Here’s a quick look at everything that caught my eye this past week:
New App
Want to know what your baby is saying when they are crying? Now there’s an app for that.
According to Digital Trends, “To create the Chatterbaby app, Anderson and fellow researchers started by uploading 2,000 audio samples of infant cries. They then used A.I. algorithms to try and discover (and therefore explain) the difference between pain-induced cries, hunger-induced cries, and fussiness-induced cries.
“The training was done by extracting many acoustic features from our database of pre-labeled cries,” Anderson continued. “Pain cries were taken during vaccinations and ear-piercings. We labeled other cries using the parent-nomination and a ‘mom-panel’ consisting of veteran mothers who had at least two children. Only cries that had three unanimous ratings were used to train our algorithm, which changes and improves regularly. We used the acoustic features to train a machine learning algorithm to predict the most likely cry reason. Within our sample, the algorithm was about 90 percent accurate to flag pain, and over 70 percent accurate overall.”
Now if only we could figure out how to translate a dog’s barking.
New Shape
It’s not every day that a new shape gets discovered and yet that’s exactly what happened recently. Best of all, this new shape was hiding in plain sight all along, within the very fabric of our skin.
As Science Alert explains:
“It kind of looks like a prism, but while one end of the prism has five edges, the other actually has six: a geometric quirk made possible by a Y-shaped split dividing one of the prism’s edges into two, creating a mini-triangle.
This bizarre ‘twisted prism’ may sound like something M.C. Escher might have experimented with, but according to the team, the novel shape has never been previously described in scientific literature.”
New Wonder Material
Add Iron Ore to the list of materials that suddenly take on unique properties when broken down to their thinnest possible state.
As New Atlas explains:
“The newest member of the family, hematene, comes from hematite, a naturally-occurring mineral that provides our main industrial source of iron. By subjecting the ore to a process called liquid-phase exfoliation, the team created sheets just three iron and oxygen atoms thick.
The researchers then studied the properties of the material, to see how those of its 2D form differed from the regular 3D stuff. Hematene was found to be ferromagnetic, as opposed to the antiferromagnetic nature of hematite. It was also shown to have the potential to be a good photocatalyst, able to use sunlight to speed up chemical reactions.”
New X-Rays
A new x-ray technique could revolutionize healthcare as it will allow doctors to obtain a deeper understanding of what is happening inside our bodies.
According to Science Magazine, “Researchers in New Zealand have designed an x-ray scanner capable of capturing human bodies in full color and three dimensions, which could give doctors a clearer picture for diagnosing cancer and other diseases, minimizing the need for invasive surgeries…”
The article added that, “Whereas traditional scanners send x-rays through the body and show only two colors, white where bone tissue has absorbed the beams, and black where soft tissues have not, the new machine is sensitive enough to detect specific types of tissue (such as bone, cartilage, fat, and water) by analyzing individual light particles. The tissue data are then used to construct a full color reconstruction of the body…The scanning technology was adapted from a tool that physicists used at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to detect particles moving through the Large Hadron Collider.”
I love this idea and what it could mean for healthcare and I especially love the fact that it was born out of the work being done at the LHC. The synergy of advancements in one field of science being used to further developments in an entirely different field of science is a beautiful thing.
Are any of these the Greatest Idea Ever?
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