Lifeboat Foundation

Photo: Roy Allela

Twenty-five-year-old Kenyan engineer and innovator, Roy Allela, has created a set of gloves that will ultimately allow better communication between those who are deaf and those who are hearing yet may not necessarily know sign language. The Sign-IO gloves in essence translate signed hand movements into audible speech.

Allela’s gloves feature sensors located on each finger that detect the positioning of each finger, including how much each finger will bend into a given position. The glove connects via Bluetooth to an Android phone which then will leverage use the text-to-speech function to provide translated speech to the hand gestures of a person signing.

Continue reading “Meet The Kenyan Engineer Who Created Gloves That Turn Sign Language Into Audible Speech” »

Scientists made a ‘new’ periodic table of elements to show how smartphones (and party balloons) are draining Earth’s resources.

Does your phone’s short battery life bug you? Static electricity could be coming to the rescue.

The piezoelectric materials that inhabit everything from our cell phones to musical greeting cards may be getting an upgrade thanks to work discussed in the journal Nature Materials released online Jan 21.

As the smartphone market matures, startups are racing to predict what’s next, and venture-capital firms are spraying money into fields like virtual reality, smart watches and even implants in the brain. Here are some of the startups attracting investment.

Venture-capital investors are spraying money into fields like virtual reality, driverless cars and even implants in the brain.

This is a horrible, horrible idea. The company wants to create a series of satellites that can unfurl, which will reflect light, and that can be manipulated to send messages to earth. The entire collection, comprised of CubeSats, will provide an area of about 50 sq. km. and create a whole new kind of orbital debris.

According to the website, “When phones don’t work, during zero visibility, power cuts and catastrophical emergencies – government can use the display for urgent notifications for the population.” We can ignore the idea of them being seen during zero visibility, but can you imagine a message floating in the sky that you can’t just turn off?

It was bound to happen.

Continue reading “Astronomers aren’t pleased about a Russian plan to put billboards in space” »

Faulty mobile phones and solar cells could soon be a thing of the past…

Lithium-air batteries are poised to become the next revolutionary replacement for currently used lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles, cell phones and computers.

Startup Biospectal could help 1.6 billion people suffering from hypertension by using a smartphone and an app to check for high blood pressure.

by
• Shelby Brown