Lifeboat Foundation

More than 45 million couples worldwide grapple with infertility, but current standard methods for diagnosing male infertility can be expensive, labor-intensive, and require testing in a clinical setting.

Cultural and social stigma, and lack of access in resource-limited countries, may prevent men from seeking an evaluation. Investigators at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) set out to develop a home-based diagnostic test that could be used to measure semen quality with a smartphone-based device. New findings by the team indicating that the analyzer can identify abnormal semen samples based on sperm concentration and motility criteria with approximately 98 percent accuracy are published online in today’s Science Translational Medicine.

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You can use the touch screen underwater.

A company has fixed the most annoying thing about underwater phone cases.

A designer named Kosho Tsuboi has conceived a beautiful gadget idea. His product, the Magic Calendar, is an e-paper calendar that syncs with a smartphone to display your schedule. The project is associated with Google’s Android Experiments, which appears to be a Japanese program in which creators can pitch ideas for Android-centered gadgets. In this case, the calendar relies on a custom Android app, and, judging off the below video, uses Google Calendar for syncing.

Tattoos that turn skin into a touchscreen could display notifications on your body and let you answer a call or pump up the volume with a tap of your fingers.

Charge your phone while you heat your dinner.

Inside a Boston lab just a few miles away from MIT, a team of PhDs is building tools for a future where factories are powered by biology, not traditional manufacturing. The startup, Ginkgo Bioworks, currently helps clients design flavors and fragrances by modifying the DNA of microbes like yeast. Once the yeast have been tweaked to produce a particular scent as a byproduct, they can be brewed like beer and the smell can be extracted and bottled — which reduces the client’s need to depend on natural resources for ingredients. (video by: Alan Jeffries, Victoria Blackburne-Daniell, Drew Beebe) (Source: Bloomberg)

Biometrics – technology that can recognise individuals based on physical and behavioural traits such as their faces, voices or fingerprints – are becoming increasingly important to combat financial fraud and security threats. This is because traditional approaches, such as those based on PIN numbers or passwords, are proving too easily compromised. For example, Barclays has introduced TouchID, whereby customers can log onto internet banking using fingerprint scanners on mobile phones.

However, this is not foolproof either – it is possible to forge such biometrics. Fingers can after all be chopped off and placed by impostors to gain fraudulent access. It has also been shown that prints lifted from glass using cellophane tape can be used with gelatine to create fake prints. So there is a real need to come up with more advanced biometrics that are difficult or impossible to forge. And a promising alternative is the brain.

Emerging biometric technology based on the electrical activity of the brain have indeed shown potential to be fraud resistant. Over the years, a number of research studies have found that “brainprints” (readings of how the brain reacts to certain words or tasks) are unique to individuals as each person’s brain is wired to think differently. In fact, the brain can be used to identify someone from a pool of 102 users with more than 98% accuracy at the moment, which is very close to that of fingerprints (99.8% accuracy).

In Brief

• A new phone concept designed by Philippe Starck and Jerome Olivet is a voice activated, gelatinous, transparent futuristic vision of where smartphones could go.
• Continuing with the trend of subtracting hardware, the phone contains no screen but will be capable of projecting 3D holograms.

The words gelatinous and smartphone might not seem like they belong in the same sentence together. In fact, they barely belong in the same dictionary together. But the Alo smartphone, an unfinished, unreleased technology, is described as a gelatinous, ergonomically shaped to fit the hand well, voice-activated and controlled smartphone. Designed by Jerome Olivet and Phillippe Starck, this design promises to be the future of smartphone technology.

This phone is unlike any current model, and its most notable feature (that we know of yet) is that it will be able to project holograms. Yes, you read that right. Any messages, photographs, or even movies would be able to be viewed as 3D holograms. And while an entirely voice-controlled smartphone might seem a little bit strange and difficult to use, it is supposedly designed to be remarkably user-friendly.

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Mathematics professor Po-Shen Loh has created Expii, a free education tool that democratizes learning by turning your smartphone into a tutor.