Automatic sleep staging typically relies on gold-standard EEG setups, which are accurate but obtrusive and impractical for everyday use outside sleep laboratories. This limits applicability in real-world settings, such as home environments, where continuous, long-term monitoring is needed. Detecting sleep onset is particularly relevant, enabling consumer applications (e.g. automatically pausing media playback when the user falls asleep). Recent research has shown correlations between in-ear EEG and full-scalp EEG for various phenomena, suggesting wearable, in-ear devices could allow unobtrusive sleep monitoring. We investigated the feasibility of using single-channel in-ear electrophysiological (ExG) signals for automatic sleep staging in a wearable device by conducting a sleep study with 11 participants (mean age: 24), using a custom earpiece with a dry eartip electrode (Dätwyler SoftPulse) as a measurement electrode in one ear and a reference in the other. Ground truth sleep stages were obtained from an Apple Watch Ultra, validated for sleep staging. Our system achieved 90.5% accuracy for binary sleep detection (Awake vs. Asleep) and 65.1% accuracy for four-class staging (Awake, REM, Core, Deep) using leave-one-subject-out validation. These findings demonstrate the potential of in-ear electrodes as a low-effort, comfortable approach to sleep monitoring, with applications such as stopping podcasts when users fall asleep.

Grown men wearing tights like to yell terrible things at Fred DeJesus. DeJesus is an umpire in the outer constellations of professional baseball, where he's been spat on and, once, challenged to a postgame fight in a parking lot. He was born in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to Puerto Rican parents, stands five feet three, and is shaped, in his chest protector, like a fire hydrant; he once ejected a player for saying that he suffered from "little-man syndrome." Two years ago, DeJesus became the first umpire in a regular-season game anywhere to use something called the Automated Ball-Strike System. Most players refer to it as the "robo-umpire."

A few years ago, I spent a day at Suntory's Yamazaki Distillery outside of Kyoto, Japan. There's a bar at the end of the tour, and (pro tip) it's one of the only places in the world you can get Suntory's whiskeys at cost. When I purchased my first glass of whiskey, a pair of Japanese men who'd taken the Shinkansen in from Tokyo waved me over to their table. Through pantomime, one of them offered me a taste of the whisky in his glass, and we ended up spending hours sampling spirits and talking about Japanese whiskey through the magic of Google Translate on our phones. It was a halting, awkward way to have a conversation, but it was glorious, and it still stands as one of the best experiences of my life.

The company's Stylish True Wireless is my go-to IEH for the gym and walks around the neighborhood, and I gave the Triple Driver IEH a rating of 5--the only such rating I've given to date--in my review of three wired models from 1More. So, it should come as no surprise that I was excited to review 1More's latest offering, the Dual Driver ANC Pro wireless IEH. Its form factor is similar to several of the company's models but different than the other wireless IEHs I've tried. I really like the form factor, but sound quality is most important, and the Dual Driver ANC Pro is something of a split personality in that regard. The Dual Driver ANC Pro consists of a flexible, silicone-covered neckband with thin wires emerging from both ends that connect to the earpieces. The back of the earpieces are magnetic, so they clasp together to form a necklace for convenient, safe storage when not in use.

Forget phrase books or even Google Translate. New translation devices are getting closer to replicating the fantasy of the Babel fish, which in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" sits in one's ear and instantly translates any foreign language into the user's own. The WT2 Plus Ear to Ear AI Translator Earbuds from Timekettle are already available, while the over-the-ear "Ambassador" from Wavery Labs is scheduled for release this year. Both brands are wireless, and come with two earpieces that must be synced to a single smartphone connected to Wi-Fi or cellular data. These devices "bring us a bit closer to being able to travel to places in the world where people speak different languages and communicate smoothly with those who are living there," said Graham Neubig, an assistant professor at the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University and an expert in machine learning and natural language processing.

For all the advances in medical diagnostics made over the last two centuries of modern medicine, from the ability to peer deep inside the body with the help of superconducting magnets to harnessing the power of molecular biology, it seems strange that the enduring symbol of the medical profession is something as simple as the stethoscope. Hardly a medical examination goes by without the frigid kiss of a stethoscope against one's chest, while we search the practitioner's face for a telltale frown revealing something wrong from deep inside us. The stethoscope has changed little since its invention and yet remains a valuable if problematic diagnostic tool. Efforts have been made to solve these problems over the years, but only with relatively recent advances in digital signal processing (DSP), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and artificial intelligence has any real progress been made. This leaves so-called smart stethoscopes poised to make a real difference in diagnostics, especially in the developing world and under austere or emergency situations.

Noise, Alex Waibel tells me, is one of the major challenges that artificial speech translation has to meet. A device may be able to recognise speech in a laboratory, or a meeting room, but will struggle to cope with the kind of background noise I can hear surrounding Professor Waibel as he speaks to me from Kyoto station. I'm struggling to follow him in English, on a scratchy line that reminds me we are nearly 10,000km apart – and that distance is still an obstacle to communication even if you're speaking the same language. We haven't reached the future yet. If we had, Waibel would have been able to speak in his native German and I would have been able to hear his words in English.

STEPPING OFF THE PLANE in Russia for the first time in 2013, I collided with a wall of blunt language and was intrigued beyond repair. Five years, countless classes and ten visits to Moscow later, I still claim a distinctly below-average capacity for the Russian tongue and its dense, foreboding components. To fill these gaps ahead of my next adventure abroad, I turned to technology. Late last year, Brooklyn's Waverly Labs released the Pilot ($299, waverlylabs.com), These eavesdropping devices use a cloud-based machine learning technology to pipe dozens of different languages into your brain in your mother tongue.

Super portability and easy access to AI assistants make these wireless headphones must-haves on your next trip. And the design is kooky. But you won't find better Bluetooth chops. The W1 wireless chip maintains a rock-solid connection to minimize dropouts, and the battery delivers five hours of listening before you have to pop them into the case for a charge. Want to hear some SZA? Double-tap either bud and ask Siri to cue it up.

Google wants its virtual assistant to be in gadgets besides smartphones and intelligent speakers, and it looks like the company could be taking steps toward making that happen. The search giant may be working on smart headphones that work with the Google Assistant, according to a new report from 9to5Google. The tech news blog discovered code within an app uploaded to the Google Play Store that seemingly refers to headphones that can run Google's virtual helper. "Your headphones have the Google Assistant," one string of code says. Tell it to do things.