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Research conducted by a team of scientists from Kaunas universities, Lithuania, revealed that low-frequency ultrasound influences blood parameters. The findings suggest that ultrasound’s effect on haemoglobin can improve oxygen’s transfer from the lungs to bodily tissues.

The research was undertaken on 300 blood samples collected from 42 pulmonary patients. The samples were exposed to six different low-frequency ultrasound modes at the Institute of Mechatronics of Kaunas University of Technology (KTU).

The changes in 20 blood parameters were registered using the blood analysing equipment at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU) laboratories. For the prediction of ultrasound exposure, artificial intelligence, i.e. analysis of variance (ANOVA), non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis method and machine learning algorithms were applied. The calculations were made at the KTU Artificial Intelligence Centre.

In the XXI century, the world of orbital launchers has started a revolution, a fundamental change of paradigm: the replacement of expendable rockets with reusable ones is well underway. This presentation summarizes the situation at the beginning of year 2024.

A short bio.
Alberto Cavallo is an Electrical Engineer, graduated at the Politecnico di Torino in 1985. He began his activity with designing electric systems in Fiat Engineering, the engineering and construction company of the FIAT Group, moving soon to control and automation systems in the same company. He was involved in all business areas of the company, which included revamping and new projects of car factories for the FIAT Group as well as large infrastructures, power and cogeneration plants for external clients. Among the projects of that time were the new FIAT factories in Melfi and Pratola Serra, the high speed railways Torino-Milano and Bologna-Firenze, the district heating system of Torino Sud, combined cycle power plants for several hundred megawatts in Italy and in Brazil. Since Fiat Engineering was transferred from the FIAT Group to a new EPC group and then merged with a large EPC company in Milan, he has been involved in large oil and gas and petrochemical projects all over the world. Besides his professional activity, he has always taken part in several cultural activities. He was a member of the Associations of Alumni of the Liceo Classico Vittorio Alfieri of Turin, active in promoting humanistic culture as well as its connection to the technical and scientific area. He manages his own website www.eurinome.it (in Italian only) about philosophy, science and politics/geopolitics. Due to this he got in contact with Adriano Autino and his TDF, then becoming one of the founding members of Space Renaissance International. Besides several papers in his professional area he has written several articles for his own site, for TDF and SRI, coauthoring the book “Three Theses for the Space Renaissance” with Adriano Autino and Patrick Q. Collins. He is currently member of the Board of SRI.

Facial recognition is a technology that can identify or verify a person’s identity based on their face. It can be used for various purposes, such as unlocking smartphones, verifying identities at airports, or finding missing persons. However, facial recognition also seriously threatens personal privacy, as it can be used to track, monitor, or profile people without their consent or knowledge. For example, some governments or companies may use facial recognition to spy on citizens, customers, or competitors or to collect and sell their data.

How can we prevent facial recognition from invading our privacy?

To protect our facial privacy, some researchers have proposed different methods to prevent facial recognition from working. These methods, collectively called anti-facial recognition (AFR), aim to hide, distort, or replace the faces in images or videos. For instance, some AFR methods use masks, makeup, glasses, or hats to cover or alter facial features. Other AFR methods use software to blur, pixelate, or swap the faces in digital media.

Gemini is the new Bard

Bard, which debuted in 2022, is Google’s attempt to create a generative AI chat experience that can do anything from writing poems and stories to generating images and code. The chatbot has been constantly evolving, adding new features and capabilities. Last year, Google upgraded Bard with Gemini, a multimodal AI model that can handle text, images, audio, and video. Last month, Bard added an image generator to create realistic pictures from text descriptions.

Recent technological advances, such as increasingly sophisticated drones and cameras, have opened exciting new possibilities for cinematography. Most notably, film directors can now shoot scenes from a wide range of angles that were previously inaccessible and in far higher resolution.

Researchers at University of Zaragoza and Stanford University recently developed CineMPC, a new cinematographic system that relies on a fully autonomous drone that carries a cinematographic to film multiple targets autonomously, while following a director’s instructions. The platform modulates various drone and camera parameters to satisfy these instructions. The team’s innovative system, outlined in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, could bring a wave of innovation to the and other sectors that can benefit from high-quality video footage.

“Existing solutions for autonomous drone cinematography revealed a common oversight, namely, none provided over camera intrinsic parameters (i.e., , aperture, focus distance),” Pablo Pueyo Ramon, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.