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New 'e-clothing' developed by researchers at Purdue University


Purdue University
Thu, 08 Aug 2019 19:17 UTC
e-Clothing
© Purdue UniversityPurdue University researchers have developed a new fabric innovation that allows the wearer to control electronic devices through the clothing.
West Lafayette, Ind. - A new addition to your wardrobe may soon help you turn on the lights and music - while also keeping you fresh, dry, fashionable, clean and safe from the latest virus that's going around.

Purdue University researchers have developed a new fabric innovation that allows wearers to control electronic devices through clothing.

"It is the first time there is a technique capable to transform any existing cloth item or textile into a self-powered e-textile containing sensors, music players or simple illumination displays using simple embroidery without the need for expensive fabrication processes requiring complex steps or expensive equipment," said Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Engineering and in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering.

The technology is featured in the July 25 edition of Advanced Functional Materials.

"For the first time, it is possible to fabricate textiles that can protect you from rain, stains, and bacteria while they harvest the energy of the user to power textile-based electronics," Martinez said. "These self-powered e-textiles also constitute an important advancement in the development of wearable machine-human interfaces, which now can be washed many times in a conventional washing machine without apparent degradation."
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Dig

Giant parrot Heracles inexpectatus lived in New Zealand 19 million years ago

Jenny Howard
National Geographic
Tue, 06 Aug 2019 10:30 UTC
giant parrot
© Brian ChooThe giant parrot Heracles inexpectatus lived 16 to 19 million years ago in what is now New Zealand. Researchers estimate that this giant parrot would have weighed more than 15 pounds. Small wrens called Kuiornis that were also native to New Zealand at the time sit at the parrot's feet.
More than 16 million years ago in what is now New Zealand, a giant bird died and sank to the bottom of a lake. Preserved in layers of sand and gray-blue clay, the bones of this behemoth have since been unearthed, revealing what is now the largest parrot known to science.

Of the 350 parrot species alive today, the heaviest is the kakapo, a flightless bird also native to New Zealand. But the extinct parrot, dubbed Heracles inexpectatus, crushes the kakapo's record: Described from two fossilized leg bones, the bird would have weighed 15 pounds and stood roughly three feet tall.

That's tall enough to be "able to pick the belly button lint out of your belly button," says Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia who is part of the team describing the find today in the journal Biology Letters.

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Galaxy

Can AI explain mysterious radio signals that keep hitting Earth?

Rafi Letzter
NBC News
Wed, 07 Aug 2019 08:59 UTC
radio bursts
Sudden shrieks of radio waves from deep space keep slamming into radio telescopes on Earth, spattering those instruments' detectors with confusing data. And now, astronomers are using artificial intelligence to pinpoint the source of the shrieks, in the hope of explaining what's sending them to Earth from — researchers suspect — billions of light-years across space.

Usually, these weird, unexplained signals are detected only after the fact, when astronomers notice out-of-place spikes in their data — sometimes years after the incident. The signals have complex, mysterious structures, patterns of peaks and valleys in radio waves that play out in just milliseconds. That's not the sort of signal astronomers expect to come from a simple explosion, or any other one of the standard events known to scatter spikes of electromagnetic energy across space. Astronomers call these strange signals fast radio bursts (FRBs). Ever since the first one was uncovered in 2007, using data recorded in 2001, there's been an ongoing effort to pin down their source. But FRBs arrive at random times and places, and existing human technology and observation methods aren't well-primed to spot these signals.

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Broom

Crashed Israeli lunar lander spilled tardigrades on the Moon

Eytan Halon
Jerusalem Post
Wed, 07 Aug 2019 13:28 UTC
Tardigrade
© iStockPhotoA Tardigrade, also known as a water bear, is a microscopic life-form that can survive in the vacuum of space.
When Israeli lunar lander Beresheet crash-landed onto the Moon in April, watched live by millions across the world, the spacecraft left a rather serious dent in the lunar surface.

According to a report published Monday by American magazine Wired, however, Beresheet may have left more on the Moon than previously thought. The SpaceIL spacecraft was apparently carrying thousands of microscopic tardigrades, also known as "little water bears," which are among the most resilient animals known to man.

The tardigrades, only 0.5mm in length when fully grown, joined the lunar-destined journey as part of an initiative led by the Arch Mission Foundation, founded by Nova Spivack.

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Info

Researchers find proteins that might restore damaged sound-detecting hair cells

Vandana Suresh
The Johns Hopkins University
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 19:24 UTC
Mouse cochlea with hair cells
© Doetzlhofer labMouse cochlea with hair cells shown in green and auditory nerves shown in red.
Using genetic tools in mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have identified a pair of proteins that precisely control when sound-detecting cells, known as hair cells, are born in the mammalian inner ear. The proteins, described in a report published June 12 in eLife, may hold a key to future therapies to restore hearing in people with irreversible deafness.

"Scientists in our field have long been looking for the molecular signals that trigger the formation of the hair cells that sense and transmit sound," says Angelika Doetzlhofer, Ph.D., associate professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "These hair cells are a major player in hearing loss, and knowing more about how they develop will help us figure out ways to replace hair cells that are damaged."

In order for mammals to hear, sound vibrations travel through a hollow, snail shell-looking structure called the cochlea. Lining the inside of the cochlea are two types of sound-detecting cells, inner and outer hair cells, which convey sound information to the brain.

An estimated 90% of genetic hearing loss is caused by problems with hair cells or damage to the auditory nerves that connect the hair cells to the brain. Deafness due to exposure to loud noises or certain viral infections arises from damage to hair cells. Unlike their counterparts in other mammals and birds, human hair cells cannot regenerate. So, once hair cells are damaged, hearing loss is likely permanent.
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Info

Children notice everything

Jeff Grabmeier
Ohio State University
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 20:44 UTC
Young Child
© Ohio State UniversityYoung children pay attention to everything -- even when they don't have to.
Adults are really good at paying attention only to what you tell them to - but children don't ignore anything.

That difference can actually help children do better than adults in some learning situations, a new study suggests.

Researchers surprised adults and 4- and 5-year-old children participating in the study by making information that was irrelevant at the beginning of the experiment suddenly important for a task they had to complete.

"Adults had a hard time readjusting because they didn't learn the information they thought wouldn't be important," said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

"Children, on the other hand, recovered quickly to the new circumstances because they weren't ignoring anything. I'm sure a lot of parents will recognize that tendency of children to notice everything, even when you wish they wouldn't."

Sloutsky conducted the study with Nathaniel Blanco, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Ohio State. Their research was published online in the journal Developmental Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.

The results show that children tend to distribute their attention broadly, while adults use selective attention to focus on information they believe is most important, Sloutsky said.

"Distributing attention may be adaptive for young children. By being attentive to everything, they gather more information which helps them learn more," Blanco said.

In one study, the researchers had 34 adults and 36 4-year-old children take part in a learning task.
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Radar

6 underwater volcanoes found hiding in plain sight in Italy

Maya Wei-Haas
National Geographic
Fri, 02 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
diver
© Emanuele LodoloA diver from the Italian army, Carabinieri, collects rocks from one of the newfound volcanoes, Actea, in February 2019. By studying the chemistry of the rocks, the team hopes to better understand the timing of past eruptions and the evolution of the volcanic system.
When the rocky mound lurched onto his computer screen aboard the R/V OGS Explora, geophysicist Emanuele Lodolo couldn't believe his eyes. Just four miles off the coast of Sicily, the team had stumbled on a previously unknown volcano with an old lava flow trailing some 2.5 miles westward across the seafloor.

"We were quite surprised about this, because we were really very close to the coast," says Lodolo, a researcher at Italy's National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics.

The edifice, named Actea, is one of six volcanoes recently discovered while scientists were mapping the underwater landscape of the Sicilian Channel, a heavily trafficked waterway off the southwest coast of the island. While Actea is the closest to shore, the structures were all found in the northwest side of the channel, within 14 miles of land, researchers report in the journal Marine Geology.

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People 2

Recursive language and modern imagination appeared simultaneously 70,000 years ago

Pensoft Publishers
Phys.org
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 09:49 UTC
lion-man sculpture
© JDuckeckThe lion-man sculpture from Germany (dated to 37,000 years ago) must have been first imagined by the artist by mentally synthesizing parts of the man and beast together and then executing the product of this mental creation in ivory. The composite artworks provide a direct evidence that by 37,000 years ago humans have acquired prefrontal synthesis.
A genetic mutation that slowed down the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in two or more children may have triggered a cascade of events leading to acquisition of recursive language and modern imagination 70,000 years ago.

This new hypothesis, called Romulus and Remus and coined by Dr. Vyshedskiy, a neuroscientist from Boston University, might be able to solve the long-standing mystery of language evolution. It is published in the open-science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

Numerous archeological and genetic evidence have already convinced most paleoanthropologists that the speech apparatus has reached essentially modern configurations before the human line split from the Neanderthal line 600,000 years ago. Considering that the chimpanzee communication system already has 20 to 100 different vocalizations, it is likely that the modern-like remodeling of the vocal apparatus extended our ancestors' range of vocalizations by orders of magnitude. In other words, by 600,000 years ago, the number of distinct verbalizations used for communication must have been on par with the number of words in modern languages.

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Heart

Potential heart issues could be detected by AI

Nick Carne
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 23:59 UTC
Heart Rhyhym
© zak00 / Getty ImagesAI may be able to identify patients with abnormal heart rhythm.
A brief, non-invasive test using artificial intelligence has been found to identify patients with abnormal heart rhythm even when their rhythm seems normal.

The study, which involved almost 181,000 patients, is the first to use deep learning to find signals in heart scans that might be invisible to the human eye.

Writing in The Lancet, researchers from the Mayo Clinic describe how they trained an AI model to detect the signature of atrial fibrillation in 10-second electrocardiograms (ECGs), with 83% accuracy.

Atrial fibrillation is estimated to affect as many as six million people in the US alone, and is associated with increased risk of stroke, heart failure and mortality.

It is difficult to detect on a single ECG because patients' hearts can go in and out of this abnormal rhythm, so atrial fibrillation often goes undiagnosed.

"Applying an AI model to the ECG permits detection of atrial fibrillation even if not present at the time the ECG is recorded," says co-author Paul Friedman. "It is like looking at the ocean now and being able to tell that there were big waves yesterday."
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Arrow Up

Huawei smartphone with own HongMeng OS preparing to go on sale


Global Times
Sun, 04 Aug 2019 15:46 UTC
Huawei technology
© Reuters/Aly Song
Huawei is busy testing its smartphone armed with self-developed HongMeng operating system (OS), and the phone could be put into the market at the end of this year, targeting low- and medium-end markets and priced at around 2,000 yuan ($288.24) to attract software developers and users to join the ecosystem, sources said.

Huawei is set to release the much-anticipated HongMeng OS, an alternative to Google's Android OS, at Huawei's Developer Conference on August 9 in Dongguan, South China's Guangdong Province.

The Chinese company said that the first batch of devices to be equipped with HongMeng OS will be the Honor smart TV series, which will be put into market on August 10, according to tech news site 36kr.com. In the future, the HongMeng OS will be expanded into other fields including autonomous driving, remote medical services and industrial control.

Comment: See also: Say hello to the Russia-China operating system

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