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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Inspired by the comfort of the classic dog bed, a couple of university students designed Plufl, the world’s first dog bed for humans.

If you’re thinking that the Plufl is just an oversized dog bed, you’re technically right, but according to its creators, University of British Columbia students Noah Silverman and Yuki Kinoshita, it’s also much more than that. Apparently, the Plufl was engineered “to provide the optimal napping experience” and “maximize comfort and foster a sense of security, delivering relief for those who have ADHD, stress, and anxiety-related issues.”

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An American family caused quite the scare at Israel’s main international airport last week after presenting an unexploded bomb shell as a souvenir at a security check.

Passengers at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv suffered the fright of their lives last Thursday, when a U.S. family casually presented an unexploded ordinance at a security check. A member of the family, whose names have not been revealed, had reportedly picked up the explosive as a souvenir on a visit to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and decided that it would be a good idea to take it home to the States as a souvenir. According to eye-witnesses, the man simply took it out of his backpack and showed it to security staff, asking them if it could be put in a suitcase.

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A young woman in Nonthaburi, Central Thailand is so obsessed with the color pink that she has painted her entire house neon pink and has been surrounding herself with pink accessories.

The pink house of Nonthaburi first went viral in August of 2019, when Facebook user “หนูเล็ก ลูกสาวคนเล็ก” uploaded dozens of them on the popular social network. It showed a large house painted neon pink both inside and out, decked with pink floor tiles, and featuring pink furniture. There was even a pink scooter parked outside, so clearly the owners had a thing for the color.

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An unusual capsule machine in Shinjuku, Tokyo has been getting a lot of attention on social media for dispensing ID photos of total strangers for 300 yen ($2.30).

Gachapon capsule toys are really popular in Japan, so popular that you can find them virtually everywhere, dispensing all kinds of collectibles, from small action figures and dolls to souvenirs. The concept has become so popular that it has been incorporated in the majority of mobile phone games, where users have to pay real money for the chance of receiving a missing character or skin. Capsule machines have been around in Japan for decades, but back in March, one particular such machine in Tokyo went viral on social media for dispensing something very unusual – ID photos of total strangers.

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Michael Kish, a 70-year-old American runner, stunned the audience at the Penn Relays athletic event last Thursday, by finishing the 100-meter dash in under 14 seconds.

Imagine being a pensioner and turning up at an important sporting event meant primarily for athletes in prime physical shape and stealing the show. That’s exactly what Michael Kish did last week with his awe-inspiring performance in the 100-meter dash, blowing past his competitors and finishing with an impressive time of just 13.47 seconds. That’s a time most 20-year-olds can only dream of beating, yet this 70-year-old grandfather ran it like it was no big deal.

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What if you only had 2 minutes a day to share a snapshot with your friends on social media, and you couldn’t use any kind of filter or editing tool on it?

If the above scenario sounds intriguing, you and your friends may want to give BeReal a try. BeReal is a new alternative photo-sharing application that wants its users to share a more authentic, filter-free picture of each other’s lives. Think of it as the opposite of Instagram, if you want. Instead of dozens of staged, over-edited photos of a fake glamorous existence, you get to share one unfiltered photo per day, in a 2-minute window, at a random time. Miss that window and you don’t get to share another photo until the next day. That’s supposed to keep things genuine and authentic, offering friends a window into their real day-to-day lives.

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A 24-year-old woman became the talk of South Korean social media this month after it was revealed that she managed to save up 100 million won ($79,400) in 4 years by being extremely thrifty.

Ji-hyeon Kwak started working when she was 19-year-old and quickly realized that she needed to save money if she was ever going to get her own place to live. Despite earning an average of 2 million won per month (after tax), the young woman managed to put enough aside every month to save over 100 million won in the last four years. That was enough for her to win an apartment subscription, which means she will soon get her own place to live. But, as you can imagine, saving that much money on such a small salary wasn’t easy. She had to take her thriftiness to an extreme level, which included spending just 8,400 won ($6.7) on food per month.

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Japanese Shinto shrine sells low-tech IT amulets that promise to keep computers from freezing and restarting randomly, as well as free from viruses and malware.

Kanda Myojin, a popular Shinto shrine in Akihabara, Tokyo sells a variety of amulets and prayers, but none as intriguing as the “computer function amulet”. Consisting of a small, CPU-shaped sticker meant to be stuck onto the gadget in need of divine protection and a larger piece of cardboard meant to be worn by the computer operator, the amulet is one of the most popular items offered by Kanda Myojinm. If used correctly, the amulet will allegedly protect your machine from viruses, malware and random errors, as well as keep it from freezing up.

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Zach Skitmore, a 9-year-old boy from Norwich, in Norfolk, UK suffers from a rare genetic condition that makes him immune to pain. That may sound like a real-life superpower, but in reality, it only makes him more vulnerable.

Zach’s parents started noticing something strange about his reactions to pain very early on. When he was just an infant getting his first shots, he didn’t so much as squeak when the nurse poked him with the needle. At age one, he bit through his tongue without even realizing, then, when he was four, he dislocated his hip on a bouncy castle and had it popped back in without any kind of pain relief. When he was six, he broke his leg and walked on it for three days before anyone noticed it was broken. Unfortunately, not being able to feel pain isn’t the same as not getting hurt, and all this physical abuse has already taken a heavy toll on Zach’s body.

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Walter Orthmann, a 100-year-old man from Brazil has been working for the same company since 1938, which officially makes his career worthy of the Guinness Book of Records.

Orthman began working for Industrias Renaux S.A., a textile company in Brusque, on January 17, 1938, when he was only 15-years-old. He began as an assistant in the shipping department, but over the years, he was promoted to administrative assistant and, eventually, sales manager. During his 84-year-long career, Walter went on sales trips all over the world, received his paycheck in nine different currency denominations, and used nearly every commercial airline in the history of Brazilian aviation.

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A video that has been widely shared on Chinese social media over the last couple of weeks shows a group of small children rollerblading on the roof of a building several storeys high, with just a small guardrail keeping them from falling.

The video, shot from a nearby building by a woman known only as Ms. Lin got a lot of attention on social media this month, with many commenters wondering how the whole thing didn’t end in a heartbreaking disaster. A group of small children can be seen casually rollerblading on the smooth roof of a building in Bayannur, in China’s Inner Mongolia region, without adult supervision. With strong winds blowing and only a small guardrail to keep the kids from tumbling down, it’s a miracle that none of them got hurt.

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Three Kenyan sisters who happen to be identical triplets are reportedly dating and planning to marry the same man, one Bigman Stevo, who claims that having three partners is no big deal.

Cate, Eve and Mary, three sisters known as “Comrades Triplets” in Kenya, have been making news headlines in their native country over the last couple of weeks, ever since it was first revealed that they are all dating the same man. Cate was the first to notice Stevo, and she later told her two sisters about him. They approached him and asked if he would be willing to date all three of them, and they’ve been together for a couple of weeks now. It was the Comrades Triplets who devised a dating schedule to keep everyone happy, and Stevo has so far been happy to oblige.

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As if we needed another reason to be scared about going to a dentist, it seems those terrifying drill bits can do more than bore through teeth, they can get lodged in your lungs.

Imagine going to a dentist for a routine procedure like getting a tooth filled, and then hearing that you might have to have part of your lung removed because of a dental drill bit. That’s exactly what happened to Tom Jozsi, a 60-year-old man from Illinois, this month. He was at the dentist getting a tooth filled, and the next thing he knows he is being told that he swallowed a drill bit. That would have been bad enough, considering that the sharp metal part could have pierced his intestines, but a CT scan later showed that he hadn’t swallowed the drill bit, he had inhaled it, and it was now lodged in his lung.

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An anonymous person is responsible for over 90 percent of the noise complaints received by Dublin International Airport last year, a whopping 12,272, or an average of 34 complaints per day.

2021 wasn’t the best year on record for airports, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Dublin Airport is no exception, but that didn’t stop one unidentified individual from lodging noise complaints regarding the flights that did land or take off from the airport. In fact, this person managed to double the number of noise complaints they made in 2020, a respectable 6,227 of them, even though plane traffic was only up around 10 percent from the previous year, because of pandemic restrictions.

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