Category: Research

Harvard’s noodly robot fingers are great at grabbing jellyfish

[ad_1] Jellyfish are about 95 percent water, and the remaining five percent of their body is incredibly delicate. At the moment, most of the tools used to capture jellyfish in their natural habitat were developed for the marine oil and gas industries, and they often shred jellyfish to pieces when they attempt to capture them. […]

Waymo shares some of its self-driving car data to help researchers

[ad_1] The Waymo team explained this as an opportunity to improve the industry as a whole. It hoped he data would improve not just other self-driving vehicles, but also general concepts like perception, behavior prediction and scene understanding. Those could help with computer vision tasks, particularly robotics and other areas where recognizing objects could prove […]

App allows citizen scientists to track monarch butterfly migration

[ad_1] According to the researchers, monarch butterflies conduct one of the most dramatic migrations in the world. Each fall, the monarchs in New England turn south and begin a 3,000-mile journey to their overwintering grounds. But like all insects, monarchs are dwindling. The number that complete that long migration has fallen by 90 percent in […]

Facebook is inching closer to a think-to-type computer system

[ad_1] Brain-computer interface systems already exist, but require users to mentally select a letter at a time on a virtual keyboard, a process that tends to be very slow. The UCSF researchers, however, tried to use context to help the machines translate entire words and phrases. Researchers implanted electrical arrays on the surfaces of the […]

‘Quantum microphone’ detects sound at the atomic level

[ad_1] Phonons have previously been impossible to measure because traditional microphones are not nearly sensitive enough to pick them up. A microphone works by detecting when a sound wave interacts with a membrane, but the phonons are so small that they can’t be detected individually due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Instead of relying on […]

Scientists used phone accelerometer data to predict personality traits

[ad_1] In a paper published by the IEEE Computer Society, the researchers say how quickly, how far and when we walk — and if we pick up our phones during the night — reveals telling patterns. By correlating physical activity to personality traits, the team determined that “agreeable” people have random activity patterns and are […]

Huawei lays off two thirds of its US research division

[ad_1] An employee still employed at Futurewei told Reuters that work ground to a halt after the ban took effect. This still leaves roughly 1,200 Huawei employees in the US, although most of them are involved in customer support, public affairs and the supply chain. Moreover, the company’s American ranks have been shrinking ever since […]

A Bluetooth vulnerability could give hackers your location

[ad_1] The vulnerability has to do with the way Bluetooth-enabled devices pair with each other. In that relationship, one device serves as the central connection and the other plays a peripheral role. The peripheral device sends out a signal that contains a unique address — similar to an IP address — and data about the […]

Researchers create eye-tracking glasses that auto-focus where you look

[ad_1] The authors note that, over time, our ability to refocus at near distances worsens as the lenses in our eyes stiffen. The condition, called presbyopia, typically kicks in at around age 45 and it affects more than a billion people. It’s a key factor as to why many of us need to start wearing […]

MIT made an AI that can detect and create fake images

[ad_1] Named GANpaint Studio, the tool is available as a free demo. Rather than manually add a tree to an image, you can tell the tool where you want the object and it will add one that matches the scene. You can erase objects too, like stools from an image of a kitchen. It’s still […]