Lifeboat Foundation

A first-of-its-kind flexible sensor turns a pair of earbuds into a device capable of recording brain activity and analyzing sweat, making them useful for diagnosing diseases and health monitoring.

The background: Health monitoring wearables can measure our blood pressure, track our heart rates, and even detect infections before we start to feel sick, helping us take better care of ourselves and potentially even giving us a way to prevent the spread of diseases.

The devices are useless if no one wants to wear them, though, so finding designs that are comfortable and easy to integrate into daily life is key. Because earbuds are already popular, researchers have used them as the basis for health monitoring devices that record brain activity to predict strokes, epileptic seizures, or Parkinson’s disease.

Epilepsy is a neurological condition that causes people to have recurring seizures. Epileptic seizures may be mild and barely noticeable or stronger ones, causing severe muscle spasms or loss of consciousness. These may last a few seconds or several minutes. Anyone can develop epilepsy at any point in their life.

Stanford researchers have finally figured out how a therapy that blocks a single protein can reverse age-related muscle loss in mice — and the discovery suggests seniors might not be the only ones who could benefit from it.

Age-related muscle loss: People tend to start losing muscle mass and strength in their 30s, and from 50 on, you could be losing up to 10% of your muscle mass every decade.

While it is possible to regain lost muscle through exercise, health issues can make hitting the weights a challenge. If left unaddressed, though, age-related muscle loss can lead to decreased mobility and weakness, which increases the risk of falls or other injuries.

OpenAI has confirmed that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is behind “periodic outages” affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has been experiencing sporadic outages for the past 24 hours. Users who attempted to access the service have been greeted with a message stating that “ChatGPT is at capacity right now,” and others, including TechCrunch, have been unable to log into the service.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially blamed the issue on interest in the platform’s new features, unveiled at the company’s first developer conference on Monday, “far outpacing our expectations.” OpenAI said the issue was fixed at approximately 1 p.m. PST on November 8.

Chptr, an app for sharing and holding onto memories of lost loved ones, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding. The app is designed to give people a way to encapsulate the life of their loved ones by inviting others to share and store stories, images, audio messages, videos and more all in one place.

The startup was founded in 2020 by Rehan Choudhry, who came up with the idea for the app when he was helping his wife, a news anchor at CBS New York, put together video tributes for the first victims of COVID-19 in New York City. Choudhry told TechCrunch in an interview that the pair was reaching out to the families, friends, neighbors and colleagues of the victims to paint a picture of what their life was like.

“The thing I realized after talking to a lot of families was that these videos served as almost a reunion point for people that they will continue to grieve around,” Choudhry said. “We noticed that the grieving process that would normally take 90 days was extended to months because they had something to rally around. So then the question for me was why doesn’t everyone on the planet have access to this because we all have smartphones and social media. So I went down the rabbit hole of discovery and it brought me to Chptr.”

The technology that makes it possible, called semantic hearing, could pave the way for smarter hearing aids and earphones, allowing the wearer to filter out some sounds while boosting others.

The system, which is still in prototype, works by connecting off-the-shelf noise-canceling headphones to a smartphone app. The microphones embedded in these headphones, which are used to cancel out noise, are repurposed to also detect the sounds in the world around the wearer. These sounds are then played back to a neural network, which is running on the smartphone; then certain sounds are boosted or suppressed in real time, depending on the user’s preferences. It was developed by researchers from the University of Washington, who presented the research at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) last week.

The team trained the network on thousands of audio samples from online data sets and sounds collected from various noisy environments. Then they taught it to recognize 20 everyday sounds, such as a thunderstorm, a toilet flushing, or glass breaking.

Amazon is reportedly investing millions in training Olympus.

Stockcam/iStock.

The Information reported that Olympus will be Amazon’s answer to the AI leaps made by OpenAI and Microsoft in selling similar software to corporate customers. Another report by Reuters said that the company is investing millions in training Olympus, according to the two people familiar with the matter.

Webb’s observations have offered key insights into the intricate process of rocky planet formation.

NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

This high-powered telescope focused its lens on the cosmic disks (protoplanetary disk), where planets came into being, and detected the presence of water vapor.

Continue reading “James Webb: NASA’s time-traveler telescope now traces roots of Earth” »

The process of washing has inspired a new method for engineering efficient lithium-metal batteries.

Vi73777/iStock.

Scientists have long been trying to successfully switch from lithium-ion to lithium-metal batteries. However, there is one issue that has been causing a delay in this transition: traditional electrolytes do not perform well in metal-based batteries.

Continue reading “Soap inspires scientists to create longer-lasting batteries” »