Facebook buys virtual reality headset start-up for $2bn

Facebook has announced it will buy Oculus VR, a Californian company which specialises in virtual reality products, for around $2bn (£1.2bn).

The start-up's flagship product, the Oculus Rift, is a goggle-like "immersive" headset for video gaming. It was developed with funds raised through crowdfunding site Kickstarter, and subsequent investment. Facebook's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, said Oculus' technologies could "change the way we work, play and communicate". The Oculus Rift has yet to be released, but more than 75,000 orders for development kits have already been placed, according to the social media giant.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Facebook said it plans to expand the use of Oculus technologies to include "communications, media and entertainment, education and other areas". Oculus' crowdfunding campaign raised $2.4m (£1.5m), 10 times the amount originally sought. It subsequently received a further $75m from investors.

The Rift headset was widely heralded at the CES technology show in Las Vegas in January, where Sony also announced a rival product. The deal includes $400m in cash and just over 23 million Facebook shares, valued at $1.6bn. Oculus employees will also receive an additional $300m if the company achieves certain targets.

Commenting on the deal, Mr Zuckerberg said: "Mobile is the platform of today, and now we're also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow." It is the latest purchase for Facebook, which last month spent $19bn on mobile messaging platform WhatsApp.

Air Pollution Linked to 1 in 8 Deaths Worldwide

Air pollution exposure contributes to one in eight deaths around the globe, according to estimates released Tuesday (March 25) by the World Health Organization.

More than doubling previous estimates of air pollution-related deaths, the new report says air pollution killed 7 million people in 2012, making it the No. 1 environmental health risk. Respiratory ailments have long been linked to air pollution, but dirty air also has more insidious effects on health.

WHO officials say they've found a stronger link between both indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure and cardiovascular diseases; stroke and ischaemic heart disease accounted for a combined 80 percent of outdoor air pollution-caused deaths in 2012. Air pollution isn't just a threat in major cities like Beijing, where thick layers of smog can sometimes be seen from space. Cooking over coal, wood and biomass stoves can create indoor air pollution, which was implicated in 4.3 million deaths in 2012, according to WHO data. This type of pollution disproportionately affects poor women and children.

"Poor women and children pay a heavy price from indoor air pollution since they spend more time at home breathing in smoke and soot from leaky coal and wood cook stoves," Dr. Flavia Bustreo, WHO assistant director-general for family, women and children’s health, said in a statement. The countries hit hardest by air pollution were low-income and middle-income nations in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific region. In those places, a total of 3.3 million deaths were linked to indoor air pollution and 2.6 million deaths were linked to outdoor air pollution, according to the WHO.

"The risks from air pollution are now far greater than previously thought or understood, particularly for heart disease and strokes," Dr. Maria Neira, director of WHO's department for public health, environmental and social determinants of health. "Few risks have a greater impact on global health today than air pollution; the evidence signals the need for concerted action to clean up the air we all breathe."

The report drew from 2012 WHO mortality data and new estimates of air pollution exposure levels based on satellite data and ground-level monitoring measurements.

Old at Heart? New Tool Calculates Heart's True Age

A new tool helps even young people to estimate their risk for heart disease later in life, by calculating their heart's true age.

People's familial and lifestyle risk factors today contribute to their heart health when they get older, and should be considered when estimating their heart disease risk, according to new recommendations by researchers from several British medical societies, published today (March 25) in the BMJ journal Heart.

Current prevention strategies for heart disease are based on short-term, 10-year risk estimates, which are heavily dependent on age and gender, researchers said. Therefore, younger people and women tend to be excluded even if they are leading a lifestyle that puts them at high risk later in life.

The new calculator has been designed to identify such people and predict how many years they can expect to live before they have a heart attack or stroke, based on the growing body of evidence showing that there is a long buildup to heart disease, said the researchers from the board of Joint British Societies’ consensus recommendations for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (JBS3).

The JBS3 calculator takes into account people's current lifestyle, blood pressure, cholesterol level and medical conditions that may affect their heart.

For example, a 35-year-old woman who smokes, has a systolic blood pressure of 160 mm Hg (higher than normal levels below 120 mm Hg), and a total cholesterol of 7 mmol/L (higher than the desirable level of below 5.2 mmol/L, or 200 mg/dL), plus family members who have had heart disease early in life, would have a true heart age of 47 and expect to survive to age 71 without having a heart attack or stroke. Her 10-year risk would be less than 2 percent.

But if this woman quit smoking, cut her total cholesterol to 4 mmol/L and her systolic blood pressure to 130 mm Hg, her heart age would fall to 30. She could expect to live to age 85 before having a heart attack or stroke and reduce her 10-year risk to less than 0.25 percent.

Similarly for other people, knowing the true age of their heart can help them understand how they fare today, and how lifestyle changes and other preventive actions may reduce their risk estimates for the future.

For the majority of people, the calculator can show the potential gains from an early and sustained change to a healthier lifestyle rather than prescription of drugs, the researchers said.

Lifestyle changes that can protect the heart include quitting smoking, adopting a healthy diet, exercising and reducing sedentary activity.

Dying from heart disease has declined over the past 40-50 years, particularly in high-income countries. However, heart disease remains the first cause of death. More patients are surviving their first heart attack or stroke, but they remain at high risk, the researchers said.

Nevertheless, most surveys suggest that the majority of the public underestimate their lifetime risk of developing and dying of heart disease, and consider cancer to be a greater threat despite robust evidence to the contrary, the researchers said.

In the United States, heart disease causes 598,000 deaths every year,200,000 of which are preventable. Cancer is the second cause of death in the country, taking about 575,000 lives yearly, according to 2010 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

4 Content Activities to Help Build Real Relationships with Influencers

Relationships are important in online marketing. Developing relationships with thought leaders, influential bloggers, or other site owners in your niche can:

• ·         Lend credibility and authority to your content and brand.
• ·         Amplify content distribution.
• ·         Build brand evangelists.
• ·         Augment link acquisition.
• ·         Lead to collaborative marketing efforts.

When it comes to relationship-building content, there are four, specific, evergreen content marketing activities that are perfectly suited to helping you connect with influencers in your niche.

The Group Interview

Cold outreach is rarely effective these days. Plus, it's a terrible way to connect with thought leaders. You need a legitimate reason to show up in the inboxes of big-time influencers in your space. Running a group interview is a terrific excuse to initiate contact.

If you're unfamiliar with group interviews, they usually feature a panel of subject matter experts and their individual responses to a specific question. They're effective for earned link acquisition, can drive high-intent traffic and are also great for establishing relationships. 

Examples of group interviews include this one on Author Rank and this one on creative link building.

When conducting a group interview, some tips are to:

Reach out with a thoughtful, personalized email. It's difficult to build relationships with anonymous, boilerplate emails. Explain why you'd like the influencer to participate. Flatter them. Laud their work, cite specific examples.

Ask them if there's anything specifically they'd like to promote in their panelist bio. Once published, be sure to reach back out and thank them for their time. Create a custom Twitter list with all your panelists and include a link to it in the post. Let your panelists know about it too. Going the extra mile helps leave an impression. It's also important to continue the dialog even after the group interview project has ended, so you can sustain these relationships. Try to:

Carve out a few minutes each day to continue to promote the influencer's work on social media. Reference them or their content in future posts on your site. As is often you case, you can develop a mutually-beneficial relationship with reciprocal promotional opportunities that will return dividends over time. But the key is to give before you receive. And if you'd rather do something more exclusive than a group interview, you can run individual spotlight type interviews.

"Best of" Lists

"Best of" articles are collections of quality resources on a particular topic that range from the best sites on a certain subject, to a top tools or apps list, to a massive list of amazing resources that your audience will find really helpful. Examples include this one on educational technology tools for teachers and this one on Google Reader alternatives.

From a relationship-building perspective, best of lists are effective because you're showcasing and promoting the content of others, and not really asking for anything in return.

You'll need to do personalized outreach to everyone on your "best of" list to begin the relationship-building process. Obviously, this is the case for any type of influencer-targeted content. Sure, you can just @ them on Twitter, but that's pretty lazy and impersonal and not nearly as effective for building a lasting connection.

When doing outreach, you want to let them know that:

They've earned a spot on your list because they've got a great site, tool, or app. Thank them for such a useful resource.

You're in the process of promoting the list

If they're working on anything else—a new tool, app, blog post—let you know and you'll be happy to help spread the word. With best of lists, I'm of the mind that "the more the merrier" since the more sources you include, the more potential relationships there are. Also, larger lists tend to perform better when it comes to sharing, syndication, and outreach beyond the folks on the list.

However, if you're doing targeted influencer nurturing, you don't need to cast as wide a net and you can reduce the scope of your list to a few select sources.

Expert Guides

Not only can expert guides help you position yourself or your brand as an authority on a specific topic, they can serve as great tools to help you connect with others in your niche. An authoritative guide is generally a longer-form, information rich article on a specific subject that is expertly-researched and written. Examples include this SEO guide and these snowsports articles. When it comes to making connections with your content, there are a few different approaches you can take like including:

Expert quotes: Work in expert quotes within the guide to help raise the authority of your content. You can either target specific experts you want to connect with, or you can use a resource like HARO or SourceBottle to find quality experts if you're time-constrained. This is somewhat similar to the group interview approach, but more exclusive since you'd only include a handful of experts, which feels like more of a privilege. If you value higher education relationships, reach out to professors or university researchers for quotes.

Resource lists: The approach here is akin to the "best of" list and you want to incorporate a list of links to quality resources in your expert article that either support your thesis or offer further information, like this and this.

Product mentions: An offshoot of the expert guide is a consumer-oriented, buyer's guide that features in-depth product reviews, or specific brand mentions. Recommending brands and individual products can help open the door for you to establish connections with the in-house PR or marketing teams of product manufacturers.

Roundups

Content roundups are curated lists of great articles or posts from your industry or a specific niche. Like each of the content types covered in this post, the common thread is celebrating others, their work, their efforts, and not asking for anything in return.

With roundups, you have the opportunity to celebrate and promote others on a pretty regular basis, since roundups are typically recaps published on a weekly or even monthly schedule. Examples include this one from Ahrefs and this one from Bruce Clay Inc. As for uncovering or prospecting for content to seed your roundup, you can leverage a range of reader tools or content curation tools to find fresh content each week.

Roundups are also a great way to help sustain and nurture any existing relationships, since you can leverage them to feature content from anyone you've already worked with in the past (e.g., group interview panelists, influencers, allies, etc.).

Info presented by Rankwinz

Nose can detect one trillion odours

The human nose can detect one trillion different odours, far more than we previously thought, say US scientists.

Until now, the long-held belief was that we can sniff out about 10,000 smells.

New estimates published in Science suggest the human nose outperforms the eye and the ear in terms of the number of stimuli it can distinguish between. Researchers at the Rockefeller University say we use only a tiny part of our olfactory powers. The human eye uses three light receptors that work together to see up to 10 million colours, while the ear can hear almost half a million tones. Until now it was believed the nose, with its 400 olfactory receptors, could detect only about 10,000 different odours.

Scientists at the Rockefeller University, New York, set out to test the idea, which dates back to 1927 and was never scientifically investigated. They devised experiments to see how good people are at distinguishing between cocktails of 128 different odour molecules, representing a large range of smells from grass to citrus. The molecules were mixed randomly in groups of 10, 20 or 30 to create unfamiliar smells. The 26 people were then asked to identify a scent from three samples - two that were the same and one that was different.

Based on these results, the researchers used theory to extrapolate how many different scents the average person would be able to discriminate if they were presented with all the possible mixtures that could be made from the 128 molecules. They estimated that the average person can discriminate between at least one trillion different odours with the nose, far more than can be detected by the eye or ear. This is probably an underestimate, they say.

'Urban legend'

The conventional wisdom on how well we can smell was based on little more than "urban legend", said co-author Dr Leslie Vosshall. "It's the first real test of how good humans are," she told the BBC. "People assume animals are much better smellers than us. Humans are remarkably good at smelling things." She said animals remain two or three times better than us at smelling, as they devote more of their brain to the sense of smell. However, the power of the human sense of smell should not be underestimated.

"You can push the sense of smell to work harder - you can get bigger and crazier, more intense perfumes," she added. "We are using a tiny part of our olfactory powers." According to Charles Spence, professor of experimental biology at the University of Oxford, while it is good to see smell pushed up the rankings of human senses, there is still a lot to learn. "I guess no matter how many smells we can discriminate, the evidence still shows that even the best experts cannot really pull much more than three odourants out of a mixture, contrary to what all those wordy wine writers might have us believe," he said.

Prof Stephen Liberles, of the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, said the nose has a large number of olfactory receptors, which implies our sense of smell could be even more powerful than the latest estimate. Commenting on the research, he said: "The research goes a long way to addressing the capability of the human olfactory system, but there are still specific questions to be answered about exactly how many individual chemicals can be perceived."

Common kitchen spices contain salmonella

Do the everyday spices in your kitchen cabinet hide bacteria commonly associated with raw meat, leaving you vulnerable to illness from simply adding seasoning to your food.

It's possible, and not cooking your spices makes you even more vulnerable.

The imported spices in our cabinets could potentially poison us with salmonella, according to a pending report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA told MSN News that it's working to characterize the nature and extent of the public health risk that comes from spices, but it intends to implement the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act to better control facilities manufacturing spices.

The safety of spices is important to FDA and presents numerous challenges due to the diversity of the industry and the fact that spices are widely distributed as ingredients in other products, FDA spokesperson Shelly Burgess told MSN News. Many spices are treated to reduce contamination but spices in general are not risk-free. The New York Times reported that the FDA will soon release a report identifying spices in the U.S. known to contain salmonella, one of the most common food-borne illnesses; the Times wrote that it affects about 1.2 million people in the United States every year, killing 450.

Related Salmonella outbreak sickens 307 in 37 states.

The publication wrote In a study of more than 20,000 food shipments, the food agency found that nearly 7 percent of spice lots were contaminated with salmonella, twice the average of all other imported foods. A study published in the Food Microbiology journal revealed that Mexico and India produce the largest amount of contaminated spices.

Westerners, who tend to add spices to food after cooking, are especially vulnerable; salmonella outbreaks involving pepper were recently traced to supply facilities in Rhode Island and California. Consumers concerned about the safety of spices used in the home should add spices during cooking rather than adding them at the table, Burgess said. It’s also important to follow basic food handling practices — cook, chill, clean and separate.

A Content Marketing Manifesto: 10 Principles to Drive Creative Content

No two content marketers are like. For example, Dan Zarella of Hubspot likes to focus on the data-driven reasons for why marketers do what they do. On the flip side, Leo Widrich of Buffer focuses on the psychological reasons for what concepts define our thought processes. Jay Baer believes in youtility, Lee Odden wants to optimize, Seth Godin uses pithy pitches, and Chris Brogan's forte is to build trust.

Every marketer has unique and distinct ideas on how to approach content marketing. And no doubt each person brings their own personality and moral values into the business of marketing. The following is the content marketing manifesto I like to adhere to. It is a declaration of the policies and aims that I work with and those that define the context under which I make all marketing decisions.

Here are its basic tenets:

1. Love What You Create

If you don't start with what appeals to you personally, and what you would love to read and re-read (or watch or listen to), how could you possibly convince someone else to give your creation a shot?

2. Don't Reinvent the Wheel

A lot has been done by smart people the world over. Use what they've done and build upon it. Existing content within your own company can be re-used, it can be upcycled, it can be integrated, and it can be weaved into different formats. Milk your existing content for all it's worth because you've put great effort into it and it would be a shame for more people not to see it. Also, curate other peoples' content but add value to it by offering up an additional opinion or an insight or perspective. Doing so will keep the pressure off you from joining the content creation rat race. And you'll have more time to focus on creating stuff that you love.

3. Make Incremental Changes

Sailors do this all time. When a ship starts to veer off course, they never make one drastic course-correct. Doing so could tip the ship over. Airline pilots do this too. When the plane starts to swerve, they make small adjustments to get it back on track. The brilliance of this is that it allows the vessel to stabilize and it allows the captain to gauge the effect of those changes in time to react to them. You are the captain of your content ship. Believe that small changes in the right direction can have a much bigger impact than a few huge overhauls.

4. Always Apply the 80/20 Rule

There's no reason to scramble for everything shiny. Not every social network is going to help your business or your customers. Not every new tool is going to increase your productivity. Try new things and give them a reasonable time frame of success. Doing so will help you find what works (the 20 percent) and use it consistently to maximize returns (the 80 percent).

5. Celebrate the Wins, Don't Rue the Losses.

It's important to recognize how far your work has come without losing sight of where you want it to go. Live in the moment but always be looking ahead. Since content marketing is a long-term game, it's easy to sometimes lose focus, get disheartened and give up when instant results don't roll in. But if your strategy is solid, you'll be able to stay the course and gain momentum with the small wins. Someone wise said, "It's always the little things."

6. Your Strategy Will Save You

Spend inordinate amounts of time creating, recreating, and refining your content strategy. Drill down and define your goals and the customers you love to work with. Find out what makes them so lovable. Doing so will help you identify other people with the same traits. When you're out of ideas, feeling demotivated or when things aren't turning out the way you wanted, your strategy will guide and reinvigorate you.

7. Transparency Wins Every Time

No matter the situation you encounter, whether it's a harsh comment on a blog or a crisis over on social media, strive to be honest, explain the facts, define your position and take responsibility. When you put yourself out there openly, the right people will be likely to reward you with their respect and trust. Learn to ignore the trolls and develop a thick skin.

8. Strive to Test, Experiment, and Test Again

Because you won't magically know what works and what doesn't for your business model. Sometimes testing might mean taking one step forward and two steps back. So be it.

9. Have Fun, Dammit!

Don't create boring content. The world does not need another "why my product is so great" blog. What the world needs is something made with love and conviction. What the world needs is somebody who comes alive while creating stories. Create; and have fun creating. Because you having fun will translate into a better product than you not having fun creating it.

10. Don't Obsess Over Your Niche

Yes it's good to be focused and attract a niche following. Yes SEO is great and being relevant is obviously important. All of that matters. But it is secondary. The primary focus is to be interesting. People need to actually want to read your content. Your words need to show your personality. Your stories need to be informative, helpful, funny, etc. or stand out in other meaningful ways. Without that primary interest, there's no long-term sustainability.

Conclusion

This content marketing manifesto is born of my beliefs, my straight-shooter nature, and my experience with what moves the needle.

Info presented by Rankwinz