Speech2Face is an advanced neural network developed by MIT scientists and trained to recognize certain facial features and reconstruct people’s faces just by listening to the sound of their voices.

You’ve probably already heard about AI-powered cameras that can recognize people just by analyzing their facial features, but what if there was a way for artificial intelligence to figure out what you look like just by the sound of your voice and without comparing your voice to a database? That’s exactly what a team of scientists at MIT has been working on, and the results of their work are impressive, kind of. While their neural network, named Speech2Face, can’t yet figure out the exact facial features of a human just by their voice, it certainly gets plenty of details right.

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Japanese beverage maker Kirin Holdings teamed up with researchers at Meiji University in Tokyo to create smart chopsticks that reportedly make food taste more savory.

Meiji University professor Homei Miyashita has been researching electrical stimulation as a way to alter the way people experience food and flavor for years. In 2016, along with fellow researcher Hiromi Nakamura, he made international news headlines for developing a revolutionary electric fork that could make any food taste saltier than it actually was. And last year, he got even more attention for his Taste the TV (TTTV) project, a lickable TV screen that could imitate the taste of various foods. Now, he’s once again the talk of the interwebs thanks to his latest invention, a pair of smart chopsticks that can allegedly make food more savory.

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A Japanese startup is trying to blur the line between reality and virtual reality with technology that allows the wearer to feel the pain experienced inside the metaverse in real life.

H2L Technologies, a Sony-backed technology company based in Tokyo, recently unveiled a wristband that dishes out small electric shocks whenever the wearer suffers pain-inducing damage in the much-hyped metaverse. The device is supposed to do a lot more than that, including mimicking a range of sensations from catching a ball to a bird pinching the wearer’s skin, as well as conveying weight and resistance. It’s all meant to make the metaverse this immersive experience that the people and companies involved in its creation have been pushing over the last year or so.

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Japanese tech giant Kawasaki caused a lot of raised eyebrows at the world’s largest robot trade show in Tokyo, with Bex, a rideable robot goat.

The 2022 International Robot Exhibition featured a lot of ingenious creations, but few as attention-grabbing as Kawasaki’s latest invention, a robot goat that can carry approximately 220 pounds of cargo. Named after the Ibex, a species of large wild goat native to parts of Eurasia and Africa, the Kawasaki Bex can transport human riders or different materials, but it also has a fully modular top half, so it doesn’t need to be a rideable goat. But let’s be honest, why would you want to ruin a good thing? After all, what’s cooler than a robot goat?

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A Polish robotics engineer recently posted a series of intriguing videos of what looks like a dextrous android arm powered by synthetic muscles.

Łukasz Koźlik, who goes under the moniker Automaton Robotics online, is a talented robotics engineer from Poland who has spent the last few years creating an incredible synthetic muscle arm that moves eerily like a human one. A firm believer in the idea that muscle mimicry is the key to fast, efficient, and affordable robots, Łukasz has been building on the concept of McKibben muscle, or pneumatic artificial muscles, creating a synthetic muscular system that allows robots to move their fingers and palms in a similar way to humans.

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After losing his balance and falling off his bicycle, a bright Chinese engineer dedicated his spare time to designing and building a bike that not only self-balances, but also detects and avoids obstacles.

I never learned how to ride a bicycle, and I always wondered how people managed to keep their balance on those two thin wheels, but thanks to the efforts of Zhi Hui Jun, I may never have to. The talented engineer was fascinated by the self-driving bicycle built by scientists at Beijing Tsinghua University back in 2019, and after suffering a bicycle accident that left him with minor injuries to his face, the young engineer decided to build his own self-balancing bicycle.

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Hua Zhibing officially registered and became a student of Beijing’s Tsinghua University on Tuesday. But she’s not just another student, but China’s first AI-powered, virtual student.

Hua Zhibing’s appearance, voice and even the music playing in the background of the vlog she introduced herself to the world in were all created using on a record-breaking AI modeling system called Wudao 2.0. It was unveiled at the 2021 Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) Conference on June 1, and, according to its developers, it is the first trillion scale model in China and the largest in the world. Wudao 2.0 is designed to enable machines to think like humans and is reportedly close to passing the Turing test in poetry and couplets creation, text summaries, answering questions and painting.

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The Expanscape Aurora 7 prototype is being marketed as the world’s first seven-screen laptop, a 17.3-inch behemoth designed with IT professionals and content creators in mind.

Having more than one display is quite common for PC workstations, but multiple screens have obviously been more difficult to implement on laptops. Well, until today, that is, as laptop manufacturer Expanscape has recently released the world’s first seven-screen mobile workstation, monster of a rig that unfolds into a mobile powerhouse. The London-based company has yet to announce a price for its unconventional device, but the company’s official website mentions that the prototypes are already available for sale.

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Japan’s Kubota Pharmaceutical Holdings claims to have developed smart glasses that, if worn just an hour per day, can allegedly cure myopia.

Myopia, or nearsightedness, is a common ophthalmological condition in which you can see objects near to you clearly, but objects farther away are blurry. To compensate for this blur, you have the option of wearing eyeglasses or contact lenses, or the more invasive refractive surgery. But a Japanese company claims to have come up with a new non-invasive way of dealing with myopia – a pair of “smart glasses” that project an image from the lens of the unit onto the wearer’s retina to correct the refractive error that causes nearsightedness. Apparently, wearing the device 60 to 90 minutes a day corrects myopia.

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Smartphones have long been known to be crawling with all sorts of bacteria and microbes, but that “dirty” reputations is getting a cleanup thanks to a UK startup that claims to have created the world’s first antimicrobial smartphone.

The CAT S42 build under the Caterpillar brand is one of the sturdiest and cleanest budget smartphones money can buy. Its IP68 rating means it has total protection against dust and water, and the manufacturer actually encourages users to wash and sanitize their phones under running water. But starting in 2021, the CAT S42 will get an extra layer of protection thanks to a new technology called “Biomaster antimicrobial technology”, which supposedly stops the spread of germs.

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The new Apple iPhone 12 was only announced a few days ago, but if you can’t wait until its official launch, or if you can’t afford to buy it when it comes out, you can simply make your old handheld look like one.

Chinese media recently reported on a popular accessory that iPhone fans have been raving about online – a new case that basically turns older Apple smartphones, like the iPhone X or iPhone 11 into a replica of the yet-to-be-released iPhone 12. Only days after the official announcement of the iPhone 12, the new case was already available in Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei Electronics Market for a reported 450 yuan ($67) for the iPhone X and 350 yuan ($52) for the iPhone 11.

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In a time when traveling the world isn’t as simple as it used to be, a site that lets you experience the view from a window halfway around the world sounds pretty interesting. That’s where Window Swap comes in.

Developed by Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam, a husband and wife team from Singapore, as a quarantine project, Window Swap is an easy and ingenious way to travel all around the world, from the comfort of your own home. All you have to do is visit the Window Swap website and click on the “Open a new window somewhere in the world” button to instantly be transported in a stranger’s home in cities like London, Bangalore or Jakarta from the windows of whom you can admire the views they wake up to every day.

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German automation company Festo recently unveiled its latest bio-inspired creation, the Bionic Swift, a lightweight robot capable of mimicking the flight of an actual swift.

Over the last decade Festo has unveiled an impressive number of robots inspired by the Earth’s fauna, from bionic ants and butterflies, to penguins, jellyfish and even kangaroos. Earlier this month, the robotics studio showcased their newest invention, a lightweight flying robot inspired by the swift and capable of mimicking its flight maneuvers with impressive accuracy. From steep turns and drops to nausea-inducing loops, the new Bionic Swift can pull of most, if not all, of a real swift’s movements.

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Japanese company Tone Mobile has been getting a lot of attention ever since it launched its Tone e20 model, the world’s first smartphone that prevents users from taking “inappropriate” (nude) photos.

The Tone e20 is not a particularly attractive phone, and its spec sheet isn’t exactly impressive either, but it does one thing that no other phone in the word does – it uses artificial intelligence to prevent users from taking nude photos of themselves or anyone else. Aimed primarily at parents who want to ‘protect children from predators’, the phone can also ‘connect’ with other devices and notify their owner if the connected phone has clicked an inappropriate photo.

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German artist Simon Weckert recently went viral after posting a video on YouTube dragging a small cart with 99 smartphones on an empty street and tricking Google Maps into showing a traffic jam.

Basically, Weckert loaded 99 smartphones with Google Maps turned on onto a small wagon cart and then pulled that cart around various streets in Berlin, including outside the Google office building. He was thus reportedly able to fool Google’s GPS app into thinking that there was a high concentration of users on those streets. And because the phones were being carried in a slow-moving cart, the app was also tricked into thinking that it was detecting a traffic jam.

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