Technology

What do you think about computer-generated news articles? Would you even know? Recently, Google has tried to penalize 'content farms' - especially companies that look for keywords, terms and trends in searches and automatically generate articles that will show up in search results but are just copied and pasted. A recent study investigated what readers thought if computers actually did the creative writing. If you read everything from TIME magazine to Fox News about a link between autism, malformed genital in males and environmental toxins, you were reading a press release. Most of the…

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) evaporate easily in the air but they help suppress a deer hunter's worst enemy - smells.  And that science of deer hunting may soon help researchers develop a life-saving device for diabetes patients, according to a paper at the latest National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). By figuring out the best way to collect and analyze VOCs from body and breath odor, the researchers are going to develop VOC detection that can diagnose and monitor disease. That's where deer hunting comes in. It isn't just pest control that pays for state…

It's hard to imagine how plants, one of nature's greatest successes, could be improved, but nanobionic plants which enhance the photosynthetic function of chloroplasts isolated from plants for possible use in solar cells may get a boost. By augmenting them with nanomaterials, plants could enhance their energy production and get completely new functions, such as monitoring environmental pollutants. In a new paper, MIT researchers report boosting plants' ability to capture light energy by 30 percent by embedding carbon nanotubes in the chloroplast, the plant organelle where photosynthesis…

Gluten-free foods are all the rage. What was once the plight of celiac patients has become the latest health fad and a $5 billion annual industry. Companies like General Mills and others have taken advantage of the 200 percent higher prices people are willing to pay for the illusion of health and have released lots of new products. It was only a matter of time before gluten-free functional foods rode that wave. The food processing industry has lots of left-over garbage and those antioxidants, phenols, fibers and proteins are all functional ingredients, which means they can be sold for profit…

New technology developed by Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne allows them to detect facial expressions and identify which of the seven universal emotions a person is feeling: fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, surprise, or suspicion. This could be useful for marketing and video game development, of course, but obviously in driver safety. Fatigue is a risk factor but so is the emotional state of the driver.  Irritation, in particular, can make drivers more aggressive and less attentive. EPFL researchers, in collaboration with PSA Peugeot Citroën, have developed an on-board…

Can you catch a mood from someone online? Most people would answer 'yes', because lots of comments on the Internet enrage them. A political science paper says they can confirm it. Co-author James Fowler, professor of political science at UC San Diego, and colleagues analyzed over a billion anonymized status updates among more than 100 million users of Facebook in the United States. Positive posts beget positive posts, the study finds, and negative posts beget negative ones, with the positive posts being more influential, or more contagious. "Our study suggests that people are not just…

Alan Turing was long famous in computer science and then became notable due to his sexuality and its controversy in England. Less well known is his work in biology and chemistry. During World War II, Turing helped cracked the German Enigma Code, which made it possible to decipher enemy transmissions.  After the war, he was convicted of homosexuality — a criminal offense in England — and sentenced to chemical castration.  Shortly after his trial, and before he killed himself in 1954, he published a biology paper, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis." Turing proposed his…

A recent analysis found that DietBet, a web-based commercial weight loss program that pairs financial incentives with social influence, delivers significant weight loss to participants. On Dietbet.com, players join a game to lose weight while betting money on themselves. Players all have four weeks to lose four percent of their starting weight. At the end of week four, all players who have lost at least 4 percent of their initial body weight are deemed "winners" and split the pool of money collected at the start of the game. To verify weight losses, players submit photo-based evidence of…

Boy scouts know this, and now we'll let you in on a secret too: if you've run out of drinking water during a lakeside camping trip, there's a simple solution. Break off a branch from the nearest pine tree, peel away the bark, and slowly pour lake water through the stick. This improvised filter will trap any bacteria, producing fresh, uncontaminated water.  An MIT team has discovered that this low-tech filtration system can produce up to four liters of drinking water a day — enough to quench the thirst of a typical person.  In their, the researchers demonstrate that a small piece of…

If a name is ambiguous and given without context, humans struggle to understand the meaning, so you can imagine the struggle computers have.  When Germans read the last name "Merkel" without context, they will not know if it refers to the Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel or tsoccer coach Max Merkel.  And  If it is a drawback for people, that means it is an even bigger drawback for web search engines. Programs capture character strings like "Angela Merkel" but may not pay attention to attributes like "German Chancellor" or "Germany's First Lady" at all, and common auto-fill…