An array of products — from mattresses and sensors to sleep trackers and apps — are catching consumers’ attention. But privacy experts are concerned about what becomes of all the personal information these products collect. Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, said it collects more than 8 billion biometric data points every night, gathered each second and sent via an app through the internet to the company’s servers. more »

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter’s suit alleges Johnson & Johnson, the nation’s largest drugmaker, helped ignite a public health crisis that has killed thousands of state residents. With just two days to go before the trial, one of the remaining defendants, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries of Jerusalem, announced an $85 million settlement with the state on Sunday. The money will be used for litigation costs and an undisclosed amount will be allocated “to abate the opioid crisis in Oklahoma,” according to Hunter’s office. In its own statement, Teva said the settlement does not establish any wrongdoing on the part of the company, adding Teva “has not contributed to the abuse of opioids in Oklahoma in any way.” This leaves Johnson & Johnson as the sole defendant. more »

James Tissot (1836–1902) was one of the most celebrated French artists during the 19th century, yet he is less known than many of his contemporaries today. Presenting new scholarship on the artist’s oeuvre, technique, and remarkable life, James Tissot: Fashion & Faith provides a critical reassessment of Tissot through a 21st-century lens. The exhibition will include approximately 60 paintings in addition to drawings, prints, photographs, and cloisonné enamels, demonstrating the breadth of the artist’s skills and the first major international exhibition on Tissot in two decades and the first ever on the West Coast of the United States. more »

"Every type of stitch has a different elasticity, and if we figure out everything possible then we could create things that are rigid in a certain place using a certain type of stitch, and use a different type of stitch in another place to get different functionality" said Elisabetta Matsumoto." Knitting is a periodic structure of slip knots. Textiles with intricate patterns are knit by combining slipknots in specific combinations. Members of the Matsumoto group are beginning to delve through the complex math which encodes mechanical properties within the interlocking series of slip knots of a material. more »