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Aug 17, 2019

Artificial throat could someday help mute people ‘speak’

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, wearables

Most people take speech for granted, but it’s actually a complex process that involves both motions of the mouth and vibrations of folded tissues, called vocal cords, within the throat. If the vocal cords sustain injuries or other lesions, a person can lose the ability to speak. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have developed a wearable artificial throat that, when attached to the neck like a temporary tattoo, can transform throat movements into sounds.

Scientists have developed detectors that measure movements on human skin, such as pulse or heartbeat. However, the devices typically can’t convert these motions into sounds. Recently, He Tian, Yi Yang, Tian-Ling Ren and colleagues developed a prototype artificial throat with both capabilities, but because the device needed to be taped to the skin, it wasn’t comfortable enough to wear for long periods of time. So the researchers wanted to develop a thinner, skin-like artificial throat that would adhere to the neck like a temporary tattoo.

To make their artificial throat, the researchers laser-scribed graphene on a thin sheet of polyvinyl alcohol film. The flexible device measured 0.6 by 1.2 inches, or about double the size of a person’s thumbnail. The researchers used water to attach the film to the skin over a volunteer’s throat and connected it with electrodes to a small armband that contained a circuit board, microcomputer, power amplifier and decoder. When the volunteer noiselessly imitated the throat motions of speech, the instrument converted these movements into emitted sounds, such as the words “OK” and “No.” The researchers say that, in the future, mute people could be trained to generate signals with their throats that the device would translate into speech.

Aug 17, 2019

Turning waste into bioplastics, Mexico strikes green gold

Posted by in categories: food, materials

TEPIC, Mexico (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — Tequila, avocado and corn are proving their worth beyond Mexican fiesta staples as key components for a fast-growing bioplastics market, with companies transforming waste from processing food crops into products such as bags, plates and even car parts.

Bioplastics make up less than 5 percent of the millions of tonnes of plastic produced each year around the world.

But as governments and consumers fret about the damage plastic is doing to the world’s oceans, scientists are experimenting by converting materials from cactus to shrimp shells and human waste into alternative greener plastics.

Aug 17, 2019

Speech Synthesis from neural decoding of spoken sentences

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cyborgs, robotics/AI

Technology that translates cortical activity into speech would be transformative for people unable to communicate as a result of neurological impairment. Decoding speech from neural activity is challenging because speaking requires extremely precise and dynamic control of multiple vocal tract articulators on the order of milliseconds. Here, we designed a neural decoder that explicitly leverages the continuous kinematic and sound representations encoded in cortical activity to generate fluent and intelligible speech. A recurrent neural network first decoded direct cortical recordings into vocal tract movement representations, and then transformed those representations to acoustic speech output. Modeling the articulatory dynamics of speech significantly enhanced performance with limited data. Naïve listeners were able to accurately identify and transcribe decoded sentences. Additionally, speech decoding was not only effective for audibly produced speech, but also when participants silently mimed speech. These results advance the development of speech neuroprosthetic technology to restore spoken communication in patients with disabling neurological disorders.

Aug 17, 2019

PALM Ebola Clinical Trial Stopped Early as Regeneron’s REGN-EB3 Therapy Shows Superiority to ZMapp in Preventing Ebola Deaths

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

TARRYTOWN, N.Y., Aug. 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) today announced that the Company was informed by study investigators that a randomized, controlled trial evaluating four investigational therapies for Ebola virus infection was stopped early because.

Aug 17, 2019

Microsoft Discovers ‘Critical’ Windows 10 Vulnerabilities Affecting 800M

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, futurism

In a recent Security Response Center update from Microsoft, the company detailed the discovery of two “critical” Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities.

The vulnerabilities are “wormable”, meaning that any future malware that exploits these could jump from computer to computer without any need for users sending it across.

RELATED: MICROSOFT JOINS APPLE, AMAZON AS $1 TRILLION COMPANY

Aug 17, 2019

Samsung Releasing Smartphone Using Graphene Battery for 15–30 Minute Charging in 2020

Posted by in categories: biological, engineering, mobile phones, transportation

Samsung will release a smartphone using new fast chargoing graphene battery technology that can fully charge in under 30 minutes according to gadgets leaker Evan Blass (@EVLeaks).

Samsung will release a smartphone powered by new graphene battery technology that can fully charge in under 30 minutes in 2020, or possibly 2021. This will be three to five times faster than today’s lithium-ion batteries which take about 90 minutes to charge.

In 2017, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) announced they had developed a “graphene ball,” a unique battery material that enables a 45% increase in capacity, and five times faster-charging speeds than standard lithium-ion batteries. The breakthrough provides promise for the next generation secondary battery market, particularly related to mobile devices and electric vehicles. In its research, SAIT collaborated closely with Samsung SDI as well as a team from Seoul National University’s School of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

Aug 17, 2019

NASA Robots to Compete in Underground Challenge in Mining Tunnels

Posted by in categories: drones, military, robotics/AI, space

Robots are about to go underground — for a competition anyways.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense dedicated to developing new emerging technologies, is holding a challenge intended to develop technology for first responders and the military to map, navigate, and search underground. But the technology developed for the competition could also be used in future NASA missions to caves and lava tubes on other planets.

Continue reading “NASA Robots to Compete in Underground Challenge in Mining Tunnels” »

Aug 17, 2019

Green City Solutions

Posted by in category: futurism

Vertikale Luftreinhaltung und Marketing, nachhaltige Lösungen.

Aug 17, 2019

A Tech Expert Says Google Chrome Has Become Spy Software

Posted by in categories: government, internet, surveillance

You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you?

Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web.

This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.

Aug 17, 2019

How Hotels use Big Data to Generate New Revenues

Posted by in category: information science

Hotel revenue management and use of analytics for room sales has remained largely unchanged for decades since the early 1980s when hotels started looking at yield and how they could optimize the revenue each room could generate. By the mid-1990’s, Marriott’s successful execution of revenue management strategies were adding between $150 — $200 million in annual revenue and thus marked the beginning of data intelligence to drive new revenue.

Fast forward to 2016 — and the part insight, part intuition, part data-driven approach to revenue management largely hasn’t moved into the new age of big data for most hoteliers.

There is a new application of data modelling hotels are utilizing to see big gains in RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room) and this comes through price differentiation. That is — dynamically displaying different room rates for every person that views your hotel search price query.