I have two items, both concerning sound but in very different ways. Phones in your ears Researchers at the University of Illinois are working on smartphones you can put in your ears like you do an earbud. The work is in its very earliest stages as they are trying to establish a new field of research. There is a proposed timeline, Caption: Earable computing timeline, according to SyNRG. Credit: Romit Roy Choudhury, The Grainger College…

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There’s a lot of arsenic in the world and it’s often a factor in making water undrinkable. When that water is used in farming It also pollutes soil and enters food-producing plants. A December 11, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces research into arsenic detectors in plants, Researchers have developed a living plant-based sensor that can in real-time detect and monitor levels of arsenic, a highly toxic heavy metal, in the soil. Arsenic pollution is…

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A December 12, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces a step forward in the development of artificial retinas, “The biohybrid retina is a cell therapy for the reconstruction of the damaged retina by implanting healthy cells in the patient’s eye,” says Fivos Panetsos, director of the Neuro-computation and Neuro-robotics Group of the UCM and member of the Institute of Health Research of the Hospital Clínico San Carlos de Madrid (IdISSC). A December 11, 2020 Universidad…

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Teaching grammar and syntax to artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms (specifically natural language processing (NLP) algorithms) has helped researchers understand and predict viral mutations more speedily. This facility is especially useful at a time when the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus seems to be mutating into more easily transmissible variants. Will Douglas Heaven’s Jan. 14, 2021 article for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Technology Review describes the work that links AI, grammar,…

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This December 9, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces research into a nanodiamond filter which can clean hot wastewater, Although most of the planet is covered by water, only a fraction of it is clean enough for humans to use. Therefore, it is important to recycle this resource whenever possible. Current purification techniques cannot adequately handle the very hot wastewater generated by some industries.… A December 9, 2020 American Chemical Society (ACS) news release, which…

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A December 2, 2020 news item on phys.org announces research that might make shattered mobile phones a rare occurrence, Dropping a cell phone can sometimes cause superficial cracks to appear. But other times, the device can stop working altogether because fractures develop in the material that stores data. Now, researchers reporting in ACS [American Chemical Society] Applied Polymer Materials have made an environmentally friendly, gelatin-based film that can repair itself multiple times and still maintain…

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There’s nothing especially new in this latest paper on neuromorphic computing and memristors, however it does a very good job of describing how these new computers might work. From a Nov. 30, 2020 news item on phys.org (Note: A link has been removed), In a paper published in Nano, researchers study the role of memristors in neuromorphic computing. This novel fundamental electronic component supports the cloning of bio-neural systems with low cost and power.Contemporary computing…

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An Oct. 29, 2020 news item on ScienceDaily features an explanation of the reasons for investigating brainlike (neuromorphic) computing , As progress in traditional computing slows, new forms of computing are coming to the forefront. At Penn State, a team of engineers is attempting to pioneer a type of computing that mimics the efficiency of the brain’s neural networks while exploiting the brain’s analog nature.Modern computing is digital, made up of two states, on-off or…

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I have a number of items from Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Metacreation Lab January 2021 newsletter (received via email on Jan. 5, 2020). 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 17th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence! or IJCAI-PRICAI2020 being held on Jan. 7 – 15, 2021 This first excerpt features a conference that’s currently taking place,, Musical Metacreation Tutorial at IIJCAI – PRICAI 2020 [Yes, the 29th International Joint Conference on…

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“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more things stay the same), is an old French expression that came to mind when I stumbled across two stories about genetic manipulation of food-producing plants. The first story involves CRISPR (clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats) gene editing and the second involves more ancient ways to manipulate plant genetics. Getting ‘CRISPR’d’ plant cells to grow into plants Plants often don’t grow…

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