For years, physical rehabilitation centers have used BFR to help people build muscle or reduce muscle loss after things like surgery and accidents. The idea is that by restricting blood as it’s leaving a muscle (while allowing oxygenated blood to flow to the muscle unimpeded), you can increase metabolic stress and cellular swelling, leading to increased growth hormone and muscle growth. By lifting less weight, you’re also putting less strain on the joints.

The new SmartCuffs are meant to be consumer-friendly, so you can use them at home, at the gym or at work. They’re automated so you don’t have to manually pump them. They’ll automatically shut off if the pressure exceeds a recommended range for each person, and SmartTools says they’re more rugged than past iterations.

Previously, you could buy two SmartCuffs for $350. Starting tomorrow, the new model is available for pre-order for $199. The cuffs will start shipping in May, and SmartTools will be demoing them at CES, so if you’re going, you can preview them this week.

When you make an emergency call, the feature will let you tap “Medical,” “Fire” or “Police.” It will then send an automated voice message to the appropriate emergency service provider. It will gather your location using your phone’s GPS and plus code. It won’t require a data connection, and it will allow you to speak during the call if you’re able to. The feature will arrive first on Pixel phones, and it’s expected to land in the coming months. It will come to select Android devices sometime after that.

In its first run, the $10,000 prototype converted “HELLO” into DNA. The device first encoded the bits (1’s and 0’s) into DNA sequences (A’s, C’s, T’s, G’s). It then synthesized the DNA and stored it as a liquid. Next, the stored DNA was read by a DNA sequencer. Finally, the decoding software translated the sequences back into bits. The 5-byte message took 21 hours to convert back and forth, but the researchers have already identified a way to reduce the time required by 10 to 12 hours. They’ve also suggested ways to reduce the cost by several thousand dollars.

In nucleotide form HELLO (01001000 01000101 01001100 01001100 01001111 in bits) yielded approximately 1 mg of DNA, and just 4 micrograms were retained for sequencing. As Technology Review notes, at that rate, all of the information stored in a warehouse-sized data center could fit into a few standard-size dice. Once the technique is perfected, it could store data much longer than we’re currently able to. As Microsoft points out, some DNA has held up for tens of thousands of years in mammoth tusks and the bones of early humans. That’s why Microsoft and other tech companies are eying DNA as a way to solve looming data storage problems. As previously reported, Microsoft’s formal goal is to have an operational DNA-based storage system working inside a data center by the end of this decade.

DNA storage isn’t entirely new, but the novelty here is that this system is fully automated. Before it can succeed commercially, though, the cost to synthesize DNA and extract the information is stores needs to come down. In other words, we need a way to synthesize DNA cost-efficiently. While it may sound a bit sci-fi, we could all be storing data as DNA before we know it.

To help move DNA storage from research labs to datacenters, researchers from @uwcse and Microsoft demonstrate a fully automated DNA storage system https://t.co/O5dyfikimm pic.twitter.com/xxnwIPGASW

— Microsoft Research (@MSFTResearch) March 21, 2019