Technology

A  team at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne has won an international artificial intelligence competition by creating software that can play the famous video game "Angry Birds" like a human. If you have never seen "Angry Birds”, the game’s goal is to crush pigs by catapulting angry birds towards them. It is the most downloaded game of all time on mobile platforms. Jason Li, postdoctoral researcher at EPFL, together with Mirko Katanic and Arnaud Jutzeler, created a program that is able to reproduce the way humans play this game and it became the “Angry Birds” world champion in…

A 34 centimeter diameter spherical flying robot does things that probably don't make sense to most people. Rather than avoiding obstacles, it bumps into and then ricochets off of them - its world is one of unpredictable, chaotic environments, it don't need no stinking fragile detection sensors sensors.  Named Gimball, it is more like an insect than the 'gimbal' you are used to, which is an axis that allows objects to pivot, like a gyroscope or a drink holder that keeps things from getting all messy. Yet like those devices, it keeps its balance using a gyroscopic stabilization system.…

I have written a lot about how I think the biggest problem in science communication today is the disproportionate value we place on where papers are published when assessing the validity and import of a work of science, and the contribution of its authors. And I have argued that the best way to change this is to develop a robust system of post publication peer review (PPPR) , in which works are assessed continuously after they are published so that flaws can be identified and corrected and so that the most credit is reserved for works that withstand the test of time. There have been LOTS of…

Living with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes means constant awareness of blood glucose (sugar) levels to ensure they remain stable. People do this at home using electronic devices that read sugar levels in a tiny drop of blood but a team of German researchers has devised a new, non-invasive method; infrared laser light applied on top of the skin measures sugar levels in the fluid in and under skin cells.   "This opens the fantastic possibility that diabetes patients might be able to measure their glucose level without pricking and without test strips," said lead researcher, Werner…

Over the past three years, 300,000 gamers have helped scientists with genomic research by playing Phylo, an online puzzle game that is a cross between Tetris, Rubik's cube and an old-fashioned sliding-tile puzzle game. As gamers line up colored rectangles that represent real genetic material (in the form of DNA sequences), they are helping to pinpoint the genetic anomalies that may be the key to a range of diseases that include diabetes, breast cancer and retinoblastoma, the most common form of malignant tumor in the eyes of children.  Since it was first launched, players who range from…

A new paper describes an acoustic remote bomb detection system that can identify homemade bombs and determine the difference between those that contain low-yield and high-yield explosives. A number of different tools are currently used for explosives detection. These range from dogs and honeybees to mass spectrometry, gas chromatography and specially designed X-ray machines. The new system consists of a phased acoustic array that focuses an intense sonic beam at a suspected improvised explosive device. At the same time, an instrument called a laser vibrometer is aimed at the object's casing…

In the past year, Google search has dramatically increased the speed of search results, not that you would notice, since they were already quite fast. They did so by increasing the number of sites around the world from which it serves client queries, re-purposing existing infrastructure to change the physical way that Google processes web searches. From October 2012 to late July 2013, the number of locations serving Google's search infrastructure increased from from a little less than 200 to a little more than 1400, and the number of ISPs grew from just over 100 to more than 850, which…

"Open access" journal publishing was founded on the principle that corporations should not hold a copyright on research that was becoming increasingly taxpayer-funded. Instead of subscribers paying to read an article, taxpayers incur an additional fee and essentially buy access for everyone in the public. Today, it is a booming industry, generating tens of millions of dollars for companies and with thousands and thousands of publications. There are also lesser-known flavors of open access. Traditional open access is reusable while some lesser forms simply allow a researcher to provide a…

Habitat for Humanity International is getting 100,000 PackH2O collapsible water backpacks from the manufacturer, Greif, to use in 8 developing countries. Greif began testing the PackH2O water backpack with Habitat for Humanity in over a dozen countries and will begin deploying 100,000 packs in El Salvador, Haiti, the Philippines, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal and Sri Lanka in September. Greif President and CEO David Fischer said that during a trip to Haiti following the earthquake in 2010, he saw women carrying water in containers on their heads, and kids lugging home dirty jerry cans and…

An important goal in spoken-language-systems research is speaker diarization - computationally determining how many speakers feature in a recording and which of them speaks when. To date, the best diarization systems have used supervised machine learning; they're trained on sample recordings that a human has indexed, indicating which speaker enters when. In a new paper, MIT researchers show how they can improve speaker diarization so that it can automatically annotate audio or video recordings without supervision: No prior indexing is necessary.  They also discuss, compact way to…