A software to change sex!

It's virtually a face off! Scientists have developed a software which they claim can change the sex of a person on a computer by taking a live video feed of a person talking.
The software has been developed by computer scientist Barry-John Theobald at the University of East Anglia in the UK and Iain Matthews, formerly at Carnegie Mellon University and now at Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand.
In fact, according to the scientists, the software can take a live video feed of a person talking and make them look and sound like somebody else could actually change that, the 'New Scientist' reported.
In their research, the scientists recorded video of volunteers performing 30 different facial expressions such as frowning, smiling and looking surprised. For each expression, the positions of key facial features, such as the eyes, nose and corners of the lips, were manually labelled.
That annotated footage was used to "train" software to recognise the face of each individual featured in the set.
Once trained on a person in this way, it can closely track every move of their face in video footage.
Those movements can then be transferred onto the face of another "known" person by calculating how the recipient's features need to change to take on each new expression.
Doing that and displaying the transformed face takes just 150 milliseconds, fast enough to allow a conversation over video link to continue in real time. To complete effect, a person's voice can be manipulated to match their new face.
Volunteers were asked to chat to one another in a video conference, but did not know if the face they saw was really that of the person they were talking with – or indeed if the other volunteer was seeing their own true face.
"The results suggest that our body language during conversation is more reactive to that of others than it is to their physical appearance. We've shown you can present a female as herself or as a male, and the other participant's behaviour doesn't change," Theobald said.

MS making human body a videogame controller

Microsofthas revealed that is has been secretly developing technology that lets people play videogames using natural body movements instead of handheld controllers.
The US software giant behind Xbox 360 videogame consoles revealed yesterday a prototype of a project codenamed "Natal," a system that combines cameras and voice and face recognition software to recognise people and their actions.
"The gamer in me went out of my mind when I got to be interactive with this," famed film director Steven Spielberg during a Microsoft press conference on the eve of a major E3 videogame industry show in Los Angeles.
"I got a feeling I was in a historic moment. What Microsoft is doing isn't re-inventing the wheel; this is about no wheel at all."
Natal lets people play driving games by simply moving hands as if turning a car steering wheel. In-game characters in boxing, skateboard, soccer and other sports titles mimic the body movements of real-world players.
The system scans faces and voices to determine who is playing, a demonstration showed.
Xbox 360 consoles equipped with Natal will be able to respond to spoken commands for actions such as playing movies or connecting online with friends for video chats.
An expected completion date for Natal was not disclosed, but Microsoft yesterday released a software kit for videogame makers interested in designing titles to take advantage of Natal's capabilities.

memory chips that could bend and twist

The day is not far when electronic memory chips would gain the ability to be bended and twisted, for engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have found a way to build a flexible memory component out of inexpensive, readily available materials.
Although the new device is not ready to debut in the market, but it holds promise not only because of its potential applications in medicine and other fields, but also because it has the characteristics of a memristor.
A memristor is a fundamentally new component for electronic circuits that industry scientists developed in 2008.
Scientists seek electronic components that can flex without breaking for many reasons-for example they could be worn on the skin to monitor heart rate or blood sugar
Although there exist some flexible components, the NIST researchers think that creating flexible memory is a technical barrier.
Thus, while hunting for a solution, the researchers took polymer sheets-the sort that transparencies for overhead projectors are made from-and experimented with depositing a thin film of titanium dioxide, an ingredient in sunscreen, on their surfaces.
They deposited the material by a sol gel process, which consists of spinning the material in liquid form and letting it set, like making gelatin.
They added electrical contacts and created a flexible memory switch that operates on less than 10 volts, maintains its memory when power is lost, and still functions after being flexed more than 4,000 times.
In fact, the switch's performance strongly resembles to that of a memristor-a component theorised in 1971 as a fourth fundamental circuit element (along with the capacitor, resistor and inductor).
A memristor is essentially a resistor that changes its resistance depending on the amount of current that is sent through it-and retains this resistance even after the power is turned off.
The NIST component demonstrates similar electrical behaviour like a memristor, and is also flexible.
And, thus, they can begin to explore the metrology that may be necessary to study the device's unique electrical behaviour.
"We wanted to make a flexible memory component that would advance the development and metrology of flexible electronics, while being economical enough for widespread use. Because the active component of our device can be fabricated from a liquid, there is the potential that in the future we can print the entire memory device as simply and inexpensively as we now print a slide on an overhead transparency," said NIST researcher Nadine Gergel-Hackett.
The findings of the study appear in an upcoming issue of IEEE Electron Device Letters.

Alcohol can make cars more climate-friendly

Test results on a novel ethanol-assisted engine by the Ford Motor Company have indicated that alcohol can make automobiles more climate-friendly.
According to a report in New Scientist, the unit, called a direct-injection ethanol engine, runs primarily on petrol.
When it needs to deliver maximum power, like climb a hill or overtake, the engine management computer adds a little ethanol to the fuel injected into the combustion chambers.
This arrangement allows the engine to operate at a much higher compression ratio - a measure of the amount by which the fuel-air mixture is compressed before being ignited - than normal.
“As a result, an average car engine can be “downsized” to one that should have around 23 percent better fuel efficiency,” officials at Ford said.
Normally, the downside of a high compression ratio is that it encourages premature ignition or “knocking”, which drastically cuts down the power output.
Adding ethanol to the fuel suppresses knocking.
“We’re trying to get the best of both worlds,” said Paul Whitaker of AVL Powertrain Engineering of Plymouth, Michigan, which is developing the technology with Ford. “It’s like knock suppression on demand,” he added.
Test results on a pickup truck fitted with the new engine were recently presented at the US Department of Energy’s annual vehicle technology review meeting in Arlington, Virginia.
They showed a 23 percent improvement in fuel efficiency for the same performance levels.
The ethanol from a 40-litre auxiliary tank would last about 30,000 kilometres, according to Ford.
Whitaker said that the next step is to road test the engine in a variety of vehicles and to ensure that the engine does not become unusable if the ethanol tank runs dry.
Ford said that its ethanol-assisted engine would cost 1100 to 1500 dollars more than a conventional engine.
This is just one-third of the extra cost of a hybrid petrol-electric engine over a normal petrol engine. Hybrids typically deliver 25 to 35 per cent better fuel economy than a conventional engine.

Eye in the Sky

Eye in the Sky

The IAF on Thursday inducted the Israeli Airborne Early Warning and Control Systems (AWACS). The system can simultaneously track nearly 250 flying objects within a radius of 800 km. (AFP)