Feedback is feeling bold, so here is a prediction: the research we are about to describe is going to win an Ig Nobel award within the next decade. The entire project feels tailor-made for the Igs. It is an effort to objectively measure human flatulence using biosensors, or "Smart Underwear". We learned of this from a press release from the University of Maryland, flagged to us by physics reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan with the phrase: "Surely, Feedback can do something with this." The essential problem is that we do not know the normal range for flatulence, unlike other key biomarkers like blood glucose.

You should start taking "Fart Walks" The name may inspire snickers, but the benefits are no joke. Take a brisk walk after meals to help your guts. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Founding father Benjamin Franklin secured the alliance with France that led to victory in the Revolutionary War, negotiated the Treaty of Paris ending said war, signed the Declaration of Independence the U.S Constitution, discovered that lightning was electrical, invented bifocal glasses, wrote the famous, and ran newspapers. He also had some thoughts on farting.

AI is leaps and bounds from where it was years ago. I remember Windows 7 had introduced voice recognition as a feature. It didn't work great, but over time it did get better as it trained on your voice. Speed ahead to now and we have speech to text and voice recognition technologies that are almost perfect in the palms of our hands. If you know me, I've been messing around with Craiyon, an image generating AI and OpenAI's GPT-3 based models that generate text based upon a prompt.

Machine learning algorithms can uncover complex patterns in the data they see, making them useful for image recognition, predicting customer service questions, or recommending movies. They can even do a decent job at naming craft beers, kittens, or guinea pigs. But one thing it turns out they're bad at? Understanding what humans find sexy. I had my first sign that this was a problem when I trained a neural network to generate new Halloween costumes and saw its attempts at the "sexy" category of names - it came up with ideas like Sexy Gargles, Pretty zombie Space Suit, and Sexy the Spock.

Google and Jigsaw launch machine learning platform Perspective to identify comments that may be labeled as "toxic,"and you can start using it now. Google and Jigsaw launched Perspective to help "improve conversations" by identifying which comments may have the potential for harassment or abuse, and it is already available to use on their website. Perspective's API uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation. Its first model is being used to identify whether a comment could be perceived as toxic. The results can be used by developers and publishers to give realtime feedback to commenters, help moderators do their job, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information, according to the official release.

It's love, but not as we know it. Valentine's Day is nearly upon us and this year we'll be staring doe-eyed at our favourite IoT creations. There's a little something for everyone, from cognitive candy dispensers and a Valentine's IoT recipe for the loved-up, to life-changing tech designed to make a difference. While I've no intention of turning all gooey on you, I would like to share one rather sweet IoT recipe: a connected little paper heart that lights up when it receives a love-note. The idea is that you can send a message from your phone over the internet, which is picked up by the Wi-Fi-connected electronic heart, which in turn lights up and performs a little dance for your loved one.