A pair of glasses that is able to'read' text and convert it into speech allowing blind and visually impaired people has been tested by scientists. The device looks like a small camera attached to the side of a pair of glasses. Using OCR - optical character reading - technology, the camera and tiny computer it contains can read printed materials. A pair of glasses (pictured) that is able to'read' text and convert it into speech allowing blind and visually impaired people has been tested by scientists. It is activated by pointing it at an object and pressing a trigger button.

Securifi announced today that its latest connected-home, mesh-network router, the Almond 3 is now available for pre-order at a 30 discount from its final retail price of 150 (your can pre-order at Amazon). First shown at CES 2016 in January, the company expects to ship the router sometime in June. Wi-Fi router, the Almond 3 is outfitted with a ZigBee radio and will be able to function as a connected-home hub. If your smart lighting, door locks, motion sensors, and other devices operate on some other protocol, Securifi offers a 20 Z-Wave USB dongle; the company expects to offer a Bluetooth dongle sometime in Q4. What's more, the new router can also operate in conjunction with Amazon's Alexa digital voice assistant (you'll also need to have an Amazon Echo, Dot, or Tap). Effective today, this last feature has also been added to two of Securifi's earlier routers, the Almond and the Almond 2015.

The algorithm's success rate is higher than a human scientist, in part because it's analysing data from failed experiments, otherwise known as "dark reactions." Often, these sit in laboratory notebooks, accessible only to the scientist that conducted the original experiment. But the team from Haverford College has taken a different approach, digitizing thousands of successful and failed reactions to create a vast, publicly accessible repository. Associate Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier broke down the properties of each experiment, while fellow Associate Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist worked on the machine-learning algorithm. As Nature explains, the team has been focusing on crystalline reactions, produced by mixing and heating a set of reagents in a solvent.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nick Lane is an evolutionary biochemist at University College London who thinks about the big questions of life: how it began, how it is maintained, why we age and die, and why we have sex. Shunning the habit of our times to regard these as questions for evolutionary genetics, Lane insists that our fundamental biochemical mechanisms--particularly those through which living cells generate energy--may determine or limit these facts of life. Lane has been steadily constructing an alternative, complementary view of evolution to the one in which genes compete for reproductive success and survival. He has argued that some of the big shifts during evolutionary history, such as the appearance of complex cells called eukaryotes (like our own) and the emergence of multicellular life forms, are best understood by considering the energetic constraints. Lane's book Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution was awarded the 2010 Royal Society Science Books Prize, the top prize in the United Kingdom for books on science. His 2015 book The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? has been described as "game-changing" and "brimming with bold and important ideas." It offers a new, detailed model for how life might have begun by harnessing the incipient chemical energy at deep-sea vents. Bill Gates called The Vital Question "an amazing inquiry into the origins of life."

It's always exciting when a new robot arrives in your lab. Usually, the more expensive the robot is, the more exciting it is. With the possible exception of Boston Dynamics' ATLAS, NASA's Valkyrie has got to be one of the most expensive humanoid robots ever made, and last year, NASA promised to give away (or, at least, lend) three of them to universities in the hope that Valkyrie will learn some new skills. Within the last few weeks, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, which teamed up with Northeastern University in Boston, Mass., took delivery of their fancy new robot, as did MIT and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. We talked to Holly Yanco at UMass Lowell and Taskin Padir at Northeastern, along with Sethu Vijayakumar at Edinburgh and Russ Tedrake at MIT, about what it's like to have a smokin' hot space robot show up on your doorstep in a bunch of pieces.

Energy is a limited resource which has to be managed wisely, taking into account both supply-demand matching and capacity constraints in the distribution grid. One aspect of the smart energy management at the building level is given by the problem of real-time detection of flexible demand available. In this paper we propose the use of energy disaggregation techniques to perform this task. Firstly, we investigate the use of existing classification methods to perform energy disaggregation. A comparison is performed between four classifiers, namely Naive Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machine and AdaBoost. Secondly, we propose the use of Restricted Boltzmann Machine to automatically perform feature extraction. The extracted features are then used as inputs to the four classifiers and consequently shown to improve their accuracy. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated on a real database consisting of detailed appliance-level measurements with high temporal resolution, which has been used for energy disaggregation in previous studies, namely the REDD. The results show robustness and good generalization capabilities to newly presented buildings with at least 96% accuracy.