The deep sea is the most challenging and least explored place on earth. Many of the deep-sea creatures, such as jellyfish, octopus, and squid have soft bodies, thus it’s difficult to capture them without damaging their body parts using existing underwater tools. to prevent this problem, researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study developed a device that safely grabs delicate deep-sea creatures inside a folding polyhedral enclosure and then ejects them gently without causing any damage of their body parts.

The grabber is made of five identical 3D-printed polymer petals attached to a series of rotating joints, which link together and create a scaffold. One a torque is applied to the point where the petals meet using a single motor, it makes the entire structure rotate about its joints and fold up into a hollow dodecahedron. The design of the joints and the shape of the petals direct the folding. It can be used by attaching it to a remote-controlled underwater vehicle or any other submersible.

“We approach these animals as if they are works of art: would we cut pieces out of the Mona Lisa to study it? No — we’d use the most innovative tools available. These deep-sea organisms, some being thousands of years old, deserve to be treated with a similar gentleness when we’re interacting with them,” said collaborating author David Gruber, Ph.D.

The team tested the grabber in an aquarium and deep in Monterey Canyon, where they successfully collected and released moon jellyfish. Although the device can only hold the sea creature in place, researchers are planning to include additional hardware, such as DNA swabs and 3D scanners to examine the creatures.

The research was backed by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation. The study was published in Science Robotics.

Originally published at thetechnews.com on July 22, 2018.

This Harvard robot makes studying deep-sea creatures easier than ever was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Would you wear a glass that’s not made for your eyes? Certainly not. Then, why do you use a headphone, which is not made for your ears? Sounds weird, right? When it comes to ears, we all have our unique sensitivities. Considering this, MF Jebsen Electronics and AumeoAudio together developed Heari, world’s first tailored audio-neckband headphones. Inspired by the success of Aumeo’s headphone personalizer, Heari integrates the technology to improve and customize all sounds you hear throughout the day.

TAILORED SOUND

Instead of just offering highest quality sound for your favorite music, it provides perfect sound-quality when you’re talking to the phone, and enhance your experience of sound by customizing based on your audio profile.

Powered by Aumeo’s algorithm and software, Heari comes with the most remarkable feature a headphone could have — its ability to customize sounds based on each of your ear’s hearing sensitivity. It calculates each ear by eight frequencies in real-time and tailors the sounds accordingly.

NOT JUST ANOTHER FASHIONABLE HEADPHONE

Besides being just another fashionable neckband headphone, Heari also integrates the latest hardware technologies, such as Qualcomm’s premium CSR8675 Bluetooth DSP chip, 3 built-in microphones, 24-bit audio processing, as well as 10 hours’ battery life. With the compatible Heari app, users can set up their profile within two minutes, and the app will tailor sounds by communicating with Heari.

The headphone is currently available on Kickstarter. You can pre-order one for $99 on a super early bird discount and hope to get the product in December.

Originally published at thetechnews.com on July 14, 2018.

This headphone gives you tailored audio experience based on your hearing sensitivity was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the past few years, UDOO has been making DIY boards with a bunch of impressive features. And now the team has developed UDOO Bolt, a more powerful portable, superminicomputer.

Powered by a built-in AMD Ryzen Embedded V1202B 3.2 GHz SoC processor and a Radeon Vega 3 graphics card, this 4.7-inch little monster is able to run AAA gaming, high-end VR, 3D rendering, as well as cryptocurrency mining at high speeds. When equipped with a chunk of RAM it’s “almost twice as powerful as a MacBook Pro 13-inch equipped with an Intel i5, and three times more powerful than a Mac Mini,” said the creators.

The UDOO Bolt might little, but could do things a powerful computer can do. With a USB keyboard, mouse and HDMI out to the monitor, you can use it like a mini workstation. It runs Windows 10 or any 64-bit Linux and is able to handle four monitors at once.

The hacker board comes with 32GB of eMMC 5.0 storage, two SODIMM slots for up to 32GB of DDR4–2400 memory, two HDMI 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, as well as two USB 3.1 Type-C ports.

The UDOO Bolt is currently available on Kickstarter with two variants to choose from, BOLT V8 packs Ryzen V1605B with Vega V8 graphics and BOLT V3 features AMD Ryzen V1202B with Vega 3 GPU. You can pre-order it for $229 or up and can expect the product to be shipped in December 2018.

Originally published at thetechnews.com on July 5, 2018.

UDOO Bolt: the portable mini supercomputer on a board was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Trees are being chopped down inconsiderably all over the world. Illegal logging has become such a huge problem these days that it needs to be stopped immediately. So, in order to prevent deforestation, environmental advocates are running a project to create a DNA Database of trees, which could help determine if the logs being sold were illegally harvested.

The experimental project is a collaboration between the Norwegian government and the United States Forest Service’s international program. Initially, the project will focus on building a database for the bigleaf maple tree on the west coast. Bigleaf maple trees are mostly used to make guitars, furniture, and veneers, and are quite popular for fetching top dollar. You can easily understand why the poachers are interested in such trees.

To create the database, the World Resources Institute has already recorded several populations of the bigleaf maple, along with the unique characteristics of each population. And, thanks to the volunteers from Adventures Scientists who helped with outdoor data collection.

Image Credit: Adventure Scientists

“The goal with this is that we have enough samples distributed widely enough across this geographic range that we can say we’re pretty sure that this was sample from a national forest in Washington,” said Meaghan Parker-Forney, who is a science officer at the World Resources Institute’s Forest Legality Initiative. “If somebody’s claiming it came from Northern California, we can say no, that’s actually not true.”

YOUR CONTRIBUTION MATTERS

While the experts are gathered to create the DNA Database, it relies on volunteers and citizen scientists as well. And the best part is, you can also help gather samples for DNA testing. All you have to do is complete an online training course on how to collect samples and pass the test. besides, you’ll have to use an app while you’re in the field to collect samples. The app will ask you a few questions about the specimen you’ve collected. Your contribution could be a vital DNA evidence to prevent any future deforestation.

The Norwegian government and the U.S. Forest Service hope to expand this project to places like Indonesia and Peru, where illegal logging is extremely uncontrolled. The more people volunteer, the richer the database will be.

Originally published at thetechnews.com on June 24, 2018.

DNA Database to thwart deforestation was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ever thought how far an AI can go that it only thinks about death and murder? Well, your nightmare just got real, thanks to MIT geniuses. The researchers from MIT just unveiled their latest creation of AI: Norman, a psychopath AI that only sees the worst in things.

Named after the main character in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Norman is basically an algorithm meant to show how the data behind the AI matters.

Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian, and Iyad Rahwan from MIT fed the AI content about death from the darkest corners of Reddit, a popular message board platform. Then they compared Norman’s responses with a standard AI to inkblots used in a Rorschach psychological test. The responses Norman showed was quite alarming compared to that of a standard AI.

For example, for the image below, Norman sees “man is murdered by machine gun in broad daylight,” while a standard AI sees “a black and white photo of a baseball glove.”

Image Credit: MIT

And for this image, a standard AI sees “a couple of people standing next to each other,” While Norman sees “pregnant woman falls at construction story.” Shocking, right?

Image Credit: MIT

According to MIT, the psychopathic tendency of Norman represents “a case study on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine learning algorithms.”

The reason behind this experiment was to show how dangerous an artificial intelligence could be if you trained it with wrong data. In 2016, Microsoft launched a Twitter chatbot named Tay, which was told to be a social, cultural, and technical experiment. However, when some Twitter users provoked it to say inappropriate and racist words, it worked. Soon the bot started picking racist languages and turned into a public relation disaster.

MIT scientists think it’s possible for Norman to retrain the way it thinks via learning from human feedback. Despite the reason behind this experiment, this is quite creepy. There’s no doubt that human extinction could be in danger with such a psychopath AI around.

Artificial IntelligenceFeaturedmitNormanPsychopsychopath AIReddit

Originally published at thetechnews.com on June 10, 2018.

The darkest side of technology: psychopath AI was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We all have to sit for a blood test once in our lifetime. It’s a common process to detect any disease in our body. However, doctors could only find a disease in a blood test when our body starts showing symptoms. Now, researchers at the world’s largest gathering said a new technique of blood test could let doctors screen for cancers before patients show any kind of symptom.

liquid biopsy

Known as a “liquid biopsy,” this new blood test screens 10 different types of cancers by detecting the very small amount of DNA released by cancer cells into the bloodstream. So far, the test has specifically good results in detecting ovarian and pancreatic cancers. Both of them have significantly lower rates of mortality when detected early enough to perform surgery to remove cancers.

“This is potentially the holy grail of cancer research, to find cancers that are currently hard to cure at an earlier stage when they are easier to cure,” said Dr. Eric Klein, lead author of the research from Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute. “We hope this test could save many lives.”

Scientists from the Stanford University, who also contributed to the study, attended the annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists in Chicago.

The research examined the cases of more than 1600 people. Of them, 878 people had been newly diagnosed with a disease, and 749 people were cancer-free without any diagnosis. The test correctly detected the disease in at least 4 out of 5 patients, with most accuracy in ovarian, liver, pancreatic, and gallbladder cancers.

For other cancers, the blood test was less accurate. It detected head and neck cancer in 56% of patients, lung cancer in 59% of patients, and bowel cancer in 2 out of 3 patients. Tests for myeloma and lymphoma were a bit less accurate, with 73% and 77% detection rates.

According to the researchers, the results of the blood test were promising, but further clinical development was necessary. Besides, they needed more test subjects to gain more accuracy in a study on this type. However, this study is a hope for everyone as a possible universal screening tool. In the near future, blood tests like this could accurately detect cancers in their early stages.

blood testCancercancer detectionFeaturedliquid biopsy

Originally published at thetechnews.com on June 3, 2018.

New blood test could detect cancers before they develop was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is there anything the AI can’t do? Starting from editing photo to smelling explosive to detecting cancer, there are a lot more things can be done by computer. And now it can even change the style of music as well. Researchers from Facebook AI Research (FAIR) just unveiled a neural network, which can convert music from one genre, style, and set of instruments used to another.

From now on, if you want to change the style of any music, just ask the AI and it will do that for you. For instance, if you choose a pop song as an input, the neural network can turn it into a heavy metal one.

“Our results present abilities that are, as far as we know, unheard of. Asked to convert one musical instrument to another, our network is on par or slightly worse than professional musicians. Many times, people find it hard to tell which is the original audio file and which is the output of the conversion that mimics a completely different instrument,” the team’s whitepaper says.

Unsupervised learning method

Although there are lots of research going to teach the AI to do things like humans, FAIR is the first team that developed an unsupervised learning method to recreate high-integrity music using a neural network. the team reached the integrity level by educating the neural network about how to auto-encode audio. For the AI it’s not a style transfer, just a conversion of a bunch of noise into another bunch of noise.

The research team says, “We distance ourselves from style transfer and do not try to employ such methods since we believe that a melody played by a piano is not similar except for audio texture differences to the same melody sung by a chorus. The mapping has to be done at a higher level and the modifications are not simple local changes.”

The auto-encoding is quite a complex method, which lets the neural network audio from inputs it’s not aware of. So, the network doesn’t change the music by memorizing notes or by matching pitch. Instead, it’s unsupervised learning method changes the music given as input using high-level semantics interpretation.

In the past few years, artificial intelligence has come so far. It can now even clone human voice, book a restaurant for you, and what not. The music FAIR’s AI created could be mistaken for actual humans’ creation. It’s likely we are heading towards a world where we won’t be able to believe our own eyes, voices, and even ears.

Artificial Intelligenceauto-encodingFacebook AI ResearchFAIRFeaturedhigh-level semantics interpretationneural networkunsupervised learning method

Originally published at thetechnews.com on May 23, 2018.

This neural network can change the style of music was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Instax SQ10 from Fujifilm is already available in the market, a hybrid of analog and digital camera that lets you take square-format instant photos. However, if you’re an analog lover, the company has covered you as well. The company has unveiled Instax Square SQ6, its first analog camera that shoots 62-mm square (2.4-in) photos.

Like all of Fujifilm’s other Instax camera (except SQ10), SQ6 is fully analog, means you will be shooting straight to film and will get a film print every time you press the shutter release. Every shot you take will be unique and one of a kind.

Image Credit: Fujifilm

Specifications

The camera covers three focus modes, such as Close-ups (0.3 to 0.5 m/1 to 1.6 ft.), Normal (0.5 to 2 m/1.6 to 6.6 ft.), and landscapes (2 m/ 6.6 ft. to infinity). Besides, it has a selfie mode, which adjusts the brightness and focuses on close-up portraits. With the help of a small camera next to the lens, you can frame your shot from the front. Plus, a tripod mount and 10 seconds self-timer will help you set your own camera rig if you want to take a photo with a larger group than just yourself.

Image Credit: Fujifilm

No chance to ruin your photo

Instax Square SQ6 knows every shot is special to you, thence it includes three color filters — orange, green, and purple, which can fit over the flash to give a different look. Its auto-exposure control feature lets you manually tweak the settings to get a perfectly exposed photo. Its sensor detects the surrounding brightness and adjusts the shutter speed accordingly. It means you won’t end up losing the background to darkness.

Image Credit: Fujifilm

The Instax Square SQ6 will arrive on Mat 25thwith three color options — pearl white, blush gold, and graphite gray. The price is set to $130, which is less than half the cost of SQ10. To me, the price is quite okay help you give up some digital conveniences and have an all analog experience.

analogcamerasFeaturedfujifilmInstagramInstax Square SQ6

Originally published at thetechnews.com on May 15, 2018.

Fujifilm’s Instax Square SQ6 is the Instagram for analog lovers was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An online ballot to attend Stephen Hawking’s memorial service opened Saturday, allowing the time travelers to apply.

After a lifetime exploring the mysteries of black holes, the origins of the universe, and the nature of time itself, the renowned scientist died on March 14 at the age of 76. His ashes will forever be interred alongside the graves of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

TIME TRAVELERS ARE ALSO INVITED

Anyone over 12 can sign up for the event, but only 1,000 will be selected. To complete the registration, one must include their birthday, which can be any day up to December 31, 2038.

The quirk that allows people born more than 20 years into the future to apply was noticed by London travel blogger IanVisits.

“Professor Hawking once threw a party for time travellers, to see if any would turn up if he posted the invite after the party,” he wrote in his site. “None did, but it seems perfect that the memorial website allows people born in the future to attend the service. Look out for time travellers at the Abbey.”

IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE?

At the Seattle Science Festival in 2012, Hawking claimed to have the experimental evidence that time travel isn’t possible. “I gave a party for time-travelers, but I didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came,” he said.

We are not sure if it’s another time travel experiment, or simply a programming error. It could also be a digital technical problem known as “The Year 2038 Problem.” Whether the time travel is possible or not, it would be better for the travelers from future to stay at home as it could “trigger a bolt of radiation that would destroy the spaceship,” warned Hawking.

The ceremony will take place on June 15, 2018. After the service, Westminster Abbey will be open to the public, so they can pay their respects at his grave.

Originally published at thetechnews.com on May 13, 2018.

You may expect some time travelers at Stephen Hawking’s memorial service was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Don’t give any offensive Facebook status about your boss. Well, we all know that rule. However, if you’re in China, don’t even think anything offensive about your boss. Chinese companies are using a specially designed hat to monitor brainwaves of their workers, then use those data to redesign the workflows and adjust the pace of production.

A report from the South China Morning Post says the companies are using such devices to monitor their employees for depression, any sign of stress that could hamper their workplace performance. If they detect any issue, the employee in question is assigned to a less stressful job or is told to take a day off if the situation is worse.

Enhance worker efficiency

Companies using this technology claim that making use of this tech has a positive impact on the performance of their employees. One of them is Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric, which says it can now adjust the length and number of breaks syncing with the employees’ individual needs.

Besides, some companies are using this tech for training purposes. At Ningbo Shenyang Logistics, trainee employees have to wear special brainwave monitoring helmets integrated into virtual reality devices that simulate different scenarios in the workplace.

Zhao Binjian, one of the company’s manager says that these helmets have significantly reduced the number of mistakes because of the improved understanding between the new workers and the company.

China is not the only country using this technology. In western countries, this technology is being used but for limited and voluntary tasks, such as archery. However, there are some limitations to this technology. It may not work perfectly as over-the-skin brain scanning through EEG is still very limited. The relationship between the signals it detects and human emotion is not clear yet. However, researchers hope that the influx of data will allow them to improve the algorithms of their devices.

Violate employees’ privacy

While the companies are so excited about this technology, employees are pretty worried, and they are somehow right. Employers may abuse their power to violate employees’ privacy.

“There is no law or regulation to limit the use of this kind of equipment in China. The employer may have a strong incentive to use the technology for higher profit, and the employees are usually in too weak a position to say no,” said Professor Qiao Zhian of Beijing Normal University.

“The selling of Facebook data is bad enough. Brain surveillance can take privacy abuse to a whole new level.”

Despite the limitations, this technology is giving the employers in China a new level of power over their employees. Employers are only concerned about the profit of their companies, not the privacy of the employees. And, this is not even logical to reassign or terminate workers because of their perceived emotions.

brainwaveChinaEEGFeaturedprivacyworkplace performance

Originally published at thetechnews.com on May 7, 2018.

Employed in China? Your boss may be reading your mind was originally published in The TechNews on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.