10 most awesome things you didn't know you could do with your phone

You see someone do something extraordinary with his or her phone that you did not know was even possible.You’ve had your smartphone for a while, but let’s face it: You’ve never read the manual. You take great pride that you know how to use it, and then it happens.

Friends don’t let friends have smartphone skill envy. Here are some of my favorite secrets buried in your phone settings that you probably don't know, but will use now.

1. Take a screenshot

                                  

Have you ever wanted to capture something on your phone's screen? Maybe it's a hilarious text from a friend, or an interesting Facebook post, or you want to send someone an image to show her how to do something.

iPhone

Press and hold the Home button along with the Sleep/Wake button. You should hear a shutter click. The screenshot will appear in your Camera Roll or Saved Photos section.

Android

Hold the Power and Volume Down buttons at the same time. The image is saved to the "Captured Images" folder in your Gallery app. That only works in Android 4.0 and higher, though. For Android 3.0, 2.3 or earlier, use an app like AirDroid.

2. Block calls and texts

                               

Have you ever had someone who just won't stop calling or texting you, even after you asked nicely? Here's how to block him.

iPhone

To block calls on an iPhone with iOS 7 or later, open the Phone or FaceTime app. If the person is already a contact, tap his name, scroll to the bottom of the page and tap Block This Caller. Then tap Block Contact.

If the person isn't a contact, tap the Info button, then scroll to the bottom of the page and tap Block this Caller. Then tap Block Contact.

If you want to block texts, open the Messages app and tap a message from the person you want to block. Tap Contact in the upper right and then tap the Info button. Scroll to the bottom and tap Block this Caller. Then tap Block Contact.

You can edit your blocked contacts later at these locations:

Settings>>Phone>>Blocked

Settings>>Messages>>Blocked

Settings>>FaceTime>>Blocked

Android

On Android, go to Settings>>Call settings>>Call block. Under "Incoming calls" tap "Call block list" and then tap Create. You can enter a number, or tap the picture icon to find the number in your Contacts list or in your call logs.

If you don't see these steps or want more blocking options, check out these call- and text-blocking apps.

3. Use a real password


iPhone and Android both default to a 4-digit PIN for unlocking the phone. That's OK as long as you don't use something simple like 0000 or 1234. However, I know some people who want even more security.

iPhone

To set a real password on an iPhone, go to Settings>>Passcode. From there, swipe off the option that says Simple Passcode. Here, you can set your passcode with letters and special characters for better phone security.

Android

Go to Settings>>Lock screen and tap Screen lock. You can set what level of security you want, from a simple swipe to a password. Select Password and type in the password that you want. It should have a mix of letters, numbers and special characters to be really safe.

4. See text more easily

Having a hard time reading things on your phone's small screen? Bump up the font size to something a bit easier to see.

iPhone

Go to Settings>>General>>Accessibility and turn on Bold Text and Larger Text. You can choose either one or both, depending on your preferences. You will need to restart your phone for Bold Text to take effect.

Android

Go to Settings>>Accessibility. Under Vision, tap Font size and set it to Large. Some phones include an even larger Huge option.

5. Read things out loud


                         




Want to keep your eyes off your phone for a bit? Have it read things to you out loud.

iPhone

Go to Settings>>General>>Accessibility and turn on VoiceOver. You have the option to practice with VoiceOver, set the speaking rate and more.

You will need to do some playing around to get used to it. For example you can touch and drag your fingers around the home screen to have it read what's there. Double tap to activate an app, while one tap will give you details about it.

VoiceOver will read directions to you in Maps, have your camera tell you how many people are in your shot, and get spoken photo descriptions. You can also handwrite notes and letters on the screen and have VoiceOver translate your messages into text for Mail and other apps.

Android

Go to Settings>>Accessibility and tap TalkBack. If you don't see it, you can download it from the Google Play store.

Turn it on and your phone will read whatever you touch on the screen and incoming notifications. Hint: To perform a regular swipe gesture, you have to use two fingers instead of one.

To adjust your TalkBack settings, go to Settings>>Accessibility and tap Text-to-Speech options. You can adjust the voice engine and speed rate.

Then go to Settings and turn on Hands-free mode. This will tell you who is calling or messaging.

6. Customize alert vibration patterns

You've set a custom ringtone for each of your contacts, but that doesn't help when you have your phone on vibrate. Fortunately, you can create custom vibration patterns as well.

iPhone

Go to Settings>>Sounds>>Ringtone>>Vibration. You can tap out patterns to record. Or, you can go into your contacts list and hit Edit and select the Vibration option for each contact.

Android

Go to Contacts and tap on a contact name. Under Vibration Pattern, tap Default and choose a preset pattern. Or tap the Create button and tap on the screen to create your own pattern.

If you don't have this built in, there are third-party apps like Vybe that can do this as well.

7. Flash camera LED for notifications

                             

Need a quiet alert about notifications and don't want to use vibrate? Have notifications trigger your phone's LED camera flash instead. Just make sure you turn this off or keep your phone hidden when you go to the movies.

iPhone

Go to Settings>>General>> Accessibility and turn on "LED Flash for Alerts." Now every time you get a notification, your phone's rear camera will flash. 

Android

Go to Settings>>Accessibility and turn on "Flash notification."

8. Better ways to take pictures

Tapping your phone's screen to take a picture sounds good in theory, but in practice it can make shots a little shaky. Here are some better options.

iPhone

Point your camera and press the phone’s Volume Up button.

Android

Open the camera app and tap the gear to see the settings. Scroll down to Voice control and turn it on. Now you can take pictures with the commands "Capture," "Shoot," "Smile" and "Cheese."

9. Take multiple pictures at once

If you're taking pictures of a moving object, squirming kid or people who tend to blink, you often want to take a bunch of pictures at once.

iPhone 5, 5s, and 5c

Open the Camera app. Tap and hold the shutter release button on the screen – or press and hold the Volume Up button – and the camera will start taking multiple pictures. Release the button when you want to stop.

The iPhones can take up to 10 pictures a second. It will group the photos for you automatically so you can quickly find the best ones.

Android

Open the Camera app. Tap the gear icon to open the settings and turn Burst Shot on. Then tap and hold the shutter release button and the phone will take multiple images until you release the button – or it hits the preset limit for your phone. The photos will be grouped for you in your gallery.

10. Turn off music automatically

A lot of people use their phone to listen to music as they go to sleep, or as they're doing a project. But you don't want it running forever and draining your battery.

iPhone

Go to the Clock app and click on "Timer," then "When Timer Ends." From here, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the screen and select "Stop Playing."

Android

Open the music player and go to Settings. Look for "Music auto off" and set it to however long you want the music to play. There are also third-party apps like Sleep Timer available.

Is a walking, talking plant-person possible? by Groot

Lumbering around on his barky limbs, sprouting flowers and even dancing in a pot, one of the stars of the film "Guardians of the Galaxy" bizarrely blends the plant and animal kingdoms. "Groot," awalking, talking tree, seems to defy nature but how outlandish is the idea of a plant-animal hybrid?
                           

. Some scientists even say Earth's biology suggests the possibility of "thinking plants" somewhere in the universe.Plants that can smell and animals that regenerate show that animal and vegetable kingdoms may not be as far apart as they first appear.

Here, experts tell how Groot-like blending could occur, and some reasons it couldn't. [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Scintific-Fiction Concepts]

Plant sight, plant hearing


                               

In the film, Groot clearly hears, sees, feels and talks (albeit, only three words, "I am Groot"). While one would be hard-pressed to find a talking vegetable on Earth, the idea of communicating and sensing plants is not at all outlandish, 

In fact, plants have a much richer, more dynamic life than most people give the leafy beings credit for, Chamovitz said. "We think of plants as un-living, because they're unmoving," Chamovitz said. "The strong scientific evidence is that plants can do everything other than hearing."

They respond to chemicals, with lock-and-key mechanisms that resemble how animals smell. Plants have specific photoreceptors, which are proteins that respond to different wavelengths of light. They "know" when they're being touched, Simon Gilroy, a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science.

Plants also have proprioception, or a sense of their location in space, Chamovitz said, which is why they can tell when they're planted upside-down.

Some plants can even "hear," able to distinguish the vibration patterns made by different chewing caterpillars, according to a study detailed this summer in the journal Oecologia, Gilroy said. (Decades-old claims that plants can "hear music," however, have little to no scientific support, he added.)

This plant sensing may not seem evident after all, plants don't scream in pain or comment on Van Gogh's use of color. But senses serve the same function in plants as they do in animals: Plants take in information, which travels through the plant body and causes some sort of response, Chamovitz said. [In Photos: Animals That Mimic Plants]

The familiar scene of houseplants growing toward the window, for example, shows how plants sense and respond to light. When part of a plant gets eaten, that causes distress chemicals to propagate through the plant, which responds with chemical changes to make itself less tasty to the predator, Gilroy said.

Not only can plants send signals within their own "bodies," but those signals can also influence other plants. In other words, they communicate, Chamovitz said. A disease or pest infestation in a neighboring plant sends out chemical signals that cause nearby plants to respond. "They can smell when neighbors are sick," Chamovitz said. "It gives off a chemical, so the plant defends itself."

Researchers have also shown corn seedlings lean toward sounds with a 220-Hertz frequency, the same tune emitted by the plants' roots, and chili seedlings grow quicker when they sense a fennel plant is growing nearby.

Moving but a bit  slowly
                                  

Groot does more than just sense and communicate, though. He also moves around. This woody best friend to a talking raccoon shifts around on mobile stumps and lifts alien bullies up by their nostrils.

"Thinking about it, the feature that really isn't plantlike about Groot is the speed of the movement," Gilroy said.

Plants, for the most part, simply can't move that fast. Animals have "squishy cells" that can move past one another, making muscles feasible, Gilroy said. But a hard wall encloses each plant cell, and neighboring cells are glued together into a rigid grid.

"Things like muscles are impossible with how plants are set up," he said.

Moreover, a plant's entire body-plan centers upon staying put, so they can maximize photosynthesis with networks of branches and roots. Chamovitz calls "rootedness" the primary principle of plant biology.

Plants do make movements, however they just do it by growing, Gilroy said. For example, they "move" toward the sunlight by elongating cells on the dark side of the stem. "Plants grow through the environment," Gilroy said.

Due to some clever mechanisms, a few notable species buck the rule of the slow-moving plant. The famous Venus flytrap shuts its jaws rapidly by essentially "growing them shut," Gilroy said. Acid released at the flytrap's hinge softens cell walls and makes them expand quickly. [Image Gallery: Carnivorous Plants]

Finally, plants have to stay put because movement burns so much energy

photosynthesis simply can't power animal-style activity, which is why animals eat plants and other animals. To move around like Groot does on screen, such a tree creature would have to eat other things, too, Gilroy said.

Stem cells and Groot

                             

Despite his (relatively) quick movements, Groot still maintains some plantlike characteristics. Capable of unlimited growth and regeneration, he grabs an out-of-reach battery by simply growing taller. His lopped-off arms return, and there's even a bit in the movie about replanting a Groot "cutting."

Clearly, the movie speeds up such vegetable growth, but real-life plants can indeed keep growing in ways animals can't, Ed Rayburn, an extension specialist and forage agronomist for West Virginia University, told Live Science. Those plant species capable of "unlimited growth" can keep going and going "for what, to humans, seems like forever," he said. And plants commonly regenerate lost limbs.

Those abilities derive from the way plants are structured and their access to stem cells.

Arranged in modular body plans, plants can grow limbs in different directions and add secondary limbs in a fractal pattern. Animals, by contrast, grow to a predetermined size and shape, and much of that happens in the womb, Gilroy said.

"We cram all our development into as short a time as possible," Gilroy said. But since plants can't run, and so will inevitably suffer damage, they have to keep growing throughout life, he said.

Plant stem cells are found in meristems, "small groups of cells that stay perpetually embryonic," Gilroy said. Located at stem and root tips, these plant stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they can develop into any type of plant cell. After injury, any plant cell can revert to similar pluripotency.

Animals, by contrast, lack meristems, and stem cells are much harder to come by, as shown by the difficulties faced by cloning efforts, Rayburn said. Some animals do approach plantlike regenerative growth, but usually those with simple body plans, like the planarian worm, Gilroy said.

plants that are called Intelligent plants?

Plant communication even has some researchers in the new field of plant neurobiology considering the potential for leafy intelligence. Alien worlds, some scientists say, could theoretically birth sentient plants.

But, Chamovitz said, such green thinkers would have to change the core trait of plants their rootedness. Animals developed thought because of their "searching" strategy for finding food, he told Forbes. Alien tree-thinkers would have to incorporate movement, perhaps with "some type of root system that can push itself out of the ground, take three steps forward and then re-root," he told Forbes.

As for creating plant-animal hybrids here on Earth, that's most likely to happen in a geneticist's lab. It's theoretically possible, given the right gene transfers, to give people a coating of green, photosynthetic skin. To actually make much use of such a feature, however, people would have to grow a canopy of leaves.

Different Scientific Ways to Get Energized, Naturally-nutrtion

Get Energized, Naturally !
Even though Caffeine and sugar can boost your energy for a while, but soon you end up feeling worse. better Try these natural energy cures for everyday pep.




                                         







When that afternoon slump hits and you feel yourself holding back a yawn, it’s tempting to reach for a candy bar or gulp down an extra coffee to get a quick energy fix. But those
may not be the best habits for your health; caffeine and sweets can leave you feeling jittery and unfocused, and they may cause you to crash after just a short energy spike. Instead, try these four healthy, cheap and completely natural ways to get energized.

Get Moving!
                                             

Going for a run might be the last thing you feel like doing when your energy supply is running low, but exercise has been proven time and again to boost alertness and minimize fatigue; even low-intensity exercise does the trick. Physical activity releases feel-good endorphins, contributes to cardiovascular health and improves blood flow. This helps your heart and lungs stay healthy and work more efficiently throughout the day, leaving you feeling tired and ready for a solid streak of uninterrupted rest at night. Try moving more each day by taking walks on your lunch break, joining a gym or biking.


Hydrate, Then Hydrate More

Drinking lots of water is the easiest and cheapest way to stay alert; your body needs the liquid to keep cells and vital organs functioning properly. Experts recommend drinking at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water each day, in addition to consuming other fluids. For some added variety, San Francisco-based health and wellness coach Amelia Eisen suggests adding lemon juice, turmeric and cayenne pepper to your water.

“For me, it's the best way to start the day because it provides a blast of essential vitamins, minerals and enzymes right off the bat,” she says. “The zing of the lemon with spicy cayenne and soothing, mood-boosting turmeric open my eyes right up and welcome a positive mind.”

Try Eisen’s natural energy water recipe:

Water
Lemon juice
1 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

                                          
Eat for Energy

Various foods contain micronutrients that act as natural stimulants to boost your energy and keep you from crashing later. Try incorporating these essential nutrients and foods into your diet to keep you feeling awake throughout the day.

Omega-3 fatty acid: This healthy fat is found in salmon, walnuts, Brussels sprouts, flax seed and fish oil. Studies suggest that fish oil and other omega-3s can help you fight fatigue and conserve oxygen while exercising.

Fiber: Fiber has been found to help regulate energy intake by helping you feel fuller longer.

Iron: Many people have an iron deficiency – which leads to low energy levels – and don’t even know it. Adult males should aim to eat at least 8 milligrams of iron per day, while women should eat 8 to 18 milligrams per day, depending on their age. Foods high in iron include eggs, lean red meat, tuna, oysters, salmon, whole grains and beans.

Date: These sweet brown fruits are packed with vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients – plus, they digest slowly, allowing your body to efficiently use all of these nutrients. What’s more, they’re sweet enough to satisfy your sugar cravings!

Cucumber: Cucumbers are 96 percent water, so eating them is another way to stay hydrated throughout the day.

Avocado: Avocados contain a healthy source of fat that helps keep you feeling full. They also help reduce blood sugar swings, which can make you feel suddenly fatigued.

Probiotics: Yogurt, kefir, kombucha and kevita drinks are great sources of healthy gut bacteria that can help prevent energy drain. Probiotics also support a healthy immune system, which can keep you feeling healthy and alert.



Sleep, But Not Too Much

Getting a solid night’s rest is key to feeling energized and alert throughout the day. Develop a regular sleep routine that allows you to get enough quality sleep without getting too much.

The idea of too much sleep may sound crazy, but Harvard researchers suggest that it is possible. If you find yourself tossing and turning for hours before you actually fall asleep, try experimenting with catching fewer Zs. You may end up getting less sleep overall, but the quality of the hours you do get will be much improved.

Too much sleep isn’t a common complaint, though, and chances are you’re not getting enough. Napping can be a good way to catch up on sleep missed during the night, but researchers recommend limiting naps to 30 to 60 minutes. However, for people that suffer from insomnia, napping during the day can make it even more difficult to fall asleep at night.

As long as you follow these guidelines, it’s OK to indulge in your favorite caffeinated beverage or candy occasionally, as long as it’s in moderation.

“I enjoy a cup of coffee just a few times a week, and the sweets I eat now involve fruits, raw honey, maple syrup, agave nectar and coconut or date sugar,” Eisen says. “I have been able to crowd out my old habits with new ones: healthier and much more sustainable means of energy.”