Paralyzed patients control computers to text, email and shop 🧠
We hope you and your teams are keeping warm, and doing well! And for our mates celebrating it, Happy Lunar New Year 🧧
Here’s what we’ve put together for your weekly Spark News:
Time to vote for the Golden Kitty Awards 🏆
Trust your team’s code and documentation with Swimm 👩💻
Paralyzed patients control computers to text, email and shop 🧠
Plastics that dissolve into sugar 🤯
Aaand Jacobs touches down in Paris 🇫🇷
💙 NEWS FROM OUR MATESTime to vote for the Golden Kitty Awards 🏆
The Golden Kitty Awards are back - and your fellow entrepreneurs need your help to get votes on products they’ve been working hard for 🦾
With hundreds built every single day, the Golden Kitty Awards is a contest by Product Hunt to find people’s favorite products across 24 categories, from SaaS, FinTech, Remote Work to Best Designed and Most Viral.
So if you’ve got time, check all the products out and vote for ones that bring real value to their users - those that deserve a spotlight in front of Product Hunt’s huge audience (and the golden kitty trophy)! You’ll have until Friday, 20th Jan.
PS: We’re surely supporting our mates in their categories, such as Folk (BEST CRM we’ve come across) and Typedream (easiest, most accessible web builder)
🤸♀️ FUN PRODUCT WE LOVETrust your team’s code and documentation with Swimm 👩💻
How do you and your teams keep track of your coding documentations? Or do you keep track at all?
Swimm is an internal documentation tool built by developers, for developers - because we all know it: it can be hard to understand another person’s code, ensure it’s up-to-date, can be found easily to be edited or used as a template.
So Swimm is here to help - to become your knowledge management tool for developers ⌨️⌨️⌨️
Features:
Powerful code-coupled editor
Use Swimm's slash editor commands to create and edit your docs quickly. Interact directly with the code and collaborate with your team in real-time.
Awesome editor features
Markdown and version control
Live code snippets from all your repos
Auto-updating Smart Tokens for classes
Auto-updating Smart Paths for files and folders
Mermaid syntax for diagrams and charts
Auto-sync & Git checks
Swimm automatically verifies that all docs are synced with your code on every PR. Swimm triggers automated updates for simple code changes and notifies you that docs are out of date when the changes are substantial.Auto-sync key features
In-IDE verification
GitHub App
CI integrations
Local Git hooks
IDE integration
Find code documentation exactly when you need it - right inside your IDE with our pluginsJetBrains IDE plugin
VS Code IDE plugin
Browse all docs in repo
Easy to create
Bring code into your documentation with content components (think: tokens, files/folder paths, code snippets) that interact directly with code and are automatically synchronized as changes are made.
Who it’s for: Developers
Price: FREE ⭐️ Until you need more than 5 users and 30 verification tests. Pricing starts at US$8 per month / user.
💭 TECH FOOD FOR THOUGHTParalyzed patients control computers to text, email and shop 🧠
In the first week of 2022, we covered a stentrode by Synchron that allowed a paralyzed patient to send a tweet out using only his mind. Now a year later, the same company has found ways to prove its safety, and allow 4 patients to do even more: to control a computer!
The clinical study was called Stentrode With Thought-Controlled Digital Switch (SWITCH), with the main aim of highlighting the long-term safety and effectiveness of the implanted brain-computer interface. After 12 months of trials, the results concluded that it is possible and safe to use from inside a blood vessel over a long period of time, without any serious side effects.
During this, the 4 paralyzed patients could control a personal computer and perform daily activities, including texting, emailing, personal finance, shopping and other forms of communication!
No clots surfaced from the stentrode, no migration from original positioning, and kept stable signals that showed no deterioration 🎉
🌱 TECH FOR SUSTAINABILITYPlastics that dissolve into sugar 🤯
For the very same reason why plastics are so useful as a material, is the same reason why they are so dangerous to the environment - their durability. Plastic items can take from 10, to 100s of years to decompose. But now - what if they could just dissolve into sugar? 🤯
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) developed a plant-based plastic alternative that does exactly that. They’ve made it from non-edible plant materials and could compare performance with polyethylene terephthalate (PET)(What’s used for most water bottles). They’re already using it to make films for packaging, textile fibers, 3D printing filaments, and much more!
“By using a different aldehyde — glyoxylic acid instead of formaldehyde — we could simply clip ‘sticky’ groups onto both sides of the sugar molecules, which then allows them to act as plastic building blocks,”
💥 WHAT’S ON @ SPARKMATEAaand Jacobs touches down in Paris 🇫🇷
Maybe you’ve heard of “Emily in Paris” on Netflix - but this is waaaay more exciting 😏 Jacob in Paris (😂)
When Jacob applied to be a Sparkmate, Morgan asked him:
"So which hub do you want to join?"
Jacob said:
“Paris”
And as simple as that, there he goes.
He left New Zealand, took a pitstop in Hong Kong, and have started in our Paris hub this week - already tinkering away with the rest of the tribe 🦾
We’ll always look to bring the best opportunities for engineers who want to build exciting, fulfilling lives - doing what they love with entrepreneurs who want to create solutions for the world.
So if you know any TOP-GUN engineers who would love to work with us, let them know we have positions open:
…or give us a spontaneous application!
Exciting things are happening every day ⚡️ Follow us on social media to stay tuned!