Lifeboat Foundation

Noise-canceling headphones are designed to block out the ambient noise and let you focus on what you want to hear.

Wirestock, photoschmidt via iStock.

This feature used to be a niche product for a select group of users, primarily frequent air travelers. But now, with technology being more affordable, it has become more vividly seen in many of the current market offerings. Take Apple’s AirPods Pro or AirPods Max, for example, or Sony’s WH 1,000 XM5 or WF 1,000 XM5 series or, say, the Bose Quite Comfort series. There are many options, from affordable to expensive ones, and the ANC performance varies across the price range.

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Remember back before smartphones existed, when you had to buy a separate cell phone, camera, music player, calculator and calendar? Well, the Utility Personal Transporter may one day do for electric vehicles what smartphones did for gadgets.

Currently in functional prototype form, the Utility Personal Transporter (UPT) is being developed by Canadian electric mobility company Envo Drive Systems. In a nutshell, it’s a four-wheel-drive electric platform that can be adapted to serve multiple purposes.

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Telecommunication goes back a lot further than you might expect. While the word has become synonymous with television broadcasting and phone communication, it really describes any communication system over a distance, and could include smoke signals. These simple signals were used to convey messages from “the enemy is approaching” to the fact that a whale has beached itself and can be butchered for meat.

While some ancient cultures varied smoke colors to convey further information, there’s only so much you can get across with a big fire. One particularly cool ancient version of telecommunication, which aimed to convey more precise meanings, was the hydraulic telegraph, used in Ancient Greece in around 350 BCE.

Continue reading “The Hydraulic Telegraph Of Aeneas: A Telecommunication Used In Ancient Greece” »

Are you ready for a cell phone with a medium-format-sized sensor?

It’s science time. New research tells us how, with the help of metalenses and spaceplates, we don’t need conventional lenses anymore. Furthermore, that will allow manufacturers to develop tiny cameras with bigger sensors. Read the highlights of the research below.

New research has found a solution for reducing the size of cameras, by combining both metalenses and spaceplates. That combination allows a significant reduction of the glass and the length from the camera sensor. The result can be a lens-free camera and a bigger sensor. Furthermore, it’s a whole new approach for how light can be focused, and utilized, that can result in manufacturing facilitation of both cameras and lenses.

Continue reading “The Future of Imaging? Metalenses and Spaceplates Allow Lens-Free Cameras and With Bigger Sensors” »

For the first time in space, scientists have produced a mixture of two quantum gases made of two types of atoms. Accomplished with NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the International Space Station, the achievement marks another step toward bringing quantum technologies currently available only on Earth into space.

Physicists at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), part of a collaboration led by Prof. Nicholas Bigelow, University of Rochester, provided the theoretical calculations necessary for this achievement. While quantum tools are already used in everything from cell phones to GPS to medical devices, in the future, quantum tools could be used to enhance the study of planets, including our own, as well as to help solve mysteries of the universe and deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature.

The new work, performed remotely by scientists on Earth, is described in Nature.

AI is already transforming the way we search, gather information, create, code, decipher data and more, and now it may democratize the process of building an app, too. A new AI-powered startup called Sutro promises the ability to build entire production-ready apps — including those for web, iOS and Android — in a matter of minutes, with no coding experience required.

The idea is to allow founders to focus on their unique ideas by leaning on Sutro to automate other aspects of app building, including the necessary AI expertise, product management and design, hosting, use of domain-specific languages, compiling and scaling.

The company was founded in late 2021 by Tomas Halgas, who sold his previous startup, the group chat app Sphere, to Twitter, alongside former Google and Facebook Product Manager Owen Campbell-Moore. The two have taken turns running the company, with Campbell-Moore at the head while Halgas worked at Twitter in its chaotic days leading up to Elon Musk’s takeover. Now, with Halgas having departed Twitter, he’s acting as CEO as Campbell-Moore has shifted to a day job at OpenAI.

The company’s journey to make its modem has been long and frustrating.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

As per a Bloomberg report, the iPhone maker, which had planned to launch its chip by next year, will likely miss its target of shipping the component by the spring of 2025, people familiar with the matter said. The chip may debut at the end of 2025 or early 2026, the last year of Apple’s extended contract with Qualcomm.

Continue reading “Apple’s modem chip project fails to match Qualcomm’s modem technology” »

Scientists have built noise-canceling headphones that filter out specific types of sound in real-time — such as birds chirping or car horns blaring — thanks to a deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm.

The system, which researchers at the University of Washington dub “semantic hearing,” streams all sounds captured by headphones to a smartphone, which cancels everything before letting wearers pick the specific types of audio they’d like to hear. They described the protoype in a paper published Oct. 29 in the journa IACM Digital Library.

Swooping magnetic fields that confine plasma in doughnut-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks could help improve the efficiency of complex machines that produce microchips. This innovation could lead to more powerful computers and smart phones, near-essential devices that make modern society possible.

Engineers use high-energy light emitted by plasma, the electrically charged fourth state of matter, to create small structures on the surfaces of silicon wafers during their transformation into microchips. These tiny components enable a range of devices, including consumer electronics, video games, medical machinery, and telecommunications. Improving the generation of this light could extend the life of vital parts within the machines and make the manufacture of microchips more efficient.

“These findings could change the microchip industry,” said Ben Israeli, lead author of the paper publishing the results in Applied Physics Letters. Israeli is a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), which is managed by Princeton University.