New Device Aims to Read Your Dog’s Mind—and Broadcast It on Twitter | Discoblog

Posted on by

Puppy2There was a time when having a pooch brought simple chores like taking the dog on regular walks, brushing its coat, and occasionally throwing a stick or prying a slipper loose from its clenched jaws. But these days, having a dog can bring strange new responsibilities–like signing the pup up to Twitter.

A new product by toy giant Mattel called “Puppy Tweets” lets the whole universe get a peek into your dog’s daily activities. The colorful little device hangs from your dog’s collar, and when it detects movement or barking it sends a message via wi-fi to your computer. The messages are translated into pre-programmed tweets and get broadcast directly via Twitter. Your pet’s twitter followers can stay up to date with the latest as he wakes, poops, and woofs.

As Mattel explains:

For example, a bark may generate a Tweet of: “I bark because I miss you. There I said it. Now hurry home.” A quick run through the house could produce: “I finally caught that tail I’ve been chasing and…OOUUUCHH!” Invite your friends and family to follow your pet on Twitter and help your dog follow his or her favorite puppy pals or celebrities. Puppy Twitter lets you connect with your pet over the Internet. It’s a great way to brighten your day ‘cause a Tweet from your pooch is a virtual smooch!

But even if your puppy’s tweets gain popularity, he won’t be the first pet superstar on Twitter; that dubious honor belongs to Sockamillion (Sockington), a feline with a fetish for tweets. He’s already racked up one and half million followers with twitter gems like this: “was my fur always thin over here OH GOD IT’S CAT PATTERN BALDNESS”

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Dr. Sigmund Doolittle
DISCOVER: A Doctor’s Best Friend
80beats: Dogs Demand Fair Play, or They Won’t Play at All
Discoblog: Dog Collar Claims to “Translate” Dog Barks; Experts Are Dubious
Discoblog: Looking to Immortalize Your Pet? Now You Can Turn Muffy’s DNA Into a Diamond

Image: Mattel


VoxOx Real-Time Language Translation For SMS/Chat/Email/Twitter Makes You Fluent Across the Globe [Translation]

Posted on by

Technology does so much to bring us together, it'd be a shame to let language keep us apart. VoxOx is the first to overcome that hurdle, with a free real-time translation tool that lets you chat seamlessly in dozens of tongues.

The VoxOx Universal Translator is basically a social Babel Fish, built into VoxOx's communications software. As you can see in the demonstration video, if you input the language of the person you're communicating with over SMS, IM, email, or select chat services (such as Facebook), VoxOx automatically translates both ends of the conversation for you.

Only one person needs to be using the service for it to work, so you won't have to convince your new friends in Minsk to download random software. In fact, you can pretty easily convince them that you're a native speaker as well.

It's one of those services that seems so inherently useful, it's a wonder that it's only just now a reality. But since it is, buena suerte making friends around the world.

VoxOx First to Introduce Real-Time Language Translation for SMS, Chat, Social Media and Email in One Interface

VoxOx Universal Translator instantly and seamlessly breaks down language barriers in mobile and electronic communication
BARCELONA (MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS) and SAN DIEGO – February 16, 2010 – VoxOx® by TelCentris®, the first and only free consumer service that unifies today's key communication channels - voice, video, IM, text, social media, e-mail, fax and file sharing - into a single user interface, today announced the launch of the VoxOx Universal Translator™, the first translation service to be natively built into a communications software, enabling seamless, real-time conversations. The VoxOx Universal Translator is also the first service in the industry to provide instantaneous foreign language messaging translation across four major communication channels – text messages (SMS), chat (IM), email and select social media networks. The service supports dozens of major languages, and only one person has to be using VoxOx to have a two-way translated conversation.

Announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the new free service makes it easy for two people who speak different languages to instantaneously communicate back and forth via SMS, IM and email. VoxOx users can also automatically translate and broadcast their Twitter @replies (public messages directed to specific users), as well as hold two-way translated chat conversations with social networking friends on Facebook and MySpace. Users simply opens up their VoxOx Universal Messaging Window (chat window within VoxOx client), select their language as well as their contact's language, and then begin sending text and chat messages, emails or Twitter @replies to anyone in the world. The Universal Translator instantly translates the messages for both parties in dozens of major languages. All language settings are customizable by individual contact and automatically stored in the cloud for future conversations. The service is completely interoperable with major instant messaging services, including Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live, AIM, ICQ, Skype and GoogleTalk.

"Never before has it been so easy for people of different languages to communicate instantaneously," said Bryan Hertz, CEO of TelCentris, the creator of VoxOx. "We expect this innovation to help friends, relatives and business colleagues better communicate and connect with each other."

VoxOx is the first service of its kind to fully address the instant communication needs of international audiences. Consumers previously were required to cut and paste messages using online translation web sites and translation "bots," or download clunky, client-specific plug-ins that both parties have to install. Translation has been particularly challenging in two-way SMS conversations, especially for older phones without an Internet connection or applications. With its built-in live translation option spanning four communication channels, VoxOx has advanced its relevance within the international community, while providing a seamless user experience.

"The VoxOx Universal Translator breaks down language barriers and has important business implications as well – for example, providing better customer support, or communicating with colleagues, partners and business contacts in another country and another language," said Michael Faught, president of TelCentris. "We look forward to the global feedback on this service. We are very excited and proud to launch this new capability for our users worldwide at such an international venue as the Mobile World Congress."

The VoxOx Universal Translator is just one capability of the overall VoxOx service, which Computer Shopper recently named the Best Software / Service at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Currently in beta, VoxOx also provides users with a free phone number; two-way texting; video conferencing; integrated social networking and chat; fax and file sharing capabilities; a free personal assistant for helping answer, manage and screen calls; and much more.

For more information on the VoxOx Universal Translator, please visit http://www.voxox.com/whats_new.php. To download the free VoxOx software, please visit http://www.voxox.com.


Study: The “Love Hormone” Oxytocin Can Improve Autistic People’s Social Skills | 80beats

Posted on by

baby-hand-parentFor the first time, researchers have found that oxytocin–the hormone at work when breastfeeding mothers bond with their babies and when couples cuddle–can help autistic patients with social interactions. The small but pioneering study showed that when autistic adults inhaled the “love hormone” oxytocin though a nasal spray, they paid more attention to expressions when looking at pictures of faces and were more likely to understand social cues in a game simulation [Reuters].

The findings will be published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although more research is needed to confirm and explore the findings, the results are the latest in a growing body of evidence indicating that the hormone could lead to ways to help people with the often devastating brain disorder function better [Washington Post].

People with autism or with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders like Asperger’s syndrome have difficulty engaging in social situations [Scientific American]. They normally have trouble making eye contact and are awkward around other people. They also suffer from low levels of oxytocin–a hormone that is found naturally in humans and animals and helps humans understand emotions and social cues better.

In this study, Angela Sirigu of the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience in Lyon, observed 13 people with high-functioning autism, some of whom were made to inhale oxytocin as part of the experiments. The researchers watched the patients’ responses during a virtual ball tossing game to measure behavioral changes [Reuters]. In the task, Sirigu found that the patients who received the oxytocin nasal spray chose to interact primarily with the most cooperative ball-throwing computer character, while patients who received a placebo spray showed no preference for the cooperative character. In another experiment, the researchers asked the patients to answer questions about pictures of human faces, and recorded the focus of each participant’s gaze. The patients who had inhaled oxytocin showed that they were far more willing, though not quite as willing as controls, to explore faces, focusing longer on eyes [The Seattle Times].

The researchers are hopeful that because oxytocin proved safe and effective in this study, it could be used to help autistic people function in society. But because the “cuddle hormone” doesn’t last long in the body, some experts said the findings were more likely to encourage drug companies to develop alternative substances that had the same benefits [Washington Post].

In the past, other studies have shown that oxytocin can reduce typical autistic behaviors, causing autistic subjects to engage in fewer repetitive actions and to have less trouble identifying emotions in voices. Another study being published in the journal Biological Psychiatry found that 16 autistic males in Australia ages 12 to 19 who received the hormone through a nasal spray were better able to recognize other people’s facial expressions [Washington Post].

Related Content:
80beats: The Lancet Retracts 1998 Paper That Linked Vaccinations to Autism
80beats: The “Love Hormone” Oxytocin Helps People Recognize Faces They’ve Seen Before
DISCOVER: Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live on?
DISCOVER: Autism Gene Located
DISCOVER: Six Degrees of Autism
DISCOVER: Autism: It’s Not Just in the Head

Image: iStockphoto


Big Foot Spotted In the Wild at Toy Fair 2010 [We Love Toys]

Posted on by

Boys love three things: sports, spies, and cryptozoology. At least that's what Fisher-Price is banking on with their new remote control Big Foot, an expressive monster that can sleep, somersault, and stomp with the best of 'em.

Big Foot comes with a foot shaped remote that controls its movement as well as its emotions, including buttons that make him happy, angry, or sleepy. Each button has several routines, so Big Foot won't always be the same kind of angry when you mash on the big, kid-friendly angry button. His different states of contentment are displayed with grunts, shrugs, and movable facial features including his nose, eyes, and eyebrows.

Some of the functions can even be stacked; you can make Big Foot sleep—he lays down on his back with his big feet up in the air—and then press "angry" to give the monster a bad dream. When it's time for him to wake up, his long arms allow him to himself up with a backwards somersault.

Big Foot will be available in June for $100, if he doesn't go back into hiding.

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.


The Infamous Hard Drive Dock, Now Imbued With USB 3.0 [Peripherals]

Posted on by

If viruses evolved as quickly as USB hard drive docks, mankind would be but a rotted pile of bones littered with the occasional bottle of green NyQuil.

The $80 Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Duo is a watershed in 2.5-inch/3.5-inch SATA to USB hard drive dock design as it transcends the accomplishments of yore with the incorporation of USB 3.0.

Some see USB 3.0 as merely a means to increase speed. The 2.5-inch/3.5-inch SATA to USB hard drive dock aficionado knows better. He knows that the construct of "speed" is but a means to quantify the flow of truth.

With USB 3.0, the 2.5-inch/3.5-inch SATA to USB hard drive dock has never been closer to enlightenment, nor have you. Remember this day; your grandchildren will thank you. [Sharkoon]


Violating Parity with Quarks and Gluons | Cosmic Variance

Posted on by

Hey, nobody told me that having a blog would involve homework. But here’s Jerry Coyne, nudging me into talking about a story in this morning’s New York Times. Fortunately it’s interesting enough to be worth taking a swipe at.

The news is an interesting result from RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven Lab on Long Island. RHIC has been quite the source of surprising new results since it turned on in 2000. It’s not the highest-energy collider in the world, nor did it ever aim to be; instead, it creates novel conditions by smashing together the nuclei of gold atoms. Gold nuclei have lots of particles — 79 protons and 118 neutrons — so the collisions make a soup known as the quark-gluon plasma. (We ordinarily think of a proton or neutron as consisting of three quarks, but those are just the “valence” quarks that are always there. There are also large numbers of quark-antiquark pairs popping in and out of existence, not to mention scads of force-carrying gluons that hold the quarks together. So you are actually create a huge number of quarks and gluons in each collision.)

qgp

We think we understand the basic rules of quarks and gluons very well — they’re described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and Nobel prizes have already been handed out. But knowing the basic rules is one thing, and knowing how they play out in reality is something very different. We understand the basic rules of electrons and electromagnetism very well, but chemistry and biology (not to mention atomic physics) are still surprising us. Likewise with quarks and gluons: the results at RHIC have yielded quite a few surprises. Most interestingly, in the aftermath of the collisions the hot plasma of quarks and gluons seems to behave more like a dense fluid than a bunch of freely-moving individual particles. Still much to be learned.

This latest result has to do with a violation of parity — the symmetry you get by reflecting around one axis, like when you view something in a mirror. (Unfortunately there is a completely different transformation known as mirror symmetry, which this new result has nothing to do with, despite potentially confusing titles.) Quarks and gluons interact in interesting ways, and in the many fluctuations that happen in these high-temperature collisions we can get “bubbles” that pick out a direction in space. In the presence of these bubbles, quarks treat left and right differently, even though they treat both directions exactly the same when they’re in empty space. The phenomenon is known as the chiral magnetic effect — “chiral” means “distinguishing left from right,” and it happens when you put the quark-gluon plasma in a magnetic field.

It’s worth mentioning that, while this result is interesting and very helpful to our quest to better understand the strong interactions, it does not represent the overthrow of any cherished laws of physics. On the contrary, it was predicted by the laws of physics as we currently understand them — and by human beings such as Dimitri Kharzeev and others. Parity is an important idea in physics, but it’s broken all the time — very famously by the weak interactions. Heck, even biologists know how to break parity — most naturally occurring amino acids are left-handed, not right-handed. (I think the reasons why are still mysterious, but can be traced to accidents of history — hopefully someone will correct me if that’s off base.)

The interesting thing is that the strong interactions don’t seem to violate parity under ordinary circumstances; it would be very easy for them to do so, but they seem not to in Nature. When things could happen but don’t, physicists are puzzled; this particular puzzle is known as the Strong CP Problem. (”CP” because the strong interactions could easily violate not only parity, but the combined operation of parity and charge conjugation, which switches particles with antiparticles.) This new result from RHIC doesn’t change that state of affairs, but shows how quarks and gluons can violate parity spontaneously if they are in the right environment — namely, a hot plasma with a magnetic field.

So, okay, no new laws of physics. Just a much better understanding of how the existing ones work! Which is most of what science does, after all.


The Ever-Surprising Swine Flu | The Loom

Posted on by

Last March a new kind of flu came on the scene–the 2009 H1N1 flu, a k a swine flu. Hatched from an eldritch mingling of viruses infecting humans, birds, and pigs, it swept across the world. Here in the United States, the CDC estimates that between 41 and 84 million people came down with swine flu between April and January. Of those infected, between 8,330 and 17,160 are estimated to have died. For more details on the evolution of this new flu strain, here’s a video of a lecture I gave in November.

This flu strain has been nothing if not surprising. It was lurking around in humans for several months, undetected, before becoming a planetary infection. And before that, the ancestor of the virus was circulating among pigs for a decade, again unknown. And while the new swine flu has killed some 10,000 people in the United States alone and many more abroad, it has proven to be relatively low key–as flu goes. Some 30,000 people die in the United States every year from seasonal flu, the cocktail of flu strains that show up year in and year out.

Now the swine flu is surprising us once more. It has dwindled away to very low levels and stayed there. Meanwhile, the seasonal flu, which was expected to kick in at some point as well this flu season, is a virtual no-show. The San Francisco Chronicle has the story. In this CDC chart of total reports of flu-like symptoms, you can see that we’re in a deep trough. At this point in previous years, we were fast approaching the peak of the flu. This season, the peak came months ago, at the height of the fall swine flu outbreak.

When swine flu started to crash, some observers expected it to bounce back soon, as other flu strains have in the past. Ian York, at his blog Mystery Rays from Outer Space, offers some interesting ideas about why this hasn’t happened. He suggests that the virus has been stymied by pre-existing immunity in a lot of old people, new immunity from vaccinated children, and the protection that infected survivors now have. In other words, the virus just doesn’t have enough hosts now to sustain a new outbreak.

It’s possible that the swine flu’s raging success in the fall may have also led to the weird situation we’re in right now, with no seasonal flu at exactly the time you’d expect it. One possibility is that getting sick with swine flu provides some cross-immunity to seasonal flu. Another is ecological: the swine flu outcompeted seasonal flu so effectively at the start of flu season that the seasonal flu hasn’t been able to get a toehold since.

That, of course, could change. Seasonal flu has been known to peak as late as March. And while flu may be in a lull in the United States, it’s doing just fine in other parts of the world. For example, a nasty kind of flu called influenza B is raging around China right now according to the Chronicle. In normal years B makes up a pretty small fraction of US flu. But this is no normal year.

Scientists did a better job tracking the 2009 H1N1 outbreak than they have with previous emergent strains. They’ve got new machines to sequence virus genes, online databases to pool information from around the globe, and powerful computers to help figure out where the viruses came from. And yet, with just ten genes, the flu still continues to move enigmatically ahead of our understanding.


Piezo Electric Tile / Flooring

Posted on by

we are designing a piezo electric tile of one sqaure feet dimensions , what we intend to achieve is that it should bear our own weight and also able to generate efficient power.

i have tried to surf about all the available piezoelectric materials but i still dont know which is the most e

Spokeless Bicycle: Riding Around on The (Somewhat Impractical) Future [Engineering]

Posted on by

Leave it to a bunch of engineering students at Yale to design a crazy spokeless bike. It's not the first spokeless bike we've seen, but it looks a lot more like a real bike than past models.

Only the back wheel is spokeless, but that's just because they only had a limited amount of time and money to build this. It would be pretty simple to do what they did to the back wheel to the front wheel. As for how it works:

It's a single speed setup. We used two cranks and two bottom brackets in the front to gear up the ratio. It goes from (IIRC) 53 to a 13, which is connected to the second crank and another 53 which connects to the rear hub. The rear hub is just a normal ratcheting rear hub that we mated to our belt pulley. Not sure if all these bike terms are right, but that's the general idea.

The front wheel would be almost exactly the same as the rear wheel except that it could be a little lighter. Some of the aluminum can be shaved off since there's no powertrain to connect to.

[Reddit via Crunchgear]


Qualcomm Blabs On "Specific Game-Centric Platforms Launched Around Snapdragon" [Qualcomm]

Posted on by

The Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm is fast becoming the standard chip for smartphones—both Android and Windows Mobile—but surprisingly we haven't seen anything that can harness its performance in gaming. That may change this year, according to Qualcomm.

Speaking to Mobile-Entertainment at Mobile World Congress, their VP of product management, Mark Frankel, said:

"There will be, by the end of this year, specific game-centric platforms launched around Snapdragon"

"You'll be able to see clearly that gaming is the main focus of those devices. There'll be a category of gaming devices that hasn't been on the marketplace before using Snapdragon."

The lack of gaming-centric phones was something we were bemoaning recently, although that could change with the Xbox 360 integration in Windows Phone 7 Series. [Mobile-Entertainment]


Even Kingston Knocks Off Kingston microSD Cards? [Broken]

Posted on by

Bunnie Huang, one of the minds behind the famous Chumby, encountered a strange production problem when building Chumby Ones with Kingston microSD cards—namely, some microSDs appeared to be dysfunctional counterfeits. The catch? They were bought directly from Kingston.

Huang's observations took him down a rabbit hole of microSD manufacturing, a fairly epic quest to discover the truth about Kingston's manufacturing process that, while never conclusive, had some interesting findings:

• Shopping around for Kingston cards from street vendors in China, some were obviously real and others were obvious fakes. But there were definite "irregular" gray area models—like those that caused low yields in Chumby production—that have questionable build quality likely due to Kingston enlisting the work of crumby production partners.

• Kingston appears to buy all the actual flash storage chips inside their microSD cards from Sandisk/Toshiba, yet they often still manage to undercut the microSD prices of manufacturers like Sandisk and Samsung. Of course, Kingston needs to make up the money somewhere, and the controller chip is the only other place that's possible. So Kingston may be stretching their thresholds of controller chip quality to make profitability possible—at minimum, the impetus is certainly there.

Of course, even if Kingston is padding supply chains with low-grade cards, I'm guessing such is more a worry for manufacturers (and purchasers of said manufacturers' products) than the random guy at Best Buy picking up a new microSD card, as Kingston probably champions the transparency of America's retail markets over the murky backwaters of Chinese industry. Probably. [Bunnie Studios via boingboing]


California’s Fog Is Clearing, and That’s Bad News for Redwoods | 80beats

Posted on by

redwoodIt’s not easy to survive century after century, through droughts and storms and oscillations of the climate. So California’s majestic coastal redwoods have developed a few tricks, like their great height: The trees can grow to more than 350 feet high, allowing their treetops to pull in moisture from the fog to keep their water levels refreshed. But, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fog is on the decline, which could spell trouble for redwoods and other area species.

Fog often rolls ashore along the California coast from June through September. The hot, dry inland air rises and creates a vacuum that sucks in the cold, vaporous air from over the ocean [Wired.com]. While the small strip of land about 50 miles inland from the coast where the redwoods live is dry and hot, this influx of moisture keeps the giant trees hydrated.

To obtain a historical record of coastal fog, the researchers looked at data on ceiling heights recorded hourly at several airports from 1951 to 2008. And they extrapolated back to 1901 using long-term land temperature data [The New York Times]. With the sea becoming warmer, less fog formed in the first place: Coastal fog cover decreased by more than an hour a day since 1951, researchers Todd Dawson and James Johnstone found. Temperature changes affected the fog, too. The coast has heated up faster than the redwood’s inland habitat, lessening the temperature difference between the two, which lowers the force pulling the fog inland. As a result of all this, the scientists propose that the redwoods receive at least three hours less fog per day in the summer than they used to.

Redwoods are tough enough to survive anyway, the researchers say, but there’s another problem. “As fog decreases, the mature redwoods along the coast are not likely to die outright, but there may be less recruitment of new trees” [Reuters], says Dawson. That means fewer seeds are likely to sprout and take root along the coast, and then to grow to maturity. In addition, climate scientist Phil Duffy tells Wired.com that we shouldn’t focus exclusively on the towering, awe-inspiring sequoias, because lower levels of fog will affect many ecosystems that rely on it for moisture.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Strange Forests That Drink—And Eat—Fog
DISCOVER: The Life, Death, And Life of a Tree
Discoblog: Treehuggers vs. Solar Supporters: Who Cares More About the Environment?
80beats: Is Google the Guardian Angel of Rainforests?

Image: flickr / morgenlandfahrer


Microsoft Turtle and Pure Dumbphones Run on Silverlight, Powered by Nvidia Tegra Graphics [Rumors]

Posted on by

With Windows Phone 7 out, everyone has forgotten about the other Microsoft handsets, the allegedly Sidekick-derived Turtle and Pure cellphones. Someone got a peek into the firmware, which confirms some of the rumors about these "not-so-dumb cellphones".

• The user interface is done in Silverlight, which the cellphones will obviously support.
• Turtle—Pride in the CDMA version—will have a 320 x 240 resolution.
• Pure—Lion in the CDMA version—will have a 480 x 320 display.
• Both firmware are tied to Nvidia Tegra.
• They seem to run a Windows CE6 core.
• There are references to Premium Mobile Experiences all through the firmware.

With the strong push on social networks in Windows Phone 7, it feels like these are now outdated and out of place. [WMExperts]


Insights from the Paul Offit Interview, Part II: Blame the Scientific Journal, Not the Media | The Intersection

Posted on by

(If you haven’t yet heard the first episode of the new Point of Inquiry, you can listen here, and I also strongly encourage you to subscribe via iTunes from the same page.)

The second insight from my chat with Paul Offit involved who he felt deserved the chief blame for the now notorious 1998 Wakefield paper (which, essentially, presented a claim of correlation between getting the MMR vaccine and getting autism based on a tiny sample of children, with a rather questionable mechanistic hypothesis attached). Offit said, very candidly, that he didn’t blame the media for going gaga over the study when it was published; rather, he blamed the Lancet for publishing it in the first place. As he put it around minute 10:

I think journals are a public trust, and when that’s published in Britain’s oldest and arguably most respected general medical journal, the media is going to see that as information, they’re not going to see it just as a hypothesis raised, they’re going to see it as a study done. And for them, they’ll jump on it and say, “Here’s at least a cause of autism,” and scare the hell out of people. Which is what happened. I actually don’t blame the media for this. I think that when something is published in the Lancet, I can see where they would jump all over it.

I agreed with Offit 100 % about this. Journals have a peer review process, and weeks or months to determine which studies to publish, after imposing quality control protocols. Journalists then have less than a day, in many cases, to determine what studies to cover and how to cover them. So by the time a study comes out in a journal, especially a major one, there’s no chance that you can unring the bell by hoping for the media to impose quality control, or call B.S. on this new piece of “science.”

It just isn’t going to happen.

For me, that’s another important insight from the Offit interview. Stand by for still more, and in the meantime, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe here. And don’t forget to buy Paul Offit’s book Autism’s False Prophets if you don’t already own it…

autism-false-prophets-258x400