3D displays have been a field of interest these recent years. Right now, it is in the “radical ideas” phase, and there are many VR technologies on the market. They are, however, unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. For example, there are some devices which can provide 3D images without the need for goggles or glasses, but they have a number of problems like slow refresh and complicated hardware. Aside from that, they also lack a standardized mode of user interaction. Another example would be a 3D display which can be manipulated by hand, but there is no feedback, which makes it tricky.

This week, researchers are describing a new take on a recent 3D display development that mixes in a key ingredient: sound. The use of ultrasound allows the researchers to both run the display and provide haptic feedback for interactions with it. As an added bonus, the new display can allow audible sound to originate from objects within the display itself.

Conceptually, the display borrows heavily from one we described early last year. The light emitted by the display comes from lasers reflected off the surface of a tiny, hovering sphere. As long as the sphere is reflective, it can display any of the colors you might need for an image. To display an object, the sphere has to be moved around rapidly enough that the human eye registers the line traced by its movement as a single object, rather than detecting that it's the product of motion.

Check out more details over at Ars Technica.

(Image Credit: NPG Press/ YouTube)

Have you ever called someone a drunkard or an alcoholic? A drug addict or a junkie? Most, if not all of us may have heard or have used these terms to describe a person. But maybe it’s about time we changed our way of talking about disorders of addiction. Research has shown that terms such as these may “perpetuate the stigma associated with disorders of addiction.”

Social reproach, fear of rejection and punishment, and personal feelings of guilt and shame are major barriers for patients who struggle with symptoms related to disorders of illicit drug and alcohol use to ask for help. This is even more compelling when we look at those who refrain from seeking professional treatment. According to the 2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 89% of people in need of treatment for disorders of addiction do not receive any type of professional help.

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What if word choice was the most cost-effective and clinically useful strategy to reduce the incidence, increase access to services, and prevent deaths associated with disorders of addiction?...

Find out more about this suggestion over at Psychology Today.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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A post shared by Risto Mattila (@rismatti) on Nov 13, 2019 at 11:25am PST

Ice comes in many forms, from gigantic icebergs, to tiny flurries of snow, which many of us see in winter. Only a few of us, however, have encountered a field of “ice eggs”, each one the size of a football.

That was exactly what amateur photographer Risto Mattila encountered when he decided to take a stroll along Marjaniemi beach on Finland's Hailuoto Island — a field of “ice eggs.” 

Lucky for us, he took some snaps, which quickly spread through social media.

"I was with my wife at Marjaniemi beach. The weather was sunny, about -1 Celsius (30 Fahrenheit) and it was quite a windy day," Mattila told the BBC.

"There we found this amazing phenomenon. There was snow and ice eggs along the beach near the water line."

A stretch of roughly 30 metres (about 100 feet) of sand was littered with frozen spheres that ranged from golf ball-sized to the circumference of a football.

Find out more about ice eggs over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Risto Mattila/ Instagram)

Eleven design vulnerabilities in 5G were identified by security researchers. These vulnerabilities could expose a user’s location, fake emergency alerts, and track phone activity (calls, texts, or web browsing). It could even be used to silently disconnect a user’s phone from the network altogether.

The flaws were identified using a custom tool the researchers built called 5GReasoner, which they used to identify five further vulnerabilities carried over from 3G and 4G. The findings were presented at a security conference in London yesterday…

Although they still face technical and regulatory barriers, 5G networks are starting to roll out in a few major cities worldwide, offering faster speeds and (we are told) greater security for users. Plugging these security holes will be an urgent task.

I wonder, can they solve the security issues before it’s too late?

(Image Credit: QuinceMedia/ Pixabay)

For heavy drinkers who had their livers destroyed by alcohol, an organ transplant is usually the only realistic option for them. However, because of donor liver shortages, as well as the rules that withhold them from people who have not shed their alcohol addiction, many people go without an organ transplant.

Tens of thousands die from alcoholic liver disease each year in the United States—and some go downhill much faster than others. Now, scientists have found a reason for this disparity: a toxin produced by some strains of a common gut bacterium. Working in mice, they have also tested a potential therapy, based on bacteria-destroying viruses found lurking in the sewer.

More details about this over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: Bernd Schnabl/ UCSD)

Back in the '80s, there came a boxing game that would be considered as one of the best video games of all time. That boxing game was Punch Out!!

In the game, you control Little Mac and fight against fictitious boxers such as Glass Joe, Don Flamenco, Super Macho Man, Piston Honda, Bald Bull, and Mr. Sandman. When you manage to win against your opponents in three circuits, you will be given a chance to have a “Dream Fight” against a highly skilled boxer. In the original version released in the West, it was Mike Tyson.

Mike Tyson licensed his name and likeness to Nintendo, and he became the game’s final boss.

Mike Tyson is considered as one of the hardest bosses in all of video game history.

If you’re a fan of the game, you might want to check out this life-size cutout of 8-bit Tyson.

This 66″ tall version of the boxer was made by artist Jason Walker, who cut it from a sheet of 1/2″ plywood, then painted all the pixels to make him come to life. I imagine it took quite some time to get all of those jaggy edges just right, so it’s well worth the $300 asking price. Of course, it’s a bit heavy and unwieldy, so it’ll cost you another $130 for shipping here in the US. Then again shipping around the actual Mike Tyson would surely cost more, and he’d probably punch you in the face while you tried to cover him in bubble wrap.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Etsy/ Technabob)

Power lines could be affecting honeybees in a negative way by emitting electromagnetic fields which can alter both the insects’ behavior and ability to learn.

Researchers report on October 10 in PLOS One that after being exposed to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) in the lab, honeybees (Apis mellifera) became more aggressive toward other bees.

“The reductions in learning are pretty concerning,” says Sebastian Shepherd. The entomologist worked on the new study at the University of Southampton in England before moving to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “These were bees that were very happy and healthy” before being exposed to EMFs in the study.

This finding may be a clue in explaining the recent and mysterious decline in managed honeybee colonies in the U.S.

More details about the study over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)

Researchers from the University of Basel, in a study in Cell Reports, found out that with a background of white noise (which refer to sounds that mask other sounds), hearing pure sounds becomes more precise.

We know that hearing is important when it comes to human communication. However, despite this knowledge that we have, we still don’t know much about how we perceive and process acoustic signals which allows us to make sense of them. One thing is for sure, though: the more precisely we can recognize sound patterns, the better our hearing is. But in an environment with background noise, how does the brain manage to identify the relevant information from the less relevant?

Researchers led by Prof. Dr. Tania Rinaldi Barkat from the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel have investigated the neuronal foundation of sound perception and sound discrimination in a challenging sound environment. The focus was on research into the auditory cortex - the "auditory brain," that is, the area of the brain that processes acoustic stimuli. The resulting activity patterns stem from measurements in a mouse brain.

As is well known, the distinction between sounds becomes more difficult the closer they are in the frequency spectrum. Initially, the researchers assumed that additional noise could make such a hearing task even more difficult. However, the opposite was observed: The team was able to demonstrate that the brain's ability to distinguish subtle tone differences improved when white noise was added to the background. Compared to a quiet environment, the noise thus facilitated auditory perception.

More details about this over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

The most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft has a new name. Known before as 2014 MU69, the 21-mile-wide (34 kilometers) body visited by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on January 1 is now officially known as Arrokoth, mission team members announced on November 12. The new name means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.

"The name 'Arrokoth' reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "That desire to learn is at the heart of the New Horizons mission, and we're honored to join with the Powhatan community and people of Maryland in this celebration of discovery."

Know more about Arrokoth over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory)

Self-driving vehicles could be a popular means of transportation in the coming years. Before that can happen, however, scientists will have to do a lot of work to ensure that these vehicles will be safe and can efficiently navigate in human-populated places without hurting anyone.

As self-driving vehicles are ultimately designed to move around both static and moving obstacles, they should be able to detect objects quickly and avoid them. One way to achieve this could be to develop models that can predict the future behavior of objects or people on the street, in order to estimate where they will be located when the vehicle approaches them.

Predicting future behavior in urban environments, however, can be a difficult task. It is even more difficult to predict human behavior, such as unexpected actions of pedestrians.

In Arizona last year, a 49-year-old woman named Elaine Herzberg was killed by one of Uber’s self-driving cars. This and other accidents sparked lots of debates about the safety of self-driving vehicles and about whether to test these vehicles in populated environments.

About a week ago, new documents released by the U.S. National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) revealed that Uber's autonomous vehicle involved in last year's fatal crash did not identify Herzberg as a pedestrian until it was much too late. The same reports suggests that the autonomous vehicle involved in the crash was never trained to detect pedestrians anywhere outside of a crosswalk.

Herzberg was jaywalking at the time of the accident, so the software flaws revealed by the NTSB report would explain why Uber's self-driving vehicle failed to spot her, which ultimately caused her death. The new analyses released by NTSB could put a halt to the company's self-driving vehicle program, which had started testing again in December 2018 after being put on hold for several months.

These recent findings show the need for a more advanced AI to be developed, as well as more reliable software before self-driving vehicles can be tested on actual roads. 

Interestingly, some days before NTSB released these documents, a paper by researchers at Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, the University of Toronto and UC Berkeley was pre-published on arXiv, introducing a new technique to predict pedestrian behavior called discrete residual flow network (DRF-NET). According to the researchers, this neural network can make predictions about future pedestrian behavior while capturing the inherent uncertainty in forecasting long-range motion.

More details about this neural network over at TechXplore.

(Image Credit: Jain et. al/ TechXplore)

Tencent is reportedly interested in creating Nintendo-style games with Nintendo characters, according to the Wall Street Journal, which quotes an unnamed Tencent official who says that the multinational conglomerate company desires to “expand from China” by developing games for the United States and Europe.

Rather than push its own ideas an IP, however, Tencent will try and become a household name here by piggybacking on Nintendo's.

The Chinese giant wants to "create console games with Nintendo characters" and, in doing so, "learn the essence of making console games from Nintendo engineers." That doesn't necessarily mean it'll go ahead, since Nintendo is notorious for protecting its culture and IP, in order to preserve the experience for gamers.

On one hand, the partnership is plausible, since Tencent and Nintendo already have a corporate tie-up, which started earlier this year. The pair teamed up with the intention of selling the Switch in China, where consoles (and gaming in general) are tightly regulated. But despite promises of getting the console into stores, there has been little actual movement, mostly down to regulatory hurdles.

More details about this rumor over at Engadget.

What are your thoughts about this one? Do you think that Nintendo will allow Tencent to make games with the former’s characters on it?

(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)

For decades, the Scooby Doo franchise has been popular and well-received by people. Even now, the names Shaggy, Scooby, Velma, Fred, and Daphne still ring a bell for both the old and the young as the “meddling kids” who catch ghosts and monsters (who are revealed to be just people at the end of each episode). But what were they like before they became “meddling kids”? This is what the 2020 film SCOOB! explores.

With Will Forte as Shaggy and Frank Welker reprising his iconic role of Scooby-Doo, SCOOB! tells the story of how the two pals met, and how they started solving mysteries with Fred (Zac Efron), Daphne (Amanda Seyfried), and Velma (Gina Rodriguez). The full-length animated film also features Kiersey Clemons, Ken Jeong, and Tracy Morgan.

SCOOB! will debut in theaters on May 15, 2020.

Are you looking forward to this film?

(Video Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures/ YouTube)

From the top of Huascarán, the highest mountain in Earth’s tropics, the western Andes valleys look peaceful and calming. From there, signs of climate change, such as the melting glaciers in the Andes, and the changes in the water supplies of the local villages, are not immediately evident. Scientists, however, are aware that these signs do exist, and they know that they are there.

It’s part of why they’ve traveled so far, from the United States, Mexico, Italy, Peru, France and Russia, and tackled this harrowing climb to more than 22,000 feet: to visit the glaciers at the top and to drill columns of glacier ice to send back to The Ohio State University for analysis. The ice holds many clues to what has happened in Earth’s atmosphere and in the climate of the region over the last 20,000 years. And, if Earth keeps warming, the glacier might not be there for much longer.

[...]

Huascarán is a peak in the Cordillera Blanca range in northern Peru. Thompson has been here before, in 1980, 1992, 1993, 2016, and in the summer of 2019 he led a group of scientists back to see how the glacier had changed and to collect new ice samples.

Because of its altitude, Huascarán is one of the more challenging and dangerous peaks on which Thompson and his crew have drilled. But that altitude also protects the ice. Currently glaciers at lower altitudes, where it is warmer, are melting rapidly and Huascarán’s glacier will eventually melt, too, but for now, it is likely one of the few remaining intact tropical glaciers in the world.

More details about this over at Ohio State News.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Ohio State News)

In Colombia lives a family with the tragic legacy of forgetfulness.

UC Santa Barbara neuroscientist Kenneth S. Kosik states that the people in this family suffer from Alzheimer’s predictably at age 45-50.

Their aggressive, genetic form of the disease has been passed down from generation to generation, causing rapid cognitive and physical declines in both the men and the women of this family.

Many scientists have been studying this family from their brains to their genes for decades. They were even able to trace the specific gene mutation of the disease as far as the time of Spanish conquistadors.

During their studies, they were able to see firsthand the onset of the disease as the members of this particular family enter into their middle years. Sometimes the onset happens sooner, and sometimes it happens later. Nevertheless, all paths have led to one point.

One woman from the family, however, has defied the odds.

Now in her late 70s, she has the mutant gene — and the plaques of amyloid protein that are the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — yet she has exhibited no signs of cognitive impairment associated with Alzheimer’s.

“When you find an escapee, it’s extremely interesting,” said Kosik, co-author of a study that appears in the journal Nature Medicine. The woman, and others who are considered outliers in the normal trend of neurodegeneration of this family, may present hints at a new approach for therapy for and even prevention of the disease, he said.

Head over at The Current to know more about this interesting phenomenon.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Tumisu/ Pixabay)

Scientists regularly capture images of the brain in action by focusing on single circuits, cells, or molecules. Visualizing how these tiny units interact to form complex behavior, however, has been a difficult task. Now, through a collaborative, multi-lab effort, researchers at Yale University were able to develop a way to leverage a pair of microscopic technologies. They were able to provide a peek of the whole brain at work in real time.

“Merging widely different scales of understanding is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience,” said Michael Higley, associate professor of neuroscience and member of Yale’s Kavli Institute for Neuroscience. “With this novel approach, we are bridging the gaps between molecular, cellular, and systems biology.”

[...]

Researchers expect the new technology will ultimately help scientists track the role of specific molecules, cells, and brain networks in human behavior and disease.

(Video Credit: YaleCampus/ YouTube)