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Gadgets to Help Tend a Garden Collecting pollen with a VegiBee, which helped tomato yields rise 38 percent for Bill Whaley, the tool’s inventor. Tim Parker for The New York TimesPicture a tiny drone that arises from your vegetable garden to shoo away hungry deer. Or maybe a houseplant that, when you’re away, meanders through your rooms like a cat following a sunbeam. Or one that posts a request for water on Twitter. The future is knocking at the door of home gardening. And, if some do-it-yourselfers have their way, there is no aspect of nature that can’t be improved with a rechargeable motor and a sensor or two. ake, for example, the VegiBee. Bill Whaley, a former department store executive living in St. Louis, said he invented the device after a disappointing tomato yield. Mr. Whaley concluded that the problem was pollination, and quickly set out to improve on the bees, which were clearly remiss. Looking a little like an electric toothbrush, the VegiBee’s wand is held close to a flow

Tap a Word in a Sentence Three Times and It’s Yours Philtrum. Salubriousness. Thaumaturge. These are three of my favorite words, but they’re not common ones. So you may be reaching for a dictionary right now. But before your fingers close on that printed book and flick through its alphabetically indexed pages, consider this: There are many dictionary apps that could help you do the job more speedily. They may also have features that will teach you new words. And they might even be fun.Dictionary.com Dictionary and Thesaurus is a free iOS and Android app that comes from one of the best-known dictionary Web sites. Unlike the Web site, the app has the advantage that many of its features work offline. This app’s home page is colorful with icons and is topped by a search bar where you enter words you want to look up. As soon as you begin to type in this bar, the app begins to suggest words that may match, so you don’t always have to type in the whole word. If you’re unsure of a word’s spel

On One Phone App, Looks Are Everything Nancy Doniger The quickest hookups in New York these days aren’t happening behind the velvet ropes of No. 8, on the bar stools of Dorrian’s or in the coed bathroom of the Electric Room.Rather, the action is happening on a new smartphone app, and no, it isn’t Grindr.“Anytime I’m at a dinner or an event, social or business, people are buzzing about Tinder,” said Erica Berman, 28, an events planner in Manhattan who said that she uses the app several times a day.Ms. Berman is not alone. Technology has hit a new level of shallow, and New York’s 20-somethings are embracing it full speed.Introduced to college campuses in September, Tinder taps into the most superficial aspect of the dating scene. After downloading the app and selecting their gender, location and whether they like men or women (or both), users swipe through a stack of profile photos (left for “nope,” right for “liked”), based on little more than the person’s appearance. If two users “lik

Brain, Interrupted TECHNOLOGY has given us many gifts, among them dozens of new ways to grab our attention. It’s hard to talk to a friend without your phone buzzing at least once. Odds are high you will check your Twitter feed or Facebook wall while reading this article. Just try to type a memo at work without having an e-mail pop up that ruins your train of thought. But what constitutes distraction? Does the mere possibility that a phone call or e-mail will soon arrive drain your brain power? And does distraction matter — do interruptions make us dumber? Quite a bit, according to new research by Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab. There’s a lot of debate among brain researchers about the impact of gadgets on our brains. Most discussion has focused on the deleterious effect of multitasking. Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer. In fact, multitasking is a misnomer. In most situations, the person j

Go the Same Way, or Go the Wrong Way With the “Yelpification” of culture, there is increasing strength in numbers. Stockbyte, via Getty Images Not long ago, a friend of mine, a dear man with exquisite taste, took me to dinner at Momofuku Má Pêche in Midtown Manhattan. I point out his taste because, being from out of town, he chose the restaurant on the fly, based on some reviews he had read on Yelp, the social networking site that rates everything from eating establishments to vacuum cleaners to gastroenterologists. The supertrendy place had gotten some raves.Now, if I had the same experience with a gastroenterologist I had chosen based on glowing Yelp evaluations as I did at Momofuku, I would be checking myself into the emergency room. My monkfish — a special favorite of the Yelp hordes — tasted like a pencil eraser. It was also so cold that it could not be described as cooked. It was deceased. As for the destination-place atmosphere, imagine the decibel level of a Justin Bieber conc

Cyberparenting and the Risk of T.M.I. It may be a timeless curse of parenthood to know simultaneously too much about one’s teenager and yet never access the information one actually wants. But the unruly morass of today’s social media and cellphone-infested landscape seems to have made both aspects of the curse worse. Nowadays, if you are the parent of a 14-year-old, you can see him guzzle beer, flirt with a girl who squeezes her bosom in every “selfie” she posts on Instagram, and describe a fellow ninth grader in language saltier than any you ever used at that age. Of course, your parents never even heard you swear. They had no idea where you went after you slammed the front door behind you. They couldn’t begin to fathom what you were really up to on a Saturday night.Today, parents are just one click away: buddied up on Facebook, logging on to Tumblr, peering over cryptic text messages and trying to get a glimpse of Snapchat images before they dissolve into the ether.   Parents who

Taking Time to Go Back to the Beginning Shortly before Miho Walsh and Roy Prieb were married in early in 2008 they kicked their video game habit, which was composed mainly of World of Warcraft. Actually, it was Mr. Prieb’s die-hard habit. For Ms. Walsh, playing video games with her fiancé was more of an act of love.“I was impressed with Miho, because rather than poo-pooing the whole gaming experience when we were first dating, she dove in,” said Mr. Prieb, now 40, a founder of and partner in Saaspire, a technology consultancy in New York. “She dove in, not by creating her own character; she dove in by sitting next to me and playing with me. We both got into it, co-piloting one character around that world.”Then they stopped, cold turkey.“It was a bright spring day and we looked out the window and said, ‘Let’s quit,’ ” Mr. Prieb recalled.