating a new global public utility. And we want it to service everyone, everywhere on earth. Although it is a very big vision, and it is a capitalist, multibillion dollar ecosystem that we’re chasing — it’s still a very different vision, and not the one venture capitalists are looking for.”

The token works to create a flash mob of help. Guard tokens pay first responders and dispatchers and “cities, campuses, and resorts stake $GUARD to access Alerts created within their geofenced borders,” allowing local folks to help immediately. They’ve sold half of their hard cap of $10 million thus far.

While tokens are always an iffy investment, this team has produced product and, more important, it’s clear they’ll never raise venture. A token, no matter how it’s used in the future, seems like a solid solution.

Tiny houses are all the rage but once you put more than a few people in one you have a problem: Where can you go from there?

Nowhere. Exactly.

What you do is, if you need that extra push over the cliff, you know what you do? Talk to Brian Gaudio. Gaudio is the founder of Module Housing, an incremental building startup from Pittsburgh. Gaudio, formerly of Walt Disney Imagineering, has an architecture background and saw firsthand the need for incremental housing in his work in Biloxi and Latin America. His idea is simple: create a little house that grows with you over time, allowing a single room to turn into a mansion with a few turns of a wrench.

“We think of the home as a recurring revenue stream – buy a starter home today, purchase additions and upgrades in the future. All our homes are designed to change over time – as a homebuyers family grows, income grows, or needs change,” he said. “We are capital light compared to other prefab startups in that we don’t own the manufacturing facilities where our homes are built. We leverage existing network of high-performance prefab manufacturers on the east coast.”

The service does it all: they offer multiple room dwellings and work with you to order the modules, find land that lets you add on over time, and assemble the houses. Like the Craftsman houses of old, you have a few basic styles but in this case you can buy a one bedroom Nook house for $212,000 and then add on over time instead of buying a house with seven rooms and realizing you only needed two.

Additional costs include building a foundation and land preparation. It’s also dead easy to add onto your house when your ready, said Gaudio, thanks to work they’ve done in modularizing the houses.

“We have patents pending on a removable roof and wall system that simplifies the addition process when a customer is ready to add-on,” he said.

The company raised $1.2 million so far and they have prototype houses in Pittsburgh. They already have orders and they’ve created a Tesla-like reservation system for the folks who want to try out their product.

“I moved back to Pittsburgh to start Module with the goal of making good design accessible to everyone,” he said. “Affordable housing is one of the most critical issues our country faces today. Module is a vehicle to promote responsible, equitable development in cities. We are reimagining housing to be more sustainable, adaptable, and better designed.”

Watchmaker Jaquet Droz makes luxury watches that cost more than some San Francisco apartments. Now, however, they’ve decided to go “downmarket” with their Sports Watch chronograph, a handmade watch that is designed for both work and play.

The watch is a standard chronograph with big date, a complication that displays the date as two digits instead of on a rotating dial. The resulting piece looks like a haute couture Speedmaster and should cost around $15,000, an acceptable sum for a manufacture watch with Droz’s provenance given that other Droz watches can run into the $100,000s, a price that might be less appetizing to the illiquid entrepreneur.

More from the release:

True to watchmaking tradition, the hour markers are 18-carat white gold appliques. Wide Roman numerals indicate 3, 6, 9 and 12 o’clock. At 12 o’clock, Jaquet Droz features a big date, a complication traditional in fine watchmaking but rarely associated with a chronograph. Although more complex to produce than a simple date aperture, the large date offers superior readability. Again, to provide optimal readability, the latest versions of the SW Chrono feature a 45 mm dial, and a rail track over the motion work in fine watchmaking tradition.

The strap is made of “rolled-edge hand-made dark-blue fabric,” a unique addition to the luxury watch world that has thus far used rubber or metal for bands. It is water resistant to 50 meters, if you think you’re going to get wet with this thing on your wrist, and it should be on sale before the end of the year.

Watchmaker Jaquet Droz makes luxury watches that cost more than some San Francisco apartments. Now, however, they’ve decided to go “downmarket” with their Sports Watch chronograph, a handmade watch that is designed for both work and play.

The watch is a standard chronograph with big date, a complication that displays the date as two digits instead of on a rotating dial. The resulting piece looks like a haute couture Speedmaster and should cost around $15,000, an acceptable sum for a manufacture watch with Droz’s provenance given that other Droz watches can run into the $100,000s, a price that might be less appetizing to the illiquid entrepreneur.

More from the release:

True to watchmaking tradition, the hour markers are 18-carat white gold appliques. Wide Roman numerals indicate 3, 6, 9 and 12 o’clock. At 12 o’clock, Jaquet Droz features a big date, a complication traditional in fine watchmaking but rarely associated with a chronograph. Although more complex to produce than a simple date aperture, the large date offers superior readability. Again, to provide optimal readability, the latest versions of the SW Chrono feature a 45 mm dial, and a rail track over the motion work in fine watchmaking tradition.

The strap is made of “rolled-edge hand-made dark-blue fabric,” a unique addition to the luxury watch world that has thus far used rubber or metal for bands. It is water resistant to 50 meters, if you think you’re going to get wet with this thing on your wrist, and it should be on sale before the end of the year.

Like a kid shooting spitballs, designer Beer Holthuis has figured out that sopping wet paper is the best material for making mischief. His 3D printer, a primitive RepRap clone that literally squirts out huge lines of paper pulp, is designed to allow artists and designers to create more sustainable 3D objects.

According to 3DPrint.com, Holthuis was searching for material that wouldn’t create waste or increase plastic pollution. He settled on ground up paper. By extruding the wet paper he is able to create a thick bead of pulp that he can then build up to create decorative objects.

“The design of the printed objects are using the possibilities and beauty of this technique,” said Holthuis. “The tactile experience, bold lines and print speed results in distinctive shapes. The objects are also durable: Printed paper is surprisingly strong.”

The interesting thing is that he uses natural binder to stick the layers together, ensuring that the entire system is recyclable. You could even feed paper into the machine and let it product the pulp automatically, thereby creating a self-feeding recycling system. Best of all, however, the objects look like something a super intelligent wasp colony would produce to trade with other cultures. Fascinating stuff.

Vitaly Bahachuk wants you to share your crypto. His company lets you lend cryptocurrency peer-to-peer via smart contract, ensuring you can send your buds some red hot Ether and, in theory, they have to pay you back. Further, it allows for some other clever tricks to be played with ERC20 tokens including performing some of the techniques used by equity traders.

Co-founded by Alex Bazhanau and Bahachuk, Bloqboard is live now and the lending system is powered by decentralized lending protocols. They’ve recently raised $1.2 million from Polychain Capital to set up shop after a summer of building use cases for the lending space.

“Bloqboard has quietly launched last month in beta testing to a limited number of users with limited functionality. Approximately $150,000 in loans have been borrowed via Bloqboard. Bloqboard has not undertaken any marketing activities yet and continues its beta testing,” said Bahachuk.

The real goal is short selling, allowing users to borrow tokens, sell high, and then repurchase them when the price falls. Only three exchanges allow this functionality right now.

“Coinbase provided reliable access to trade cryptocurrency and created a brand,” said Bahachuk. “We aim to create a brand in all things token lending. With much talk about tokenization of real assets, we believe that some real world assets will become tokenized. Tokenized assets work well as a stable collateral, so businesses and institutions can borrow stable coins against such assets.”

The app is out of beta and ready for business. Now all you have to do is buy some sweet tokens.

Students at Oregon State University dressed up their bipedal robot, Cassie, in a delightful AT-ST costume. This robot, which everyone said looked like one of the Empire’s two-legged walkers, anyway, can now zap both Rebels and Ewoks in a deadly battle to take control of the forest city of Corvallis.

The robot, as you can see, can change its center of gravity for better stability and, because it doesn’t have a torso or arms, can balance in multiple difficult environments. It can also now fire lasers at primitive man-bears stuck in the Stone Age.

The Dynamic Robotics Lab at Oregon State University built the original robot and now Agility Robotics is mass-producing the bipedal machines, presumably for for Grand Moff Tarkin. You can see Cassie without her costume here, but I think the Star Wars version is far superior.

Picture it: you have the perfect song for Kelly Clarkson. It’s a mix of genres and styles best described as “Since U Been Gone” meets “911 Is A Joke.” How do you get it in front of Kelly so she can add it to her next album (imagine her singing “My heart is on fire when you’re not there/But the Austin fire department doesn’t care”)? You talk to MyPart.

MyPart lets aspiring creators and musicians submit stuff to their favorite artists. A vetting system separates the hits from the chaff and, by ensuring the artist doesn’t see unsolicited content, reduces lawsuits. MyPart, founded in 2016, has added a number of interesting features to its platform thanks to AI and machine learning.

“MyPart has recently finalized our seed round with $1M, and were named a MassChallenge 2018 top 10 startup award finalist,” said co-founder Matan Kollnescher. “This followed a $150k pre-seed round that enabled us to achieve an MVP, strategic industry partnerships and legal validation.”

Kollnescher was a former member of the Israeli Intelligence Corps and the other co-founder, Ariel Toli Gadilov, spent time inside Intel as a finance and legal advisor. Both are skilled musicians. They’ve also hired Evan Bogart, writer of Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Rihanna’s “SOS.”

The team soft-launched and have 2,030 users and hundreds of uploads. The platform is designed to ensure that good music floats to the top and not so good music doesn’t create false positives. In fact, say the founders, MyPart can even “read” a piece of music to see if it is stylistically relevant.

“Crowdsourcing art by conducting competitions is a problematic approach due to the multiple losers (since everyone are competing over the same project) and the need for active involvement and initiative defining exact projects,” said Kollnescher. “The publishing industry barely utilizes technology at all and most conservative competitors don’t have not will be able to easily develop differentiating technology to solve quality, quantity, and relevance issues – thus continuing to have immense scaling issues.”

The platform lets good musicians get discovered, a product that could truly be useful in today’s saturated media market.

“MyPart’s A.I. approach to the industry is the first of its kind; our platform sifts through thousands of data points and looks into the ‘soul’ of a song to then sort by relevance to the famous performing artist of our user’s choice,” he said. Luckily, Kelly Clarkson loves songs about reducing state budgets due to the inability of the Austin Police Department to get these squirrels out of my back yard.

The Zortrax Apoller, a Smart Vapor Smoothing device that uses solvents to smooth the surface of 3D-printed objects. The resulting products look like they are injection molded and all of the little lines associated with FDM printing will disappear.

The system uses a microwave-like chamber that can hold multiple parts at once. The chamber atomizes the solvent, covering the parts, and lets the solvent do its work. Once its done it then sucks the excess vapor back into a collection chamber. The system won’t open until all of the solvent is gone, ensuring you don’t get a face full of acetone. This is an important consideration since this is sold as a desktop device and having clouds of solvent in the air at the office Christmas party could be messy.

“Vapor-smoothed models get the look of injection-molded parts with a glossy or matte finish depending on the filament used. With a dual condensation process, a 300ml bottle of solvent can be used for smoothing multiple prints instead of just one. This efficiency means that the combined weekly output of four typical FDM 3D printers can be automatically smoothed within one day without loss of quality,” the company wrote.

Given the often flimsy structural quality of FDM prints, this smoothing is more cosmetic and allows you, in theory, to create molds from 3D printed parts. In reality these glossy, acetone smoothed parts just look better and give you a better idea what the finished product – injection-molded or milled – will look like when all is said and done.