Our nostrils share the workload like coworkers on rotation. Each of our two nostrils smells the world differently. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you close one eye or put a finger to your ear, there's an immediate sense of loss. Two eyes help us see the world while two ears enable us to locate sounds.

The ugly gossip about Marjorie Taylor Greene swirling in DC... no wonder she's giving this'nothing to see here' performance of a lifetime: KENNEDY Tupac's family hid his final secret for decades. Southern city morphs into New York's'tiny twin' as Big Apple residents flock there in droves to escape woke mayor The truth about Aaron Rodgers's secret'wife': Family lift the lid on the NFL's biggest mystery... and finally put to bed those swirling rumors Singer Grande shows off her 40 hand'prison' tattoos at Wicked: For Good premiere in Paris Insiders blow lid on top secret actor'blacklist' at Paramount that's tearing Hollywood apart and start naming names White House space sabotage plot EXPOSED: The truth behind the NASA war that tore Trump's inner circle in two Wild image shows how Simone Biles would look next to Olivier Rioux... after he made his college basketball debut Donald Trump wants Washington Commanders to name $3.7billion stadium after him Air India grounds three Boeing planes for'extensive investigations' after crash that killed 260 She was an award-winning Teacher of the Year. Succession star Sarah Snook's new thriller is the best show of the year - its brings every parent's worst nightmare to life in spectacular fashion and I binged all eight episodes in one sitting Fears as Days of Our Lives is beset by string of tragedies... leaving producers desperately scrambling to save iconic show Soap icon turned ordained minister who flirted with Andy Warhol steps out in LA... can you guess who? Jeremy Renner's film partner claims he sent her explicit photos and videos to woo her then threatened the unthinkable when they fell out Whether you're in a work meeting or on a first date, it can sometimes be impossible to tell what someone is thinking. But help is at hand, as experts have revealed the tiny facial microexpressions that can give away a person's true thoughts.

The application of autonomous robotics to close-contact healthcare tasks has a clear role for the future due to its potential to reduce infection risks to staff and improve clinical efficiency. Nasopharyngeal (NP) swab sample collection for diagnosing upper-respiratory illnesses is one type of close contact task that is interesting for robotics due to the dexterity requirements and the unobservability of the nasal cavity. We propose a control system that performs the test using a collaborative manipulator arm with an instrumented end-effector to take visual and force measurements, under the scenario that the patient is unrestrained and the tools are general enough to be applied to other close contact tasks. The system employs a visual servo controller to align the swab with the nostrils. A compliant joint velocity controller inserts the swab along a trajectory optimized through a simulation environment, that also reacts to measured forces applied to the swab. Additional subsystems include a fuzzy logic system for detecting when the swab reaches the nasopharynx and a method for detaching the swab and aborting the procedure if safety criteria is violated. The system is evaluated using a second robotic arm that holds a nasal cavity phantom and simulates the natural head motions that could occur during the procedure. Through extensive experiments, we identify controller configurations capable of effectively performing the NP swab test even with significant head motion, which demonstrates the safety and reliability of the system.

The nasopharyngeal (NP) swab test is a method for collecting cultures to diagnose for different types of respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19. Delegating this task to robots would be beneficial in terms of reducing infection risks and bolstering the healthcare system, but a critical component of the NP swab test is having the swab aligned properly with the nasal cavity so that it does not cause excessive discomfort or injury by traveling down the wrong passage. Existing research towards robotic NP swabbing typically assumes the patient's head is held within a fixture. This simplifies the alignment problem, but is also dissimilar to clinical scenarios where patients are typically free-standing. Consequently, our work creates a vision-guided pipeline to allow an instrumented robot arm to properly position and orient NP swabs with respect to the nostrils of free-standing patients. The first component of the pipeline is a precomputed joint lookup table to allow the arm to meet the patient's arbitrary position in the designated workspace, while avoiding joint limits. Our pipeline leverages semantic face models from computer vision to estimate the Euclidean pose of the face with respect to a monocular RGB-D camera placed on the end-effector. These estimates are passed into an unscented Kalman filter on manifolds state estimator and a pose based visual servo control loop to move the swab to the designated pose in front of the nostril. Our pipeline was validated with human trials, featuring a cohort of 25 participants. The system is effective, reaching the nostril for 84% of participants, and our statistical analysis did not find significant demographic biases within the cohort.

The nose is one of humanity's most distinctive facial features, but exactly how we came to inherit such diverse shapes and sizes has remained a mystery. But new research which examined differences across populations around the world may have the answer. And it seems that the local climate may have helped to shape variations in the evolution of the nose. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University used 3D imaging to examine the nasal characteristics of 140 people. Dr Mark Shriver and his colleague Arslan Zaidi looked at the width of the nostrils, distance between nostrils, height of the nose, nose ridge length, nose protrusion, external area of the nose and the area of the nostrils. They examined the distribution of these traits across distinct global populations and compared them with temperatures and humidity in each area.

The team at Google Brain has made an impressive breakthrough for increasing the resolution of images. They've managed to turn 8x8 grids of pixels into monstrous approximations of human beings. Neural networks are our best chance at being able to truly increase the level of detail in a low-resolution image. We're stuck with the pixel information that a photo contains but deep learning can add detail through what are commonly referred to as "hallucinations." This essentially means a piece of software making guesses about an image based on the information it's learned from other images.