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Sign language has helped the hearing-impaired communicate for many centuries, way before it was formalised and officially recognised, but this long-standing language of gestures has now been given a 21st-century technological upgrade. Saudi designer and media artist Hadeel Ayoub has invented a smart glove that recognises hand movements and converts them into the relevant text.

Much like Google Translate can give anyone a basic grasp of a foreign language in an instant, this glove is designed to help sign language users make themselves understood by those who can’t usually interpret it.

Five flex sensors sit on the fingers, monitoring how they’re being manipulated, while an accelerometer integrated into the fabric of the glove figures out how the hand is being held and the direction in which it’s pointing. Through three successive prototypes, the glove has been made thinner, lighter, and faster, and the latest version includes a text-to-speech chip to vocalise the words as they’re signed.

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The truck has smart systems including radars, cameras and active speed regulators and works without a human driver — although one has to be in the driver’s seat and take the wheel if necessary.

The standard Mercedes-Benz Actros, fitted with the intelligent “Highway Pilot” system, travelled 14 kilometres (about nine miles) on the A8 motorway, with a driver in the cabin but his hands off the wheel.

“Today’s premiere is a further important step towards the market maturity of autonomously driving trucks -– and towards the safe, sustainable road freight transport of the future,” said Wolfgang Bernhard, board member responsible for Daimler Trucks and Buses.

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The new finding, a clay tablet, reveals a previously unknown “chapter” of the epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia. This new section brings both noise and color to a forest for the gods that was thought to be a quiet place in the work of literature. The newfound verse also reveals details about the inner conflict the poem’s heroes endured.

In 2011, the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Slemani, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, purchased a set of 80 to 90 clay tablets from a known smuggler. The museum has been engaging in these backroom dealings as a way to regain valuable artifacts that disappeared from Iraqi historical sites and museums since the start of the American-led invasion of that country, according to the online nonprofit publication Ancient History Et Cetera.

Among the various tablets purchased, one stood out to Farouk Al-Rawi, a professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. The large block of clay, etched with cuneiform writing, was still caked in mud when Al-Rawi advised the Sulaymaniyah Museum to purchase artifact for the agreed upon $800. [In Photos: See the Treasures of Mesopotamia].

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Moore’s Law is, and shall be for a very long time, the law of the land.
Singularity: +1, Luddites: Who cares, they don’t use computers.
wink

Schematic of a set of molybdenum (M0) end-contacted nanotube transistors (credit: Qing Cao et al./Science)

IBM Research has announced a “major engineering breakthrough” that could lead to carbon nanotubes replacing silicon transistors in future computing technologies.

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Could discovering how neural stem cells protect themselves from damage lead to treatment that helps combat aging?

We now know that stem cells in the brain do in fact divide, and that this regenerative capacity begins to falter with age. The majority of our cells don’t divide, and the bulk of division falls to stem cell niches dotted across our body. Stem cell populations do age, but they’re more resistant than ‘normal’ cells are, and they produce higher levels of telomerase — enabling them to divide for years.

How do brain stem cells remain free of damage?

Neural stem cells aren’t perfectly protected from aging, but they’re generally a hardier bunch. Scientists from the University of Zurich have now discovered that part of this aging resistance in neural stem cells is due to a ‘diffusion barrier’. When they divide, these cells produce a barrier which filters out damaged proteins to one side, allowing the new cell to be damage-free.

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