#Instagram for doctors: how Figure 1 is crowdsourcing diagnoses Where do doctors turn when even they don know what wrong with you?
Colleagues? Books? The internet? A Canadian startup wants to make the answer an Instagram for doctors.
Figure 1 is an app that allows iphone and Android-owning doctors to share images of diseases, injuries and everything in between.
Launched in 2013, the app was born from the idea that sharing images of what confounds doctors with other doctors across the world can help point them in the direction of the right answer.
It something doctors were already doing. Over 10,000 texts, Whatsapps and emails with images of curious and classic cases are being sent in the US each day
according to Dr. Joshua Landy, cofounder of Figure 1, who sought to provide a more secure and useful alternative. edicine has used always asynchronous communications such as pagers
or phones, says Landy. ow we want to help people share images, enabling more eyes on more cases,
but with privacy and learning in mind. Figure 1 looks like Instagram. Pictures are uploaded into feeds,
comments are made and images can be starred t not a ike more a bookmark for something to go back to,
says Landy. Some use their names, others hide behind usernames so colleagues could be collaborating on a diagnosis using the app
while unknowingly standing next to each other. Anyone can join the service and look at the images,
but only medical staff be that doctors, nurses or other medically trained personnel can become erified In the same way Twitter blue tick verifies that a user is who they say they are,
Figure 1 will verify someone is a medic by contacting their hospital or a suitable authority database.
The company is verifying 1, 000s of doctors a week across 40 countries and at some stage Landy expects to be verifying all users who join,
but not at present. ee not after gore seekers, but in some countries such as India reliable databases of doctors are nonexistent,
so we don want to keep them out, explained Landy. Uploading images isn quite as easy as Instagram.
The uploader is required to follow strict guidelines on what is and isn permitted. The patient face, any text or numbers or identifiable marks should not be in view.
Built-in image editing tools can be used to delete any pixels necessary before upload, ensuring patient privacy. ploaded images often look like a mess of black holes where things have been deleted,
but that fine this is not about aesthetics, it about sharing and learning, said Landy. The patient also has to sign a consent form either digitally on screen with their finger or via paper copies.
Each consent form is tailored for the country they happen to be patients in and is kept by the doctor,
not Figure 1. Once uploaded, images are queued before being reviewed manually. Those that have identifiable marks,
aren of educational value, or breach the terms of service are rejected. The images are stripped also of all metadata that could be used to identify the patient.
Verified doctors can be aged which sends them a notification of a query or picture asking for their expert opinion.
While Figure 1 has not found widespread adoption in the UK only one of 10 doctors contacted by the Guardian had heard even of it those that have started using the app say that it provides a great platform for learning
Dr Vikas Shah a consultant radiologist at University Hospitals Leicester. upload radiology cases such as x-rays or CT SCANS with a question or two,
borders, medical specialities and grades. The app is popular with medical students and forms part of their adoption of social media and the new smartphone and tablet tools that are increasingly being used in hospitals,
according to Shah. t is safe to use and there are strict regulations around privacy and anonymity,
#Tesla announces low-cost solar batteries The electric car company Tesla has announced its entry into the energy market, unveiling a suite of low-cost solar batteries for homes, businesses and utilities,
he missing piece it said, in the transition to a sustainable energy world. The batteries, which will retail at $3,
500 in the US, were launched on Thursday at a Tesla facility in California by the company ambitious founder, Elon musk,
who heralded the technology as fundamental transformation in how energy is delivered across the Earth Wall-mounted, with a sleek design,
the lithium-ion batteries are designed to capture and store up to 10kwh of energy from wind or solar panel.
The reserves can be drawn on when sunlight is low, during power cuts or at peak demand times,
when electricity costs are highest. The smallest owerwallis 1. 3m by 68cm, small enough to be hung inside a garage on
or an outside Wall up to eight batteries could be tackedin a home, Musk said, to applause from investors and journalists at the much-anticipated event.
The batteries will initially be manufactured at the electric car company factory in California, but will move production to its planned igafactoryin Nevada
when it opens in 2017. The Nevada facility will be the largest producer of lithium-ion batteries in the world
and it is hoped its mass-production scale will help to bring down costs even further. It is not the only battery storage system on the market,
but the Powerwall boasts a relatively high storage capacity, a competitive price, and the heft of investment and excitement generated by Musk vision.
The entrepreneur, who helped to invent the online payment system Paypal, has founded also a private space company, Space X,
and is experimenting with a high-speed public transport system called Hyperloop. Musk also unveiled a larger owerpack a 100kwh battery block to help utilities smooth out their supply of wind and solar energy
-which is generated intermittently -or to pump energy into the grid when demand soars. He said on Thursday about two billion Powerpacks could store enough electricity to meet the entire world needs. hat may seem like an insane number,
he said. ut this is actually within the power of humanity to do. Deutsche bank estimates sales of battery storage systems for homes
and businesses could yield as much as $4. 5bn in revenue for Tesla. The energy storage industry is expected to grow to $19bn by 2017, according to research firm IHS CERA.
Tesla is currently taking orders for the systems, with the first units expected to shift in August u
#The innovators: the 3d weaving machine putting new heart into soles They are no ordinary navy lace ups.
Their chunky, bright orange soles are made of an elaborate flexible grid of interwoven fibres which resembles a crushed honeycomb.
The shoes are the first illustration of a new method of weaving in three dimensions created by Nigerian American industrial designer Oluwaseyi Sosanya.
Sitting somewhere between the traditional art of weaving and the recent home availability of 3d printers,
Sosanya has created a way to weave materials such as wool and cotton in three dimensions before they are sealed to maintain a rigid structure.
The method he said, could be applied to protective clothing in sports, for making bulletproof vests and in constructing buildings.
Sosanya is in the early states of developing the new weaving method, an idea which came to the 31-year-old
when he was studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. e have been using the same sort of weaving techniques for thousands of years.
and a rigid plastic protector to cover body parts. hen you put on the sportswear, you are constrained automatically, some more than others.
and computer programming to handbuild a machine which guides yarn in set patterns over layers to create the 3d shapes such as those used on the soles of the navy shoes he created.
Above those tubes is a mechanised eederwhich winds the fabric for example cotton around them in shapes dictated by a set pattern programmed into a computer.
The tubes act as scaffolding for the grid of fabric to be built on top. To make the structure rigid
the thread is coated in silicone which then solidifies. When the desired shape is completed, the tray at the bottom of the machine is slid out and the mesh
which in the early testing is silicone. As there is one continuous piece of thread which is used through the whole structure,
I could press a button on a machine after an algorithm which runs over the ball of your foot and the underside of your foot
and cut down on the number of materials used. retty much everyone sports companies has a neoprene on the inside a nice soft stretchy material on the inside then layers of foam
By scaling up the method, Sosanya believes it could be used in building construction and on a smaller level in bulletproof vests both areas in
#Brain-training game helps'minimise impact of schizophrenia on life'A rain traininggame improves the cognitive function of people with schizophrenia
and facilitates everyday tasks, according to researchers at the University of Cambridge. Wizard, which will now be available on ios (Apple operating system) as part of the Peak app,
was tested for four weeks by 22 participants with a schizophrenia diagnosis. Schizophrenia is a long-term mental health condition
which can contribute to behavioural changes, confused thinking, apathy and, in some cases, delusions or hallucinations.
People with schizophrenia may experience cognitive impairments, including poor episodic memory, which affects remembering things such as times and dates,
and understanding context. Wizard aims to improve the cognitive functionality and episodic memory of people with schizophrenia,
with in-game tasks including users moving through rooms and identifying items in boxes and character locations.
Professor Barbara Sahakian, who developed the game alongside Tom Piercy at Cambridge, said: e need a way of treating the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as problems with episodic memory,
but slow progress is being made towards developing a drug treatment. So this proof-of-concept study is important
because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have failed so far. ecause the game is interesting,
even those patients with a general lack of motivation are spurred on to continue the training.
n conjunction with medication and current psychological therapies, Wizard could help people with schizophrenia minimise the impact of their illness on everyday life. eople with schizophrenia often find studying
The employment rate for people with schizophrenia was recorded at 8%,according to a 2013 paper. The Wizard game will be included as a mode within the popular brain-training app, Peak,
after it began a partnership with Cambridge in April 2015. his new app will allow the Wizard memory game to become widely available, inexpensively.
State-of-the-art neuroscience at the University of Cambridge combined with the innovative approach at Peak, will help bring the games industry to a new level
Professor Sahakian said e
#Revolutionary tidal fence is set to trap the sea power A British company has announced plans for an array of unique marine turbines that can operate in shallower and slower-moving water than current designs.
Kepler Energy, whose technology is being developed by Oxford university department of engineering science, says the turbines will in time produce electricity more cheaply than offshore wind farms.
It hopes to install its new design in what is called a tidal energy fence, one kilometre long, in the Bristol Channel#an estuary dividing South Wales from the west of England#at a cost of £143m.
The fence is a string of linked turbines each of which will start generating electricity as it is completed,
until the whole array is producing power. The fence total output is 30 megawatts (MW),
and 1mw can supply around 1, 000 homes in the UK. Peter Dixon, Kepler chairman, told Reuters news agency:
f we can build up to, say, 10km worth, which is extended a very fence, youe looking at power outputs of five or six hundred megawatts.
And just to visualise that, it like one small nuclear reactor worth of electricity being generated from the tides in the Bristol Channel. he new Transverse Horizontal Axis Water turbine (THAWT)
Because the turbines sit horizontally beneath the surface of the sea they can be sited in water shallower than the 30-metre depth typically required by current designs.
Kepler says it will still undergo a rigorous environmental impact assessment during the planning process to ensure that it poses no significant risk to marine life and to other users of the sea.
and solar energy#gave the go-ahead for a large offshore wind farm that could provide power for up to two million homes.
The new wind farm is to be built near the Dogger Bank in the North sea and will have 400 turbines.
Its developers say it could create almost 5, 000 jobs during construction. And, earlier this year, they obtained planning consent for another installation nearby which,
with the new development, will form one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world. But the fossil fuel industry is far from abandoning its own interest in British waters as the energy giant BP has announced that it is to invest about £670m to extend the life of its North sea assets.
It said it would be drilling new wells replacing undersea infrastructure, and introducing new technologies to help it to produce as much as possible from the area,
delegates to the UN climate change convention annual negotiations will gather in Paris to try to conclude an ambitious and effective agreement on preventing the global average temperature rise caused by greenhouse gas emissions exceeding 2c above its preindustrial level.
#Google is now Alphabet (well, sort of: the internet reacts Google reign of terror is over! Well, not quite:
the preeminent search engine isn going to go the way of Askjeeves and Altavista, the company is simply rebranding itself with a new holding company called Alphabet,
whose largest and wholly owned subsidiary will be...Google. Desperately googling Alphabet? No need. Let Larry page and Sergey Brin,
Google cofounders, explain: e liked Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity most important inventions,
and is the core of how we index with Google search. s well as being ne ofhumanity most important inventions,
Alphabet is also a really great name for a sinister uber-corporation in a dystopian sci-fi novel,
an internet domain registry company that owns a range of suffices including. college. His latest client?
The new parent company of Google, which can be found at abc. xyz. Daniel reacted with the appropriate gravitas:
If youe Microsoft, you can at least reassure yourself that you now also have a funky new URL.
To give Google credit where credit is did due, they at least manage to mock the megalomaniacal nature of their own announcement,
throwing in a link to Hooli. xyz, clearly a reference to the Google-esque Hooli from HBO Silicon valley.
though, spare a thought for the owner of twitter. com/alphabet, who must have been having an interesting 24 hours.
The internet has been reacting with confusion, horror and mockery to the announcement, as you would expect.
One user managed to explain the complex ownership structure of the Alphabet/Google nexus in Simpsonian terms:
Finally, it worth mentioning that Google have announced also a radical shake-up to their corporate management structure,
handing control of its core search engine business to Sundar Pichai, pictured below
#Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman resigns after third leak of emails The chief executive of extramarital affairs website Ashley Madison has left the company after a third leak of emails
and suggestions that he had affairs despite earlier denials. ffective today, Noel Biderman, in mutual agreement with the company, is stepping down as Chief executive officer of Avid Life Media Inc (ALM)
said an unattributed statement on the Ashley Madison website. ntil the appointment of a new CEO,
the company will be led by the existing senior management team. In July details of more than 37m accounts were stolen from the website
whose tagline is: ife is short. Have an affair. The company is now being sued for emotional distress
and dedicated employeesand that it remained teadfast in our commitment to our customer base That customer base personal information was spread far and wide across the internet earlier this month,
with police tying multiple blackmail attempts and at least two suicides to the leak. e are actively adjusting to the attack on our business and membersprivacy by criminals,
with police and security researcher Brian Krebs communicating much of the available information. Krebs has posted new information on the hack,
a Twitter user (or, as Krebs speculates, users) called Thadeus Zu posted a link to the hack before anyone else
and appears to have had special knowledge of the data breach before anyone else did. The third and latest data dump, posted at the site that first released the user database,
appears to be a download of emails from Biderman personal Gmail account. The second torrent released by an entity calling itself the Impact Team contained emails that seemed to be from Biderman work account
and its release had done already damage to his personal reputation: the executive told the New york daily news in 2014 that he had cheated never on his wife,
but the hacked documents suggested otherwise e
#New San francisco restaurant replaces humans with ipads Those sick and tired of having to deal with their fellow humans all the time have a new respite a fully automated restaurant in San francisco. Customers at Eatsa in the Financial District will order from an ipad,
sending the order to the kitchen. When the meal is ready, it appears in a small glass compartment.
The food is prepared by real people, but the patrons never have to see them. The owners of Eatsa may have felt that San Franciscans needed to ease themselves into such a radical change
however; for the launch on Monday, concierges in red shirts met guests to help them order.
But eventually they will disappear. Hundreds visited the shop on Monday to try the vegetarian dishes,
the Chinese have been experimenting with ordering via tablet for years in order to reduce labor costs and prices.
In Japan, the Nanna-na hotel, which opened in July, is completely human-free, using robots for every task,
from cleaning rooms to managing check in and checkout. Not far from San francisco, a hotel in Sunnyvale, the Aloft Cupertino, recently began testing a robot that assists its human colleagues with daily tasks such as changing linens
Riley Thomas, a San francisco resident who works near Eatsa, was one of the few patrons who questioned the concept at a time
when more and more families are struggling to survive in the city. like the food and love the price,
That way we can get the price down. t
#The innovators: burglar alarms upgraded for the smartphone age As history has it, the young Isaac newton found inspiration for the theory of gravity by watching apples fall to the ground.
Dan Conlon big idea was born after smashing the bell box of a faulty alarm system off the side of his house in the early hours of the morning as the ringing kept the neighbourhood awake.
It was not the first time Conlon had had a problem with an alarm. He had won previously a court case after his business broke a contract with an alarm company
the home alarm seemed ripe for an overhaul for the internet age. e were surprised...that the technology had moved not really on since the 80s,
he said. assumed that there would be loads of easy smartphone connected alarm systems and there were not. e found that a lot of people who own an alarm don bother to set it either
Cocoon uses a microphone to detect sounds outside of the hearing range of humans to alert in case of intruders in the home.
Using smartphones to identify the various residents of the house or flat, the device learns their movements
At the heart of the Cocoon unit is a microphone which can detect infrasound waves,
or the detection of a volcanic eruption from a distance. nfrasound is the range of sound
32. ou can put a sensor in a building and you can then hear those inaudible sounds that are created by things happening in that building.
People moving around move air, vibrate floorboards, they close doors and drawers and so on, so they make infrasound.
But costs prohibited the sensors being used widely in home alarms, as did the fact that an unsophisticated infrasound microphone would pick up unwanted sound waves,
such as people walking by outside or a lorry going past. The five cofounders of Cocoon have used smartphones
and machine learning to filter out this noise and isolate the waves which may signal a threat.
The device learns over three days how residents come in and out and live. Through an app on the phones of the residents, the device understands their movements
and then builds up a model or rainaccording to the company of what happens when people are in the home.
It knows when people are outside of the home as the phones will not be present.
The alert of an intruder can be sent to the smartphone of the residents and a camera on the device
which also has fitted a siren shows images of what is happening within its range. A subscription service is planned where a call centre will monitor the home
and will be able to contact the police. There are potential problems. f you have no smartphone,
the product is not for you. We think that the vast majority of the population do,
What if someone forgets their phone? f that happens then the system will not be armed. It will think that they are at home in the same way
The company argues that many children who do not have smartphones may be with their parents anyway. ou can really buy a phone that is not a smartphone any more.
It is only if you have not had a new phone for five years that it is not Android or ios,
when they are hidden in forests. Infrasound is produced when a volcano erupts resulting in the event being able to be tracked from remote locations.
tractor beam becomes a reality A sonic tractor beam that can grab tiny objects and move them around has been created by scientists in Spain.
Though not much use for capturing vessels in the vacuum of space, the team at the Public University of Navarre in Pamplona,
the researchers describe how they used ultrasound to move tiny polystyrene beads measuring only 3mm across
Could ractor beamtechnology be a reality in medicine? e can move bigger and heavier objects than we have done,
The technology works by using an array of flat speakers to produce acoustic holograms. Just as visual holograms are produced in 3d from interfering light waves,
tweezers or rotating spirals that could lift, grab, spin and nudge tiny particles around. The sonic tractor beam uses a 3d hologram with the shape of a cage or bottle in
which the object to be moved is captured. The walls of the cage are created by high pressure ultrasound waves,
while inside the cage, the pressure is close to zero. hen the particle is surrounded by high pressure,
the scientists see medical applications as a priority for the technology. t could be used to manipulate kidney stones, clots,
Men are freezing women out of the workplace As the Northern hemisphere languishes in summer temperatures,
a new study has shown that office climate control systems are giving women the cold shoulder. Many office air-conditioning systems are locked down to avoid arguments about how hot
or cold to have the building. In the 1960s and 1970s, studies were made to decide on the optimum temperatures for workplaces,
and this is used by office managers to set the temperature. The problem is that a key metric in the data used to calculate these temperatures is wrong
according to a paper published in Nature climate change specifically it's male only. In general women like the temperature a little hotter than men 25°C (77°F) verses 22°C (72°F) respectively.
In part, this is down to a difference in the metabolism between the sexes, and temperature controls take as their base point a 40-year-old man weighing 70kg (11st).
Before you rush for the thermostat in a green-fueled frenzy, it's worth pointing out that this study only involved 16 female test subjects,
The study also leaves out mention of other factors. The heavier someone is the more likely they are to have slightly different body temperatures
for example, and a lot depends on the dress code workers are asked to comply with skirts are cooler than trousers, after all
#Boffins have made optical transistors that can reach 4 TERAHERTZ Aluminum-doped zinc oxide is the key to building faster, optical chips, according to researchers at Purdue University, Indiana.
They've modelled an all-optical, CMOS-compatible transistor capable of 4thz speeds, potentially more than 1, 000 times faster than silicon transistors.
The all-optical bit means that the data stream and the control of the switching is optical;
previous optical transistors have used electrical control and optics for data. This has inhibited the switching speed.
The use of aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) opens up the opportunity for both. It is aimed very much at optical switching rather than building processors,
and according to the researchers, the optical transistors have a tunable dielectric permittivity compatible with all telecoms infrared (IR) standards. e are pretty far away from building anything resembling an processor.
In fact our transistor is only simulation at the current time, "said doctoral candidate Nate Kinsey, in conversation with El Reg."
"However, we have taken care to use realistic parameters so that the performance should be very similar to our simulations,
He explained that one issue is that the transistor is controlled with UV LIGHT, and this is really not that practical for a highly integrated device.
We envisioned our switch being more of use for ultra-small signal encoding, say in like a data centre".
"Even the stages of developing something simpler, such as an adder, multiplier, or a gate poses problems, Kinsey explained,
as the"things you're discussing you need light of the same wavelength in the signal and the control,
so that the output of one transistor can control another"."""This is how you would build logical circuits.
With our current system that uses a carrier of 1300nm and a control of 350nm, this would be extremely difficult to achieve,
where the capacitance of the resistor takes time to charge. Electrical transistors are limited by the RC delay time
while the limiting mechanism for optical system is recombination time. By eliminating RC delay there is scope for massive increases in clock speeds.
The manufacturing process is used similar to that for traditional CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor chips. The transparent conducting oxides Perdue is working with are CMOS-compatible materials with low optical loss. ur materials are deposited using standard techniques,
"The last two are friendly to semiconductor fabrication facilities but the former is not. We would likely need to modify this to another process for mass production,
Kinsey cautions that something as advanced as a processor is at least two decades away, so while a 1, 000-fold increase in processor power sounds a lot,
it not when considered over the kind of timescales we are talking e
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