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    • A Camera That Measures Your Pulse From Afar

      By Bill Weir, C. Michael Kim, David Miller & Justin Bare | This Could Be Big – Thu, Oct 11, 2012

      In life we're surrounded by subtle changes in movement and temperature that are undetectable to the naked eye, like the flashing pulse in our face or the gentle sway of a large building. Despite our inability to see these movements, they do occur, and a team from MIT has come up with a way to reveal these unseen secrets.

      It's a method of spatial decomposition called "Eulerian Video Magnification". It works by isolating subtle changes in video, allowing you to magnify individual variations and leave the rest the same.

      A similar type of video processing is utilized by an app called Cardiio, that detects your heart beat using the front-facing camera in your iPhone. But when the more sophisticated MIT framework is made available later this year, the implications will be broad and far-reaching. Among other things, it can be used to detect functional issues with buildings and bridges, monitor babies heart rates from afar and measure vital signs without touching the patient.

      It takes a

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    • The Red Carpet Restaurant Swap

      By Bill Weir, C. Michael Kim, David Miller & Justin Bare | This Could Be Big – Wed, Oct 3, 2012

      This is a different type of innovation from what we typically cover on TCBB, but this definitely fits the concepts of innovation and boldness we look for in our stories. Eleven Madison Park in New York and Alinea in Chicago, two vaunted three star Michelin restaurants, are doing the unheard — combining staffs and cohabiting spaces for a week each. We'd heard of pop-up restaurants, but these are two of the best in the United States — if not the world — and are now combining their talents to bring their entire dining experience with them: dishes, ambience, and décor.

      We visited Eleven Madison Park where Alinea's Head Chef Grant Achatz and his team from Chicago were working to bring their brand of flavors to New York, "we've basically taken the Alinea tasting menu, along with all the service wear, special equipment, we brought in 14 members of our staff and plunked it down right here at Eleven Madison Park."

      So does this signal the future of fine dining? As Achatz points out, if

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    • Can a Smartphone App Make You a Blackjack King?

      By Bill Weir, C. Michael Kim, David Miller, Justin Bare & Mark Monroy | This Could Be Big – Thu, Sep 20, 2012

      Blackjack often ranks as the most popular table game at your local casino, because of all the options available on the casino floor, Blackjack is the one that gives the house the smallest advantage over the gambler - especially if the gambler is employing proper strategy. And if the gambler knows how to count cards?

      Movies such as Rain Man, The Hangover and 21 have introduced the concept of card counting to the world, a strategy often cited as being developed by Dr. Edward O. Thorp in the early 1960s. The concept is simple, even if the details are not. By employing various strategies of tracking which cards are dealt during the game, and adjusting your bets accordingly to the shifting odds, a player is theoretically able to eliminate the house advantage and rack up a tidy profit.

      Nowadays, there are several smartphone apps that claim to teach a user how to employ these card counting strategies to become a Blackjack King. The tagline for the popular app BlackJack Domination is "It's

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