Jul 29
As record-breaking temperatures have pummeled much of the country this summer, another heat-related menace is causing trouble: flash droughts.
Jul 29
Given the current onslaught of ‘80s nostalgia (bolstered by Stranger Things and elevated by “sure, why not?” occurrences like the ALF revival), it only makes sense that one of the coolest characters of the era—artificial intelligence personality Max Headroom—would be angling for a return.
Jul 29
Going to a medical facility for an ultrasound image is a great way to provide doctors with one snapshot of what’s going on inside the body, but a new stick-on patch can snap ultrasound images for up to two days, giving potentially much better insights.
The bioadhesive ultrasound (BAUS) device (“the patch”) features a stretchable ultrasound imaging array that could capture images from the heart, lung, blood vessels, or muscles and tendons. It is currently connected to another device that will interpret the ultrasound signals into 2D images.
However, the patch allows doctors to watch how tissues react while the patient is in motion, which would be extremely valuable for the heart and muscles. In the future, the patch could, in theory, become wireless, further facilitating overall utilization.
Monitoring an area for long periods is extremely useful because some internal organ issues might only appear under specific conditions (like physical stress) that are not met during a traditional one-time imaging event.
The cited 48 hours of continuous imaging is due to how long the patch can remain on the skin without being uncomfortable (glue residue etc.) and not because of any electronics-related limitations.
The image resolution is probably not as good as the larger Ultrasound imaging devices, especially the fancy new 3D ones, but that should improve as well in time. If you want all the details about this technology, read the full paper.
Ultrasound Patch Captures Medical Images For Two Days
, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Jul 29
Alabama Official Told Reporter Her Skirt Was Too Short To Witness An Execution
Posted in: Today's ChiliIvana Hrynkiw was ultimately allowed to witness the killing of Joe Nathan James Jr., who was executed against the wishes of his victim’s family members.
Jul 29
Valve Says Everyone With a Steam Deck Reservation Will Get Their Console by End of Year
Posted in: Today's Chili
Good news for PC gaming fans eager to play laying down! Valve has announced it will be able to fulfill the demand for the Steam Deck, its handheld gaming console, sooner than initially estimated.
Jul 29
Las Vegas was the center of some intense flooding last night as locations across the Strip and beyond were inundated after a torrent of rain battered the city. This is the second major flooding event the U.S. experienced this week after major flooding hit St. Louis on Tuesday.
Jul 29
One of the dangers of going viral when you’re a pop culture reporter is that occasionally, sometimes, every now and then, your editor will ask you to start an open channel based on a silly tweet you shot off at midnight after reading a fanfic so devastating that you read it twice in two days. This is especially true…
Jul 29
You can find AI that creates new images, but what if you want to fix an old family photo? You might have a no-charge option. Louis Bouchard and PetaPixel have drawn attention to a free tool recently developed by Tencent researchers, GFP-GAN (Generative Facial Prior-Generative Adversarial Network), that can restore damaged and low-resolution portraits. The technology merges info from two AI models to fill in a photo’s missing details with realistic detail in a few seconds, all the while maintaining high accuracy and quality.
Conventional methods fine-tune an existing AI model to restore images by gauging differences between the artificial and real photos. That frequently leads to low-quality results, the scientists said. The new approach uses a pre-trained version of an existing model (NVIDIA’s StyleGAN-2) to inform the team’s own model at multiple stages during the image generation process. The technique aims to preserve the “identity” of people in a photo, with a particular focus on facial features like eyes and mouths.
You can try a demo of GFP-GAN for free. The creators have also posted their code to let anyone implement the restoration tech in their own projects.
This project is still bound by the limitations of current AI. While it’s surprisingly accurate, it’s making educated guesses about missing content. The researchers warned that you might see a “slight change of identity” and a lower resolution than you might like. Don’t rely on this to print a poster-sized photo of your grandparents, folks. All the same, the work here is promising — it hints at a future where you can easily rescue images that would otherwise be lost to the ravages of time.
Jul 29
Crumbling Tower of 'Babel' Traded $280 Million of Users’ Crypto, Lost It All
Posted in: Today's Chili
Babel Finance, the Hong Kong-based crypto lender, apparently had other designs when its worldwide user base handed over their crypto to the company than just borrowing and lending. It seems to have been doing what everyone else does with crypto, rapidly speculating and trying to make “line go up.” Of course, all that…
Jul 29
Intel could really use a few bucks from the recently passed (by Congress, at least) $280 billion CHIPS and Science ACT. The U.S. chipmaker shocked investors on Thursday, revealing it lost nearly $500 million in Q2, its first quarterly loss in years. The company cited weakened demand for PC components and downturns in…
Who's in charge here?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.