Google researchers have worked with doctors to develop an AI that can automatically identify diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause blindness among adults. Using deep learning—the same breed of AI that identifies faces, animals, and objects in pictures uploaded to Google’s online services—the system detects the condition by examining retinal photos. In a recent study, it succeeded at about the same rate as human opthamologists, according … Read More → "Google’s AI reads retinas to prevent blindness in diabetics"

The zero-G lifestyle does funny things to our bodily fluids. That’s the conclusion of one recent study, which may have found a reason for a common space travelers’ malady. The researchers presented their results at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

If we’re going to start sending humans to Mars and … Read More → "Scientists figure out why many returning astronauts need glasses"

Conventional wisdom suggest that facing your fears is a good way to overcome them, indeed various forms of therapy for fear-related conditions are based on this premise. But by using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and neuroscience, an international team of researchers have come up with a way to eliminate specific fears from the brain without the subject actually needing to confront them, an approach that could offer more comfortable ways of treating phobias and post-traumatic stress disorders.
via New Atlas</ … Read More → "Deleting fears from the brain means you might never need to face them"

You still can’t get a 3D-printed liver transplant made from your own cells, but an Australian hospital is trying to push the tech into the mainstream. The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane is building a dedicated “biofabrication” space where doctors and researchers can develop tech to model and print cartilage, bone and other human tissue. “It will be the first time a biomanufacturing institute will be co-located with a … Read More → "Hospital to get first dedicated 3D tissue-printing facility"

New Zealand’s geoscience agency GNS Science has released videos showing the fault lines that ruptured during the recent earthquakes that moved the nation two metres north.

The Kaikoura earthquake struck on November 14th, 2016, and caused extensive damage on New Zealand’s South Island. Two people died as a result of … Read More → "Geo-boffins say ‘quake moved New Zealand by 2 metres at 3km/second"

Pluto may have lost its official planet status, but the frozen world at the edge of our solar system still deserves a closer look. That’s the end goal of two new studies of Pluto published in the journal Nature this month, both of which focus on Sputnik Planitia — a 1,000-kilometer long basin covered in frozen nitrogen. As Wired notes, both papers agree that Sputnik Planitia’s … Read More → "Researchers offer new evidence of a liquid ocean on Pluto"

With its acquisition by Tesla confirmed yesterday, SolarCity has today shown us just what its tech can be capable of. The solar power firm has provided details of a solar panel and battery storage microgrid it rolled out on Ta’u in American Samoa, which is powering the island almost entirely.

SolarCity describes the deployment as “one of the world’s most advanced … Read More → "Pacific island powered almost entirely by solar microgrid"

Google and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust have announced a fresh five-year collaboration today, which will see the former’s DeepMind AI used to improve patient care across the trust’s various hospital sites. The partnership will focus on Streams, a mobile app the pair have been working on since late last year that’s been approved as a medical device by the UK’s health regulator. DeepMind … Read More → "NHS to use Google DeepMind AI app to help treat patients"

A new artificial intelligence system can now lip read better than humans, according to New Scientist. Though films and pop culture usually show lip reading as some incredible tool that allows you to decode what anyone says, in practice, it’s fairly spotty: Even for experienced lip readers, one estimate puts the amount of speech you can interpret … Read More → "Artificial intelligence can read lips more accurately than people"

Japanese businesses are finding they need to deal with increasing numbers of foreign visitors to Japan, and Panasonic thinks it has the answer: a megaphone that translates the user’s voices into multiple languages. The Megahonyaku, which is a reasonably good pun on the Japanese words for “megaphone” and “translation,” listens for Japanese input and … Read More → "Panasonic megaphone automatically translates commands into multiple languages"