Experimental brain-controlled hearing aid decodes, identifies who you want to hear

Science Daily  May 15, 2019 When two people talk to each other, the brain waves of the speaker begin to resemble the brain waves of the listener. Using this knowledge a team of researchers in the US (Columbia University, Hofstra-Northwell School of Medicine and Feinstein Institute for Medical Research) combined powerful speech-separation algorithms with neural networks, complex mathematical models that imitate the brain’s natural computational abilities to create a system that first separates out the voices of individual speakers from a group, and then compares the voices of each speaker to the brain waves of the person listening. The speaker […]

Gut bacteria’s shocking secret: They produce electricity

Science Daily  September 12, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (UC Berkley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) discovered that a common diarrhea-causing bacterium, Listeria monocytogenes, produces electricity using an entirely different technique from known electrogenic bacteria, and that hundreds of other bacterial species use this same process. They showed that the food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes uses a distinctive flavin-based EET mechanism to deliver electrons to iron or an electrode. The discovery will be good news for those currently trying to create living batteries from microbes. Such “green” bioenergetic technologies could, for example, generate electricity from bacteria in waste treatment […]