20 Jul

Posted at 21:44h in Scoop.it

"If you’re a six-foot human standing on a paddleboard, it’s just as well you don’t know that a 60-foot, 40-ton humpback whale with 16-foot flippers is surfacing directly beneath you. The only thing more unsettling would be if there were four 60-ft., 40-ton humpback whales with 16-foot flippers doing the same.

 

Just such a don’t-look-down moment played out off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 2016. Ordinarily, it would have been the kind of experience that the paddleboarder—who came through unharmed—would have described to his friends with a helpless “You should’ve seen it.” As it happens though, his friends did see it, as did more than 200 million people so far on Facebook, YouTube and uncounted other websites around the world."

Sourced through Scoop.it from: time.com

20 Jul

Posted at 21:33h in Scoop.it

Needle-Less Alternative to Stitches
DermaClip is a needle-less alternative to conventional stitches or surgical staples. The adhesive clips are placed around a wound so doctors can pull it closed without any pain. They are most effective to use in emergency situations or by those without medical tr

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.technology-in-business.net

16 Jul

Posted at 18:42h in Scoop.it

Sometimes, a genetic tweak can make a really big difference in an animal’s appearance. That’s what likely happened when the predecessors of modern snakes lost their legs, a process that started some 150 million years ago, two separate groups of scientists have discovered. Although the teams took very different approaches to solve the mystery of how those limbs vanished, both came up with similar results: Mutations in DNA located near a gene key to limb formation keep that gene from ever turning on, they reported recently.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.sciencemag.org

13 Jul

Posted at 18:10h in Scoop.it

For better or worse, a new technology is making its way from consumers’ homes into America’s classrooms: voice-controlled "smart speaker" systems from companies such as Amazon and Google.

The internet-enabled devices listen to what users say, send audio recordings to the cloud, translate that information into commands, and respond accordingly—providing users with a personal digital voice assistant such as Amazon’s Alexa, which teachers are now using to help with everything from setting a classroom timer to leading a group of 3rd graders through a spelling test.

Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union are raising alarms about privacy.

"Should students be required to submit themselves to always-on voice-tracking and other third-party surveillance in order to get an education?" asked ACLU staff technologist Daniel Kahn Gillmor in an interview. 

Still, the early K-12 adopters of smart speakers and digital voice assistants are generally enthusiastic.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: blogs.edweek.org

06 Jul

Posted at 15:49h in Scoop.it

Researchers working on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) efforts hunt for the same thing that their predecessors sought for decades—a sign that life arose, as Carl Sagan would say, on another humdrum planet around another humdrum star and rose up into something technologically advanced.

It could happen any day. A strange radio signal. A weird, brief flash in the night sky. A curiously behaving star with no natural explanation.

 

It could be anything, so SETI researchers are casting a wide net, tracking down as many promising leads as they can. But one thing they’ve started to realize is that if a civilization from another world follows a similar path to our own, then we may be dealing with a whole different form of brainpower. Not a little green person, Vulcan, or strange organism we aren’t yet fathoming, but an artificial intelligence.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.popsci.com