Photo: metamorworks (Shutterstock)

Would you try a pair of headphones that rests on your cheekbones and sends audio through your bones to your ears? It does this through a technology called “bone conduction,” which is most commonly used in consumer headphones. These products are not too expensive and can be a good alternative for people who don’t enjoy headphones or want to try something different. What to Consider Before Buying a Pair for Yourself

What is bone conduction?

When you hear something, you usually hear it because sound waves traveled through the air and reached your ear. However, sound can travel through liquids and solids too – in fact, sound travels the fastest through solids. If you put your ear on a track, you would hear an oncoming train much sooner than if you were just standing near the track (however, we don’t recommend testing this yourself).

Our bones are also solid so they can act as conductors of sound vibrations for our ears. Have you ever wondered why your voice sounds different to your own ears when you speak than when you hear a recording of your voice? This is because you can hear part of your own voice transmitted through your bones – which, of course, is not audible to anyone.

How do bone conduction headphones work?

Bone conduction headphones bypass the outer part of the ear entirely – usually they’re placed on the cheekbones to send audio vibrations to the inner ear. That is, if you have normal hearing, you can hear surrounding sounds clearly while using bone conduction headphones to continue listening to music, podcasts, or other audio files. This is especially useful in situations where you need to hear other sounds around you, such as when walking or running outdoors. Bone conduction technology is also helpful for some people with hearing impairment – the technology is used in certain types of hearing aids.

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Bone conduction critics point out that due to their design, these headphones do not “seal” your ears like conventional headphones, so the sound quality itself is not as good. And because these headphones are placed on your cheekbones, you may find it uncomfortable or inconvenient to use them during intense physical activity.

These types of headphones, such as open-back headphones, also tend to lose sound so that people around you can hear some of what you are hearing. This is something to consider when tempted to use them in quiet, enclosed spaces like a library or an airplane.

Another challenge you can experience with bone conduction headphones is the vibration itself – since these products send sound through your bones, you will feel the vibrations in your skull all the time. How annoying these vibrations feel varies from person to person.

Should I buy bone conduction headphones?

The answer to this question is subjective and depends on your headphone usage, your needs, and your desire to try different technologies. For most people, they’re not a necessity – but they can be beneficial in some situations, including swimmers using the waterproof version, people with hearing impairments, and those who cannot wear normal headphones due to skin irritation or who have dizziness.

Generally a set of bone conduction headphones will be used reset between $ 50 and $ 200, and some brands such as Aftershocks, specializing in bone conduction headphones.

If the vibrations are not for you, something like that Bose Sport Open Earphones could be an alternative – they offer some of the benefits of bone conduction (they sit lightly on your ear and don’t block your ear canal), minus the vibration.

Lifting a huge barbell explosively above your head requires strength, technique and a certain fearlessness. I trained this sport – Olympic style Weightlifting– for about two years, and it seems like I find something new about it every day. I recently had the chance to ask two members of the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team, Jourdan Delacruz and CJ Cummings, how they train, how to stay motivated, and what it’s like to step on the platform under so much pressure.

Your answers were illuminating for me, partly for what they do differently from me and from each other, but also for the same thing. Both of them told me, for example, that beginners need to be patient and remember that they’re going to be around in the long run – something my coach has told me a million times.

This is a sport where you only do two exercises: the snatch, which brings a barbell up off the floor in one quick motion, and the clean and jerk, which does it in two steps. The moves are tricky and you need to do them consistently enough to become second nature. Pulling a little too hard or keeping your balance a little too far forward or backward can mean the difference between a miss and a make, a win and a loss.

So you spend hours working out every week, and it all boils down to six minutes on a big day.

How do you stay motivated to exercise every day?

My trainer programs me three to five days of weightlifting every week. I usually fill in my remaining time with other exercises and training for other sports, but that’s because otherwise I get bored and enjoy lifting. I find staying physically busy works wonders for my mental health. But it would probably be different for me if lifting was my job, so I asked these two Olympians how they stay motivated to exercise every day.

“You know, there are days when it gets tough, but you just have to keep remembering your goal and why you’re doing it,” says CJ, also mentioning that often people don’t know how much fun Olympic lifting can be. “I love doing what I do.”

Jourdan also connects her everyday training with her goals. “I have my big goals and then I have my very small goals,” she says; As a recent example of the latter, she cites that in the chaos of 2020, she’s getting heavier on squats and focusing on the mental health loop.)

But what makes both of them show up every day is simply the fact that they do. “Because weightlifting is part of my life right now, it’s become a routine,” says Jourdan. “For example, it’s weird not to train on a Monday or not to train on a Tuesday.”

How do you prepare to be your best on a particular day?

Climaxing for a major competition is another complex skill. You want to be physically strong, but not exercise so much that you get tired. You also want to be mentally sharp and focused, but not nervous.

“I tell myself, okay, it’s like going to the gym,” says CJ. He remembers having done these exercises thousands of times and trying to focus on the familiarity of the exercises rather than the pressure.

Jourdan describes a process of consciously narrowing your focus. “After about four or five weeks, I try to make my routine very simple. I tune in to my diet, my mental abilities and recovery – basically all aspects of the training itself. I try to make this very routine. ”On the day of the competition:“ I put it down. And then I concentrate exactly on what I’m doing on the platform. “

What do you think about when you step onto the platform?

And then the day comes. We spoke before the Olympics (Jourdan has already started this week; CJ’s train is yet to come). This is how the two jacks describe how they approach the bar.

“I work really hard to have a very simple mindset, ”says Jourdan. She tries not to focus on the importance of the competition, just to focus on “a keyword or two” to think about while lifting. “My favorite keyword, and one that I’ve been holding onto for a few years now, is to feel the ground with my full foot,” she says. (“I don’t know if that makes sense?” She asks, but I assure her it is – it’s a catchphrase I use too. If you’re not a weightlifter, it helps you keep your balance , so “In the end, the pole is directly above you and not in front of or behind you.)

CJ admits getting nervous on a big day, especially before his kick-off, the first lift of the competition. (We all do.) He seeks distraction to control his nerves. “I don’t even think about the elevator,” he says until he’s on the platform. “I don’t think about anything but the elevator. So I could be thinking about what I’m going to do after the competition, I could be thinking about what I’m going to eat tonight, or if I have to do something else later in the week because I don’t want to start thinking about the lift because when If I think about it too much, it will just rack my head. ”His favorite sign is simply“ pull, jump and crouch, ”a phrase he kept hearing from his trainer. “But I don’t really think about it until the last second before I start.”

Was it scary or intimidating the first time you lifted something heavy?

Let’s talk for a second about the fact that people who compete in this sport stretch a bar from the floor to overhead, a bar that can weigh more than twice its weight. (My own clean and jerk is only slightly above my body weight; CJs and Jourdans are both more than double that.) It takes a certain fearlessness to approach a heavy bar that you basically throw up and then yours Using inertia to pull one’s body down while the thing is momentarily weightless. The whole concept is almost unbelievable. I was curious about these athletes’ attitudes towards what they do.

“That’s the crazy thing,” says CJ, who started when he was 11. “I never found it intimidating. The first time I walked into the gym, I saw these guys lifting massive weights and I thought, Whoa. I would like to do that, for example. So I just thought, how can I do this? And that’s where we started training. ”

Jourdan admits feeling the fear and doing it anyway. “Oh, it’s super intimidating,” she says. “I mean, even now I still get nervous when it comes to really big elevators. But when I first started, I was very fortunate to be surrounded by already pretty strong women at the gym, so I could see other women and girls lifting heavier weights than me and feeling a little more confident [myself.]”

Backing up your PC, smartphone, and other devices ensures that you can restore your data in the event of a crash, sudden power outage, or total hardware failure – but not many people think about doing the same for their game consoles. Fortunately, the PlayStation 5 makes it easy to back up your files to an external USB device, and PlayStation Plus subscribers can safely copy their saved game data to the cloud.

Note that backing up your data this way is different from adding an external drive to your PS5’s storage. While technically producing similar results, the backup and restore features are helpful for unloading data that you don’t need on your PS5 right away and for recovering it in the event of a crash or data corruption.

On the other hand, adding more storage to your PS5 allows you to install (and in some cases play) games from the hard drive itself, but that requires certain types of hard drives and USB cables. We’ll cover how to expand the available storage on your PS5 in a separate post, but for now we’ll cover how to back up your PS5 data.

Back up and restore PS5 data with an external USB hard drive

The PS5’s backup and restore feature works with a wide variety of USB storage devices, but you should make sure you have enough free space on your external drive before starting the backup process.

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1. Go to Settings> System> Backup and Restore.
2. To choose “Back up your PS5.”
3. Connect your hard drive to the PS5 with a USB cable.
4. Select which data should be backed up. The bar at the bottom right shows how much space the selected data is taking up on the external drive.
5. To choose “Next,” then “To back up” to start the process and wait for the data to be copied. To avoid data corruption, do not move, disconnect, or turn off your PS5 or USB drive while the transfer is active.

After backing up your data, you can now disconnect the USB device. It will be safely saved in case you need to recover data from the USB drive. To do a backup if necessary:

1. Connect the USB backup drive to your PS5 and turn on the console.
2. Go to on the PS5 home screen Settings> System> Backup and Restore.
3. To choose “Restore your PS5.”
4. Select the data you want to copy from the drive to your PS5, then follow the on-screen instructions to begin the transfer.
5. Wait for the files to be copied. Again, do not disconnect or turn off your PS5 or USB drive while the transfer is active.

How to save data on PS5 in the cloud

While you can use the USB backups to create a physical restore point of all your PS5 data, PS Plus users can also back up their game saves to the cloud. This requires an active PS Plus subscription and enabling automatic updates on your PS5, but the console will automatically back up your game saves once the feature is activated. This is how it works:

1. Go to on your PS5 Settings> System> Power saving mode> Features available in sleep mode and activate “Stay connected to the internet.”
2. Next, navigate to Settings> Saved data and game / app settings.
3. To enable cloud save backups for PS5 games, select PS5 Games> Sync saved data and activate “Automatically synchronize saved data.”
4. To enable cloud save backups for PS4 games installed on your PS5, select “PS4 Games” then turn on “Auto Upload.”

As soon as the options are activated, the PS5 save data is automatically synchronized between the cloud and your console, so that you always have the latest save data available in both locations. However, PS4 data will need to be downloaded to your console manually from the game’s home page.

[Android Central]

Photo: aapsky (Shutterstock)

Plants are pretty wonderful and provide us with food, shade, and air to breathe, but they’re not magical. Yes, rainforests are vital for our ecosystem because they filter carbon from the air and create oxygen – but any notion that indoor plants can be used to filter toxins from the air in our homes is like this report in The Atlantic indicates this, Wish nonsense. That is why you should buy plants for decoration or advertising personal wellness-but not to serve as an air purifier.

Why houseplants can’t filter your air effectively

In nature, plants actually keep our ecosystem healthy by enriching the air with oxygen serve as a carbon sink, and even absorb some pollutants, but the effect isn’t exactly scaled down – according to the information page Science alertto effectively filter toxins from the air, you would need “between 10 and 1,000” [plants] for every square meter of your living space. ”Unless you live in a greenhouse, this isn’t exactly a realistic option.

This idea that plants filter and purify air in a confined space became popular in the 1980s as NASA scientists Bill Wolverton did a study on the ability of certain houseplants to take off Volatile organic compounds from the air in a closed environment. This discovery was made with astronauts living in sealed compartments in mind for extended periods of time, but is now common misused as evidence why you should buy more plants to distribute around your home As an engineering professor Dr. Michael Waring said The Atlantic, the results of the 1989 study do not apply to the average household:

“Wolverton measured whether houseplants could remove VOCs from an airtight laboratory environment. But a house is not a hermetic chamber. It has open windows and doors, drafts and leaks and a lot more clutter. ”

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If you’re stuck in an airtight chamber for hours as a scientist or astronaut, it might be a good idea to bring a plant or two with you. If you are concerned about fresh air in your home, open a window.

You should still keep plants around for many other reasons

Instead of buying certain plants in the mistaken hope that they will purify your air, buy them for the psychological and emotional benefits they offer. Accordingly Health line, living in a house full of plants can help reduce stress and increase productivity. The scent of plants like peppermint or lavender not only creates a more relaxed environment, plant care can also improve your mood. CNBC reported on one Learn japanese who found that full-time desk workers who took breaks to tend their plants had lower heart rates and anxiety.

Of course, there are some of the websites promoting plants’ abilities in helping us relieve stress including those who encourage the use of plants to improve air quality. And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with filling your home with greens and flowers, just remember: plants are great, but they’re not magic – so buy a pansy and an air purifier.