Technology
Here we bring you all the latest technological news both here on Earth and in space.
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This Smart Ring Tracks Glucose, Alcohol, and More Through Your Sweat
By Daniel Kane, Liezel Labios, University of California – San Diego – SciTechDaily
A new smart ring could reveal far more than how well someone slept or how fast their heart is beating.
Engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed an experimental smart ring that continuously analyzes sweat from the finger to monitor several molecules associated with metabolism, nutrition, exercise, and alcohol consumption.
The prototype can measure up to four biomarkers at once, with interchangeable sensors designed to detect glucose, ketones, vitamin C, uric acid, lactate, and alcohol.
The technology marks a shift from the physical measurements collected by most consumer wearables. Existing smart rings typically rely on signals such as heart rate, movement, and skin temperature, while the new device is designed to capture changing chemical information from inside the body.
“Commercial rings only provide biophysical information, but they lack molecular information about biochemical markers that offers deeper insights about an individual’s health status,” said study…Read more here.
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Scientists Develop a Groundbreaking Chip That Operates at Brain-Like Speed
By Akaash Babar, Peking University – SciTechDaily
A memristor chip brought complex brain modeling into millisecond-scale operation while preserving detailed cortical structure.
Reconstructing the brain’s deeply folded surface in real time requires enormous numbers of calculations. Researchers in China have now developed a chip that performs this work in less than 10 milliseconds, a speed they say is comparable to the functioning pace of the human brain.
The research was led by Yuchao Yang of Peking University in collaboration with scientists at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The findings were published in Science under the title “A sub-10-millisecond neural dynamical system based on phase-change memristors.”
Neural dynamical systems pair neural networks with mathematical equations that track how complex systems evolve over time. They are used in physical modeling, medical imaging, and…Read more here.
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Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Clean Hydrogen Fuel
By University of California Los Angeles – SciTechDaily
The advance could provide a scalable route to clean energy while making plastic recycling more effective.
A discarded bottle, shopping bag or car part can remain in the waste stream long after its useful life ends. Although plastic is everywhere in modern society, recycling it remains difficult because most systems require different types to be separated first, an expensive and labor-intensive step.
As a result, only 9% of plastic waste is recycled, while 79% goes to landfills and 12% is burned, releasing carbon dioxide.
Mixed plastics become clean hydrogen: Researchers co-led by the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Ewha Womans University in South Korea have demonstrated a chemical process that converts a mixture of three widely used plastics into high-purity hydrogen fuel. The method operates at substantially lower temperatures than conventional gasification and stores the carbon as a solid mineral instead of releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Read more here.
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Scientists Discover AI Models May Not Think Like the Brain After All
By Sandra McLean, York University – SciTechDaily
A reverse prediction test suggests that supposedly brainlike AI models may rely on visual strategies the primate brain does not use.
Artificial intelligence can sometimes predict how the brain responds when people recognize objects. But that resemblance may hide an important weakness: the internal workings of today’s vision models do not necessarily match the processes used by a primate brain.
Over the past decade, artificial neural networks (ANNs), computer models designed for visual tasks, have become some of the leading tools for explaining how the brain processes sight. York University researchers wanted to determine whether these systems truly operate like biological vision.
“Artificial intelligence systems are often described as ‘brain-like’ because they can predict activity in parts of the brain that help us recognize objects,” says York University Assistant…Read more here.
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