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When Dr. David Rabin told me how Apollo Sessions worked, my exact first thought was, poppycock. This was an app, he said, that would turn my iPhone into a healing device using the vibrations of the phones haptic engine. By stimulating the vagus nervea core component of the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for the bodys recovery and relaxation mechanismsusing certain frequencies, this iOS app would make me feel different. It works, he assured me. With trauma patients in clinical settings, he claimed. As someone who is skeptical about wundermedicine by default, I didnt believe it. But as someone who has lived through a few years of a traumatic experience, I was curious. I wanted to try it. And Im glad I did.[Image: Apollo Neuroscience]The science behind ApolloFor 20 years, Rabin has studied chronic stress, focusing on the effects of addiction and trauma on veterans, women, and children. Witnessing the limitations of medication in treating these conditions, he and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center began exploring non-drug treatments. They discovered that various techniques, such as soothing touch, music, and talk therapy could induce a state of safety learning in the body, promoting recovery and reducing stress. This exploration led them to experiment with vibrations as a means to trigger the bodys natural relaxation response. Just like music can calm your body or getting a hug can calm your body, we can send soothing vibrations that are like music composed for your touch receptor system in your body to trigger the safety nervous system, Rabin explains.[Image: Apollo Neuroscience]These vibrations, akin to the calming rhythm of ocean waves or a cats purr, activate the vagus nerve. This is a key player in regulating the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary bodily functions such as heart rate, digestion, and respiration. By activating the vagus nerve, Apollos vibrations promote a shift towards the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, responsible for rest and recovery. This shift counteracts the effects of chronic stress, which often keeps the body in a state of heightened arousal, leading to fatigue, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating. And since the vagus nerve can affect your state in different directions, if you manipulate the frequency of the vibration, you will trigger different physical responses.The teams initial research focused on using this technology to help veterans cope with trauma. However, they soon realized the potential benefits for everyday stress and began testing it on themselves and others in real-world situations. The results were so remarkable that they caught them by surprise: improved sleep, better focus, increased energy, and reduced reliance on stimulants like coffee. Recognizing the transformative potential of this discovery, Rabin and his colleagues decided to keep testing and eventually founded Apollo Neuroscience, a company that packaged what they learned into Apollo Neuro, a consumer wearable that used a haptic engine and software to help anyone destress (it was a finalist in our World Changing Ideas Award 2021).According to Rabin, Apollo Neuros effectiveness is backed by rigorous scientific research. He claims that they have completed eight clinical double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled crossover trials, with more than 1,700 subjects. Three of them are published and five are currently accepted for publication or under peer review for publication in 2025, he says. The company also claims it has 13 more ongoing clinical trials at different hospitals. One of the reviewed studies he shared with me, published in the Journal of Rheumatology, demonstrates that the Apollo wearable device led to significant improvements in fatigue, reduced instances of Raynaud phenomenon (a condition affecting blood flow to extremities), and enhanced overall quality of life, including physical function, mood, sleep, and social participation. The study, which involved participants wearing the device for a minimum of 15 minutes daily for four weeks, showed that the technology was well-tolerated and used far beyond the requested time, with no adverse effects. The iPhone versionBuilding on the success of the wearable device, the company has now launched Apollo Sessions, an iPhone app that delivers a subset of the same therapeutic vibrations without the need for the wearable. The idea of using the always-stressful iPhone vibration for good may seem nuts, but according to Rabin, Apollo Sessions takes the very device that often makes us feel overwhelmed and transforms it into a tool for calm and clarity.Rabinwho is also executive director at The Board of Medicinetells me that the companys mission is to create technology that heals humanity. We designed the wearable to prove that that was possible, he says, and it does [but] not everybody can afford a wearable. Thats when they looked at the haptic engines in phones to see if it was possible to do the same. It worked for the iPhone, he says, but not for Android phones, because they dont have the same level of access to the haptic capabilities of the hardware. While the Apollo Neuro devicewhich is worn on the wrist or anklehas more advanced features thanks to a more powerful haptic engine with a wider range of vibration intensities and patterns, the Apollo Sessions app offers only a subset of these functions. The iPhone Apollo Sessions app makes the core vibration technology accessible to everyone, Rabin says. The wearable has all these advanced AI and sleep benefits the phone does not have. The app focuses on providing daytime relaxation and stress relief, too.[Image: Apollo Neuroscience]Apollo Sessions offers a range of vibration patterns. These Vibesas the company calls temare designed to ease you into different states. Whether you need a boost of energy with Espresso Shot, a calming embrace with Hug, or a moment of relaxation with Relax, Rabin says Apollo Sessions can do that for you. He recommended that I start with the Hug Vibewhich is free to tryby placing the phone on your chest for two to five minutes, preferably in airplane mode with do not disturb enabled, to fully immerse in the experience for that limited time. He also said that I could put it on my yoga mat while I meditate or on the mattress while I go to sleep.Does it actually work?I tried it a few times. And, despite my natural skepticism, it does work. Perhaps it was self-suggestion. Maybe its a placebo effect. But it did what it says it does, especially the calming vibes. So well, in fact, that I asked my own therapist and he explained to me all the science behind this and other similar therapies associated with vibration and rhythm. The Apollo Sessions app is free. You can try the Hug one for two minutes, which should be enough to feel an effect. Or you can subscribe for $9.99 per month to go deeper, unlocking unlimited access to sessions that offer six different Vibes. Rabin says that the plan is to keep expanding this library as their research finds out the effect of other frequencies and vibration patterns.
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KitchenAid just unveiled its color of the year, a retro, comforting Butter yellow. While most people are aware of Pantones color of the year program (hello, Mocha Mousse), fewer might be clued in to the fact that the beloved appliance company KitchenAid has been running its own version of the concept since 2017. Each year, KitchenAid picks a trendy new hue to outfit a line of its iconic stand mixers. In 2023, the pick was an electric pink Hibiscus, followed by a powdery Blue Salt in 2024. Now the company is all-in on its nostalgic buttery hue. The new mixer retails online for $499.99. [Photo: KitchenAid] A team of analysts from KitchenAids parent company, Whirlpool, work year-round to identify culturally relevant colors for new products. The color of the year program is a way to highlight that workand, conveniently, it taps into the consumer demand for colorful cookware that has helped brands like Our Place and Le Creuset amass loyal followings. Brittni Pertijs is a color, material, and finish design manager at Whirlpool. She says her team has had their eye on yellow for color of the year since 2019, when mustard first started becoming a popular hue. The main goal with the color of the year program is to look at the drivers of social cultural trends and filter those through the KitchenAid brand lens, Pertijs says. Then, we forecast how people may want to feel in the year of launchin this case, those feelings were comfort and optimism. From there, we look at our color tracking to identify which tones seem to be emerging and which align best with interior design trends. [Photo: KitchenAid] Butter yellow is an apt choice, given that the soft, retro hue is having something of a modern-day revival. Back in December, Pinterest predicted that 2025 would see a resurgence of youthful primary colors in interior design. In January, the platform spotlighted butter yellow as one of its five colors of the year, given that searches for butter yellow on the site were up 115%, while butter yellow nails saw interest spike by 1,835%. Pertijss team identified their perfect butter yellow shade by collecting a range of potential samples, including a vintage butter knife found in an antique shop. The final hue is somewhat brighter than plain butter, but its just right to evoke the warm and fuzzy feelings of your grandmas 1960s-era kitchen. Butter is so comforting, yet indulgent, Pertijs says. The soft color has just enough energy to spark that feeling of joy. We literally wrote a love letter to Butter as we were building our inspiration around this years selection.
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Young software engineers from Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continue to infiltrate U.S. government agencies with the stated goal of eliminating what the Trump White House deems wasteful (or woke) spending. Theyre already on the ground at the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. And theyre spreading further every day. DOGE has also said it aims to modernize government systems, which implies altering the code within those government systems. That could bring members of the organization face-to-face with something theyve potentially never seen before: COBOL, or common business-oriented language. COBOL was developed in the 1950s by a private-public partnership that included the Pentagon and IBM. The goal was to create a universal, English-like programming language for business applications. In the decades since, private-sector businesses have moved away from the language. The code is difficult and costly to maintain, and was built for batch processing, which means it doesnt integrate well with more modern cloud-based and real-time applications. But its a totally different story in Washington, D.C. Indeed, despite a number of modernization pushes in recent decades, the language is still widely used within government mainframe systems that manage all kinds of government financial transactions, from tax payments and refunds to Social Security benefits to Medicare reimbursements. The systems, if maintained correctly, are extremely reliable. COBOL acts as the glue that holds the components of the mainframe together, the code that orchestrates its work with apps and databases, as one expert told me. The mainframes themselves are loaded with redundancy and fault-tolerance features so they never break down. COBOL-based mainframe systems are also still widely used in regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare. Some people worry that Musks young engineers might blunder into the COBOL code base and make changes without understanding the full effects. Normally, any changes to the code underlying government systems has to follow a set of detailed business requirements written by other agency staffers. Any delays or downtime in these systems has direct effects on real peoples lives. Its also very possible that software engineers and others within the agencies will impress upon Musk and his DOGE advisers the importance of respecting established norms. But Musk and his people are, if anything, unpredictable. Should the DOGE staffers attempt to rewrite sections of the COBOL code, it could lead to unintended consequences, including major disruptions to critical government services. And unintended consequences are very possible, if not probable. Itll break and then well figure out what to fix In a way, the COBOL language symbolizes the disconnect of worldviews of the players in the DOGE drama. Maintaining the COBOL code is a process of translating new policies or regulations into detailed business requirements, translating the requirements into computer code, arduously testing the code in a safe environment, putting the final product into production, and documenting its purpose in the system. Since COBOL hasnt been part of the computer science curriculum since the 1990s, the people who do this work are usually older, and their numbers are diminishing. Musk and the DOGE staff, most of whom are young software engineers from Silicon Valley circles, are used to a very different move fast and break things process, says Don Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, which helps governments modernize complex services and products. You look at the way, for example, the early Tesla full self-driving software was put together, and we have a culture in the tech industry of, Let’s hack it together, let’s get something that works well enough, and then it’ll break and then we’ll figure out what to fix, says Hon, who has helped troubleshoot and modernize state and federal government systems, including Medicaid and logistics at the Defense Department. To be sure, that philosophy has yielded a lot of success for entrepreneurs like Musk in the past, Hon says. But that sort of calculated risk means something very different for government systems on which hundreds of millions of people rely. Engineers whove spent their entire professional life developing consumer-facing software may not be equipped to draw a correct risk profile for implementing changes to a government payments system. You’ve got someone who might say, What’s one missed Social Security payment or what’s one missed Medicaid payment, because we can fix it later, right? Hon says. What’s one missed federal payment that the states then disperse weekly to, for example, a service provider for social services? (DOGE did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.) The COBOL software is brittle. If, for instance, the code is updated with a new policy that conflicts with an existing one, the whole system can crash. Some systems dont have automated testing routines, so software engineers must program tests by hand and go through the time-consuming task of testing new code before it gets implemented. This is complicated by the fact that some parts of the code arent properly documented, so people whove not yet seen itsuch as DOGE engineersmay not know what the code was written to do. Without whistleblowers from inside the agency, it may be hard to know if the DOGE people are attempting to alter system code. Earlier this month the Trump administration and the Treasury Department claimed that Musk and his cadre of DOGE operatives have merely read only access to government computer systemsand will make no changes to government systems or operations without the express consent of the president. But in a recent court filing, the highest-ranking DOGE point person at the Treasury Department, Thomas Krause, admitted that another DOGE staffer at the department, Marko Elez, had indeed been granted read and write access to the code, allowing him to alter it. (Krause said this access was given by accident.) Krause also said in the same court filing that his job is to understand how the agencys end-to-end payment systems and financial report tools work, [and] recommend ways to update and modernize those systems. This implies an intet to alter system code. Such an effort could easily touch the COBOL code working within the mainframe systems. In the court filing, Krause said hes been working closely with Treasury staffers to find ways of advancing Trumps and Musks objectives while still respecting the agencys data privacy and security guidelines. But DOGE officials already pushed out the Treasurys highest-ranking career staffer, David Lebryk, after he refused them access to the agencys payment systems. Krause likely can dispatch any internal objector with one phone call if they dont comply with DOGEs wishes. But the DOGE team may think twice before firing the veteran staffers who speak COBOL and know where the bodies are buried. In the end, COBOLs incomprehensibility and brittleness may be features, not bugs.
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