You鈥檙e going to wear that to the toilet?
鈥淥K Glass, I鈥檓 going to the loo.鈥� To prevent a wearable device like Google Glass from catching people on camera during a private moment, a team at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte taught smartphones to automatically detect when the user had entered a restroom. The phone鈥檚 microphone searches for sounds that are similar to other bathrooms, like echoes from tiled floors, and shuts down a device鈥檚 picture or video apps. It was presented earlier this month at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers in Seattle.
31,000 The number of invite requests per hour that claims it received on last week鈥檚 launch. It says it won鈥檛 sell user data to advertisers
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From the mouths of robo-babes
A robot with artificial vocal cords resembling those of a 6-month-old child has been created. Lingua, developed by Nobutsuna Endo and his team at Osaka University, Japan, can only produce baby-like burbles with its robot voice box and moulded silicon tongue. The team is working on giving it the ability to shape its lips and produce vowels and consonants, in a bid to produce increasingly human-like speech.
Computers that 鈥渕elt鈥� after use
A vanishing computer? Just add water. New biodegradable circuit boards made from cellulose gum make it possible to build a computing system that is less damaging to the environment when discarded. John Rogers and his team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign made a printed circuit board that measures temperature for 24 hours, reporting its readings wirelessly. The circuit disintegrates after 10 minutes in water, leaving only traces of relatively safe metals behind ().
