Using a gloves fitted with flex sensors, touch sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers a Ukrainian team in a Microsoft competition has built a system called EnableTalk that can translate sign language into text and then into spoken words using a text-to-speech engine.
The whole system then connects to a smartphone over Bluetooth.
There are currently about 40 million deaf, mute and deaf-mute people. Many of them use sign language,… read more
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin says the world should unite to establish a defense system against space objects that threaten Earth, under the umbrella of the United Nations, Space Daily reports.
The Russian leader said the threat from asteroids, meteorites, comets and other stray space objects should serve to “unite humanity in the face of a common enemy.”
Alexander Bagrov, a senior researcher at the Institute… read more
AlphaDog is the new robot in town from Boston Dynamics. Think Big Dog on steroids.
AlphaDog (official name: LS3 (Legged Squad Support System) is designed to assist soldiers in carrying heavy loads (up to 400 lbs of gear) over rough terrain, IEEE Spectrum blogger Erico Guizzo reports.
AlphaDog is getting close to something that can be… read more
Neuroscientists have found a way to watch neurons fire in an independently moving animal for the first time. The study was done in fish, but it may hold clues to how the human brain works, Science Now reports.
Junichi Nakai of Saitama University’s Brain Science Institute in Japan and colleagues selected a glowing marker known as green fluorescent protein (GFP) and linked it to a compound that… read more
Smell-O-Vision was a system that released odors during the projection of a film so that the viewer could “smell” what was happening in the movie.
Now the “smelling screen,” invented by Haruka Matsukura at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan and colleagues, makes smells appear to come from the exact spot on any LCD screen that is displaying the image of a cup of coffee,… read more
The Dutch “bird man” who posted a video showing a successful “test flight” of a wing suit contraption has admitted that the amazing feat was a hoax all along.
Viewers became sceptical after it emerged that no scientists actually knew “Jarno Smeets,” who claimed to have created the technology.
Now Smeets has confessed that he is actually a “filmmaker and animator” named Floris Kaayk, and… read more
A Queen’s University researcher has created a Star Trek-like human-scale 3D videoconferencing pod that allows people in different locations to video conference as if they are standing in front of each other.
“Why Skype when you can talk to a life-size 3D holographic image of another person?” says professor Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab.
The technology Dr. Vertegaal and researchers at… read more
Obayashi Corp., headquartered in Tokyo, has unveiled a project to build a space elevator by the year 2050 that would transport passengers to a station 36,000 kilometers above the Earth and transmit power to the ground.
A cable, made of carbon nanotubes, would be stretched up to 96,000 kilometers, or about one-fourth of the distance between the Earth and the moon. One end of… read more
Amateur astronomers are puzzling over a seemingly anomalous cloud that has shown up on images of Mars taken over the past few days, MSNBC Cosmic Log reports.
More: Exosky.net.
Traditional American universities are suddenly running scared of YouTube, Xconomy reports, along with Vimeo, 5min, iTunes U, TED and the Internet Archive.
Without YouTube, Sal Khan and Khan Academy could never have reached his 4 million unique viewers a month with their 3,200 videos, viewed 170 million times.
Internet video sharing technology means that talented people from outside the education establishment can make and publish free educational videos that are… read more
Google’s ambitious book-scanning program is foundering in the courts. Now a Harvard-led group is launching its own sweeping effort to put our literary heritage online, MIT Technology Review reports.
Robert Darnton. A distinguished historian, prize-winning author, and director of Harvard’s library system, has an ardent desire to see a universal library established online, a library that would, as he puts it, “make all knowledge available… read more
Meet FastRunner, a bioinspired robot that thinks it’s an ostrich, being built at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. It’s expected to be the world’s fastest robotic biped, at 22 mph.
Impressive, but no Boston Dynamics Cheetah, at 28.3 mph (on a treadmill) — beating out Usain Bolt’s 27.79 mph.
But FastRunner may soon negotiate more complex environments — ones that Cheetah may fear to tread, thanks to… read more
An estimated 670 million Indians were affected by this week’s grid outage (see “How Power Outages in India May One Day Be Avoided“). But it would be a mistake to think that India is uniquely vulnerable to large-scale grid failures, Technology Review reports.
The growing complexity and reliance on the electric grid in both developed and fast-growing countries is making stability tougher to achieve.… read more
University of Illinois scientists have mapped the physical architecture of intelligence in the brain in one of the largest and most comprehensive analyses so far of the brain structures vital to general intelligence and to specific aspects of intellectual functioning, such as verbal comprehension and working memory.
“We found that general intelligence depends on a remarkably circumscribed neural system,” said Neuroscience professor Aron Barbey of the … read more