Phone App Translates Your Voice to a Different Language in Real Time

Credit : Vocre

Simply speak into your phone, flip the phone over, and Vocre will speak for you in any of six languages (with more on the way). Using the accelerometer in the iPhone allows Vocre to theoretically give you a ‘touchless’ and more natural way of having a conversation in a foreign tongue.

According to the maker’s website: “Vocre is a new translation app from myLanguage that allows anyone to communicate instantly with anybody from anywhere – without language being a barrier.”

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Computer Interprets When People are in Pain

A team at Stanford University in California used computer learning software to sort through data generated by brain scans and detect when people were in pain. Currently, doctors rely on patients to tell them whether or not they are in pain. And that is still the gold standard for assessing pain, Mackey said. But some patients — the very young, the very old, dementia patients or those who are not conscious — cannot say if they are hurting, and that has led to a long search for some way to objectively measure pain.

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Can Driverless Pod Cars Solve the ‘Last-Mile Problem’?

Credit: ULTra PRT

Driverless “pod cars” already exist in London’s Heathrow Airport. The small, four-seater automated cars, manufactured by the company ULTra PRT, move along a track like a rollercoaster, and are environmentally friendly in two key ways: they’re electric, and they run on demand. The pods ferry 800 people along 2.4 miles of track daily. The company has proposed systems similar to that at Heathrow for 10 cities in the United States.
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First “Printed Aircraft” Flown

Engineers from University of Southhampton made and flew the first “printed aircraft ever.” The plane is an unmanned air vehicle (UAV). The entire structure of the plane was printed including the control surfaces, access, hatches, and even the wings. During the build of it, no fasteners were used and all the equipment was “snapped in” so it could be put together within minutes. The plane is electric, has a top speed of almost 100 mph, and has a 2 meter wing-span. The plane was printed on an EOS EOSINT P730 nylon laser sintering machine. These amchines create plastics or metals, by building the object layer by layer.

iPhone App Detects Cancer Using Scanner

Just when you thought your Smartphone couldn’t get any smarter, a new app has successfully been tested to detect cancer. How? First you use a special scanner, developed by Harvard and MIT researchers, to extract cells using a tiny needle. Then you hook it up to your Smartphone, which analyzes the cells and delivers a diagnosis within an hour. The most surprising thing about this gadget isthe cost- only $200.

Engineers Attempt to Give Robots the Ability to Love

You can’t buy love, but can you engineer it? A project at the National University of Singapore with all kinds of somewhat unsettling implications is trying to create the means for human-robot love by giving robots all the emotional and biological tools that human have. Read more here