Crave

A new type of artificial larynx could mean better-sounding speech for those who've had their larynx removed due to laryngeal cancer or other ailments.

Researchers hope the SmartPalate can work for those without a larynx. The space-time graph pictured below the device corresponds to the tongue-palate contact pattern for the word "been."

(Credit: Jaren Wilke/Megan Russell/University of the Witwatersrand )

Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, have come up with a system that tracks mouth movements to determine what word is being formed and then uses a speech synthesizer to audibly produce the correct word.

"All of the currently available devices produce such bad sound--it either sounds robotic or has a gruff speaking voice," Megan Russell, a Ph.D. candidate at the university, told Technology Review. "We felt the tech was there for an artificial synthesized voice solution."

Russell and her colleagues created the software for the system, which is being shown off this week at the International Conference on Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Engineering in Singapore. For their research, the team is training a retainer-like mouthpiece already utilized in speech therapy to recognize words mouthed by people without a larynx.

The mouthpiece, called a SmartPalate, is made by Utah-based company Complete Speech. It uses 118 embedded sensors to track tongue-to-palate and lip closure contacts.

A microprocessor input/output device worn around the user's neck or placed on the desktop connects the SmartPalate to a personal computer, and software produces real-time, onscreen visual feedback that shows those with speech impediments how to reposition their tongues.

The system being developed in South Africa, according to Technology Review, would translate mouth movements into words to be reproduced on a small sound synthesizer that could be kept in a pocket.

Russell has trained her software to recognize 50 common English words by saying each one multiple times with the SmartPalate in her mouth. The information picked up by the sensors can be represented on a graph and put into a database, and each time the wearer configures his or her mouth to form a word, the contact patterns are compared against the data to identify the right word.

Russell says the system identifies correct words 94.14 percent of the time, although this doesn't include words that the system classifies as "unknown" and chooses to skip.

Shareable Ink is hoping to popularize a camera-in-a-pen that wirelessly transfers text written on paper to a remote database to better track such data as glucose levels.

(Credit: Shareable Ink)

It all started when anesthesiologist Vernon Huang wanted to figure out a better way to streamline his billing. How could he bridge the gap between what's written on paper and what must be entered into an electronic database?

Huang, who's clocked in time as a senior manager for health care markets at Apple, designed the application for a digital pen whose tiny camera embedded right next to the ink cartridge captures every stroke of the written word on film and whose images are uploaded wirelessly and automatically to a remote database.

He knew such an invention has a range of applications well beyond billing, and founded Shareable Ink (headquartered in Newton, Mass., with a branch in San Mateo, Calif.). Medgadget caught up with Huang at TedMed and posted a shaky but informative demonstration:

There is, of course, competition. ... Read more

Photochromic lenses that allow you to walk from inside to outside without putting on UV-filtering lenses have been around for decades. But the technology is just making its way to contacts.

The contact lens on the left contains photochromic dyes that darken in the presence of UV light.

(Credit: Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology)

Traditionally, these light-to-dark lenses have been constructed by coating a normal lens with a photochromic dye. When UV light hits the dye, the individual molecules expand, darkening the lens and absorbing light. Coating contacts, however, doesn't work so well.

So researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have laced contacts with a matrix on nano tunnels filled with these photochromic dyes. Not only has the team been successful in producing transition contacts; these contacts darken in the presence of UV light faster than standard lenses (just 10 to 20 seconds).

The researchers are now working on isolating the photochromic material to just the corneal region of your eye, granting you all of the UV filtering without turning your entire iris black.

But until they graft the timeless style of a Wayfarer onto my eyeball, I'll pass.

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

(Credit: Peking University and Tsinghua University)

That tiny, plastic-looking black cube up there can absorb up to 180 times its own weight in toxic waste without absorbing any water. How? As with just about every amazing and/or inexplicable scientific breakthrough nowadays, the answer is spelled N-A-N-O.

Researchers at Peking and Tsinghua universities, both in Beijing, have adapted carbon nanotubes into a sponge-like material that can be squeezed dry, which sounds like extremely exciting news for the infomercial cleaning product industry. One minor detail:

Since carbon nanotubes are hydrophobic, there's no modification required to make them not absorb water.

For the record, that includes mysteriously blue infomercial demo water, so there goes that. If not absorbing 20 times as much water as its leading competitor, what exactly is this new type of sponge good for? Environmental cleanup, evidently. See, instead of just dropping dispersants into the middle of an oil or chemical spill--which forces the spill to simply absorb into the water--these light and porous nanosponges could float in water and be used to sop up the spill, after which they could theoretically be wrung dry and reused, like so:

The scientists detail their findings in Advanced Materials. It's an amazing idea, but I get the feeling that carbon nanotube sponges, riskily abbreviated as CNT sponges, won't exactly be cheap.

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

(Credit: NASA)

The International Space Station isn't just an orbiting laboratory, spaceship testing ground, and multinational geek fest--it's also the world's highest (250 miles) and fastest (17,500 mph) computer network. We burrow under its metal skin and siphon out its most interesting specifications, like some kind of star-hopping alien data vampires (but without the plutonium-coated fangs).

Read more of "Space Station IT: High technology" at Crave UK.

(Credit: Jonathan Worth/PopSci)

I know most of you out there think we landed two Americans on the moon in 1969. Well, let me tell you that you're wrong. It's all a hoax! It was done on a sound stage and George Clooney and Dan Aykroyd were involved!

I mean, look at this real-life version of the Atari classic Lunar Lander vector game!

It took British engineer Iain Sharp less than $800 and a year to build this replica in his garage to honor the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, and it works almost like the real thing. It's powered by a pair of old PCs he wrote custom software for. In addition, the movements are controlled by things like old inkjet printer motors, and fishing line. But what's important is it works just like a real lunar lander would--if one existed.

If Sharp can make a device like this in his garage in his spare time then it's not a leap to assume the U.S. government could have made a full-size mock-up with the years and millions it took to make the so-called "moon shot" happen. This awesome toy might be all the evidence I need. Myth busted.

(Via PopSci)

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for iPhone.

OK, that's probably a little overly dramatic, but the new NASA iPhone app, which was released Friday, is pretty cool.

With NASA's iPhone app, space geeks can access all kinds of information about their favorite missions.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Designed to provide information, updates, and images on all current and scheduled NASA missions, the app--which can be found in Apple's App Store under the name "NASA app for iPhone--nicely allows you to search for any specific mission, say, Constellation, and then find information and images just for that project.

"Users can access NASA countdown clocks, the NASA Image of the Day, Astronomy Image of the Day, online videos, NASA's many Twitter feeds," and more, the space agency said in a press release about the app. It also allows users to track where the International Space Station is at any moment, as well as other spacecraft orbiting the planet, in three different views: maps with labels and borders, available visible imagery of satellites, and satellite positions overlaid on maps with country labels and borders.

Already, NASA nuts--you know who you are--have had access to much of this information online. But now, having it all available in a free iPhone app is going to keep these people happily staring down at the screen of their devices no matter where they are.

And for NASA, anything it can do to get more people excited about its various missions and projects is a good thing as it struggles for public resources and attention in an era where the economy is in trouble and people are increasingly distracted by other things.