life

The Sleep Doctor Michael Breus is back in the studio to solve all our snooze-related questions, and he also brings us a new toy! He's showing off the Renew SleepClock by Gear4, a sleep management tool that knows when you're sleeping and takes careful measurements to record your sleep patterns.

It also works as a tailored alarm clock that wakes you up at the lightest moment in your sleep cycle, so you'll arise super refreshed. Dr. Breus also gave us one to give away on a future show, so be sure to tune in to find out how to win.

As usual, the Doctor also answers questions from our listeners. Today he'll respond to inquiries about the correlation between memory and sleep, and whether or not we can learn things like languages and facts just by sleeping.… Read more

The work-life balance often seems like a seesaw, with a grossly overfed boss sitting at one end.

There seems little respect either for personal time or even vacation time, because your time isn't your time. It's time you sold to the highest bidder.

So much so that the majority of U.S. employees expect to have to work on vacation. Well, it is paid vacation, isn't it?

I am privileged to have been passed a survey commissioned by TeamViewer. This is a company that is officially responsible for remote access software, but is uncommonly dedicated to commissioning Harris Interactive … Read more

On paper, a smartphone will beat a regular phone in every single area except for one -- battery life. At least there are a few things you can do to improve your Samsung Galaxy S3's staying power and extend your fun time with your cherished new mobile.

That big, bright, show-off screen and beefy processor will have your brawny gadget wheezing like a weightlifter running the steeplechase in no time. If you play games, stream videos, or fiddle with apps on your daily commute, don't be surprised to soon witness the dispiriting sight of the battery indicator flashing … Read more

Tired of the same old battery life drain game? A team of engineers from UC Berkeley's Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory has developed an app called Carat that "provides a great deal of information about how energy is being used on your phone," according to the official description.

So how does Carat work? The app runs in the background and monitors the energy consumption of various apps and processes on your smartphone, then sends that information to a data analytics Spark application running on Amazon Web Services. Usual suspects include data-hungry apps, an outdated operating system, Wi-Fi, and GPS. … Read more

We seem to be approaching critical mass for new ultrabooks this week. Acer, Lenovo, and Sony all announced new thin laptops yesterday. Now Fujitsu enters the fray with the LifeBook U772 and the LifeBook UH572.

The U772 is the star of Fujitsu's lineup. Starting at $1,149, the U772 has a 14-inch, 1,280x768-pixel screen with edge-to-edge glass, and comes with Intel's new third-generation Core i5 or Core i7 chip, depending on the configuration. For its measurements, Fujitsu says the U772 is .69 inch thick, weighs 3.15 pounds, and offers seven hours of battery life.… Read more

That seemingly ordinary iPad 2 that Apple is selling for $399 has actually been modified internally in ways that, in some cases, can yield better battery life, according to a report.

Along with the new third-generation iPad, Apple in March began selling a lower-priced, $399 iPad 2.

Among those iPad 3 models is a variant, the "iPad 2,4," that sports a more advanced 32-nanometer version of the dual-core Apple A5 series chip, according to chip review site Anandtech. (The older iPad 2 uses an A5 based on a lagging-edge 45-nanometer manufacturing process.)

And an A5 built on … Read more

NEW YORK -- The next stop on Mike Daisey's career path was supposed to be obscurity.

Instead, the monologist and Apple critic has never been hotter.

Daisey is the monologist who wrote and stars in the one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." In January, he went on "This American Life" radio show and told a compelling story about how he saw great suffering among the workers who assemble iPads and iPhones in China. Unfortunately, many of the most compelling details of his story were embellished or flat-out fictional.

Critics predicted that … Read more

Facebook decided to use its multi-million-member network to make it easier for people to become organ donors and it seems that so far, it's working.

Since Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg made the announcement early today that users can add if they are organ donors to their timelines, the Donate Life California registry has had an 800 percent increase in its organ donor registrations.

"As of 12:30pm today, the Donate Life California registry has increased its online donor sign ups by nearly 800 percent from yesterday thanks to this mornings announcement of the partnership … Read more

GarageBand got a few tweaks, but they are mostly limited to fixing stability issues. Apple says a bug that formerly would crash the app when uploading songs to iCloud, and another that caused an error when logging into SoundCloud with a Facebook account, have been fixed.

iPhoto received mostly bug fixes and enhancements to streamline use as well, but did get a minor interface tweak that will be useful. Now when you publish a journal to iCloud, a new button lets you copy the link to clipboard -- useful for sharing freshly made journals with friends right away.

iMovie received … Read more