All posts tagged: Innovation News

New wearable uses light and AI to turn silent throat movements into audible speech

New wearable uses light and AI to turn silent throat movements into audible speech

Published by Jenni Sidey

Speech usually seems simple. Air moves, vocal cords vibrate, sound comes out. But the act of speaking leaves behind another trace, one that never reaches the ear. Tiny muscles in the throat tense and shift. Skin stretches by fractions so small they are easy to miss. Those motions, a team of researchers found, may carry enough information to rebuild spoken words. This is true even when no sound is made at all. That is the idea behind a new wearable system developed by researchers at POSTECH, or Pohang University of Science and Technology. Led by Professor Sung-Min Park and Dr. Sunguk Hong, the team created a neck-mounted device that reads subtle throat movements with light. Then, it uses artificial intelligence to decode those patterns and turn them back into speech in the user’s own synthesized voice. The concept targets a stubborn problem. In loud places, clear communication breaks down fast. Factories, construction zones, battlefields, and even some clinical settings can make spoken words unreliable. Traditional silent speech interfaces have tried to solve that by measuring …

Undergraduate students built a cavity detector to search for axion dark matter

Undergraduate students built a cavity detector to search for axion dark matter

Published by Jenni Sidey

Dark matter is supposed to be everywhere, threaded through the Milky Way and outnumbering ordinary matter by a wide margin. Yet after decades of effort, nobody has caught it directly. That gap between certainty and absence has helped turn modern cosmology into a field of giant machines, giant budgets and giant collaborations. So there is something striking about a recent axion search that went in the opposite direction. A team of then-undergraduate students at the University of Hamburg built a compact cavity detector. They ran it inside a powerful magnet and used it to probe one narrow slice of the dark matter problem. They did not find a signal. However, what they did find was a way to rule out axions with certain properties in that range. This tightened the map for future searches and showed that careful, smaller-scale physics can still leave a mark on one of science’s biggest mysteries. The work, now published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, focused on axions, hypothetical particles long considered one of the strongest candidates …

Mini lightning bolts help chemists turn methane into clean-burning fuel

Mini lightning bolts help chemists turn methane into clean-burning fuel

Published by Jenni Sidey

Tiny bolts of plasma, flickering inside a submerged glass tube, may have opened a new route for turning methane into liquid fuel. Chemists from Northwestern University have developed a way to convert methane directly into methanol in a single step, using electricity, water and a copper oxide catalyst instead of the punishing heat and pressure used in conventional production. The process relies on pulses of high voltage that create miniature lightning-like discharges inside a porous glass reactor. These discharges set off reactions that are otherwise hard to start. Methanol matters because it sits at the center of modern industry. It is used to make plastics, paints and adhesives. It is also drawing interest as a cleaner-burning fuel for ships and industrial boilers. Global production already exceeds 110 million metric tons a year. However, the path to making it is energy-hungry and carbon-intensive. That is why methane-to-methanol conversion has long been treated as one of chemistry’s hardest practical problems. Methane is abundant and cheap, but it is stubbornly stable. Once methanol forms, it has the opposite …

Scientists create light inside the body using ultrasound

Scientists create light inside the body using ultrasound

Published by Jenni Sidey

Getting light deep inside the body has always come with a catch. Tissue scatters and absorbs it, which means doctors and researchers often have to cut into the body or thread in optical fibers to reach the places they want to target. A team at Stanford University now says it has found a way around that problem, at least in mice. Instead of trying to shine light through layers of tissue, the researchers used ultrasound to trigger tiny particles circulating in the bloodstream, making them emit light exactly where the sound waves were focused. The result is a noninvasive method for creating small, controlled pockets of light inside living tissue. That matters because light has become an increasingly useful tool in biology and medicine. It can stimulate cell activity, influence neural signals, and help treat certain cancers. The problem has never been what light can do. It has been how to get it where it needs to go without physically entering the body. “Ultrasound is very convenient to use, and it penetrates much deeper into …

Scientists develop laser-powered graphene propulsion for next-generation space travel

Scientists develop laser-powered graphene propulsion for next-generation space travel

Published by Jenni Sidey

A laser hit the tiny black cube, and it lurched forward almost at once. That split-second jump, caught during a zero-gravity arc aboard a parabolic flight, points to a strange and promising idea for space travel. A class of ultralight graphene aerogels, when illuminated under microgravity, can turn light into motion with surprising force. In the experiment, the material accelerated so quickly that the main burst was over in about 30 milliseconds. “The reaction was fast and furious. Before you could even begin to blink, the graphene aerogels experienced large accelerations. It was all over in 30 milliseconds,” said Marco Braibanti, ESA’s project scientist for the experiment, Light-driven propulsion of graphene aerogels in microgravity. The work came out of an international team led by researchers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates. Their findings, published in Advanced Science, suggest that light-driven propulsion in graphene aerogels becomes far more effective when gravity is stripped away. Inside a vacuum chamber, a continuous laser fired at three tiny graphene …

Scientists just built a computer that doesn’t require electricity

Scientists just built a computer that doesn’t require electricity

Published by Jenni Sidey

A steel bar pivots. A spring stretches. Then, with a small shove, the whole setup flips into a new state and stays there until the next push. That simple motion sits at the heart of a mechanical computer built by researchers from St. Olaf College and Syracuse University, who designed a system that can perform basic computations without electricity, batteries, or a computer chip. Published in Nature Communications, the work turns an abstract idea from physics into a working platform made from rigid bars, steel rods, and ordinary springs. “We typically think of memory as something in a computer hard drive, or within our brains,” said Joey Paulsen, an associate professor of physics at St. Olaf College. “However, many everyday materials retain some kind of memory of their past, for example, rubber can ‘remember’ how far it has been squeezed or stretched in the past.” The team wanted to push that idea further. Could a material not only remember motion, but also use that history to process information? Led by Professor Paulsen (center), the St. …

New holographic storage method uses light to pack more data in less space

New holographic storage method uses light to pack more data in less space

Published by Jenni Sidey

Light has always carried more than brightness. In this case, it also carries direction and twist. That mix may open a new path for storing far more data in the same physical space. A research team led by Xiaodi Tan at Fujian Normal University in China has developed a holographic data storage method that packs information into three properties of light at once: amplitude, phase and polarization. This was reported in Optica. The approach pushes beyond the usual one- or two-dimensional encoding used in most holographic storage research. Therefore, it could help address the growing demand for denser, faster storage systems. Holographic data storage already differs from a hard drive or optical disc in a basic way. Instead of writing data only on a surface, it stores image-like data pages throughout the volume of a material using laser light. In fact, those light patterns can overlap inside the material. Therefore, the technique promises high storage density and fast data transfer. “In conventional holographic data storage, data encoding typically uses one light dimension such as amplitude …

Flipping a single DNA letter can trigger complete sex reversal

Flipping a single DNA letter can trigger complete sex reversal

Published by Jenni Sidey

Humans have about 3 billion DNA bases in their genetic makeup. However, most of it does not encode for protein. In the last few decades, scientists have come to realize that while much of the non-coding portion of the genome was once thought to be irrelevant, there is now overwhelming evidence that this segment plays an important role in regulating when and how genes switch on and off. A new study conducted by Bar-Ilan University supports this finding. It reveals an example of how impactful a single change to this regulatory region can be, and how significantly one nucleotide alteration can affect an organism’s phenotype. In an article published in Nature Communications, researchers found that inserting one nucleotide into the regulatory region of a mouse’s genome caused XX mice that normally develop as females to develop as males with testes and male genitalia. This change occurred outside the protein-coding region. It was located roughly 500,000 bases away from the gene it regulates. “This is an extraordinary finding, particularly because just a minute alteration — a …

Scientists use lasers to convert leather into wearable power storage

Scientists use lasers to convert leather into wearable power storage

Published by Jenni Sidey

A tiger on a leather bag is not just decoration in this experiment. Its back and tail double as an energy-storing device. That small visual twist sits at the center of a new study from Jilin University in China. In this work, researchers used a CO2 laser to write conductive patterns directly onto vegetable-tanned leather. As a result, they created a set of flexible microsupercapacitors. These are tiny energy devices that can store charge and help steady electrical signals in wearable electronics. “Using a laser, we directly write conductive patterns onto vegetable tanned leather to create microsupercapacitors that can store energy and help smooth electrical signals so that wearable electronics run more reliably,” said research team leader Dong-Dong Han. The work, published in Optics Letters, points to a simpler route for making wearable electronics with fewer chemical-heavy steps and less dependence on synthetic materials. Instead of building devices on plastic, the team used vegetable-tanned leather. This is a natural material processed with plant-based extracts and already valued for breathability, flexibility, biocompatibility and comfort against skin. …

New chip design could boost efficiency of power management in data centers

New chip design could boost efficiency of power management in data centers

Published by Jenni Sidey

In an effort to meet the rising energy demands of data centers, engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new chip design that could improve how graphics processing units (GPUs) convert and manage power. The technology demonstrates a more efficient way to perform a critical task in electronics: converting high voltages into lower levels required by computing hardware. In lab tests, a prototype chip performed the type of voltage conversion used in modern data centers with high efficiency. The advance, published in Nature Communications, could lead to the development of smaller, more energy-efficient systems for advanced computing. A chip designed to convert high voltages into lower levels in electronics — a process known as DC-DC step-down conversion — more efficiently using a piezoelectric resonator. (CREDIT: David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering) The chip design offers a new approach to improving the performance of a circuit component known as a DC-DC step-down converter, which is found in nearly all electronics. The step-down converter acts as a protective bridge between power sources …