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'Baby crying detector' beams notifications to your Gear smartwatch

Samsung smartphones are all about the features, but one unique capability we didn't hear about at the Galaxy S5's Barcelona launch event is its apparent ability function as a baby monitor. Tracked down by Malaysian site SoyaCincau, the feature, dubbed "Baby crying detector" lives under the Accessibility menu and lets you alert a paired Samsung Gear smartwatch if the phone picks up the sound of a child crying.

Smart goat

A goat pulling a lever (A), lifting a lever (B), and enjoying the "fruit" of its labor (C).

Briefer et al. / Frontiers in Zoology

New research found that most goats tested could quickly figure out how to solve a "mechanical puzzle" that yielded a delicious piece of fruit. In this case they had to pull on and then lift up a lever, a "highly novel cognitive task." Completing this two-step process caused a box to open, within which was a piece of fruit. Of the 12 goats tested, nine of them got it within fewer than a dozen trials on average. Two of them were disqualified for trying to pry open the fruit-box with their horns, which actually might have been a smart idea (and it's not like the goats knew they'd be DQ'ed), and one was dismissed as hopeless upon not showing signs of learning the task after 22 trials.  

The scientists re-tested the goats 10 months later, and this time they solved the puzzle much more quickly, within two minutes. "The speed at which the goats completed the task at 10 months compared to how long it took them to learn indicates excellent long-term memory," co-author Dr Elodie Briefer, at ETH Zurich, said in a statement. 

The study, published this week in Frontiers in Zoology, shows that goats can learn rather quickly, and can also store these lessons in long-term memory. Researchers had suspected that goats are intelligent, based on their ability to colonize new and harsh environments, to find and remember the location of hard-to-reach foods (for example Moroccan goats are known to climb trees to reach sprigs), and their relatively long lifespans, during which time they can build up a repertoire of memories and skills, as reported by Smithsonian.

The 3-D Printed Skull

From a video by UMC Utrecht

A woman with a rare bone disorder has had much of the top of her skull replaced with a 3-D printed plastic piece, Wired U.K. reports. Three months later, she's symptom-free and back to work.

The woman's condition made her skull increase in thickness, giving her severe headaches and affecting her eyesight. The surgery, performed at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, gave the woman a replacement that closely matched the original shape of her skull. "It is almost impossible to see that she's ever had surgery," her lead surgeon, Bon Verweij, said in a statement from the university.

Verweij's team has used 3-D printing to replace some portions of skulls before, but never to this extent, Wired U.K. reports.

You might see more such stories in the near future. While researchers are still working on 3-D printing soft tissues that are safe for transplants, 3-D-printed bony parts have already shown up in specific surgeries. As in the Utrecht case, doctors often emphasize how personalized such replacements can be.

Three years ago, a British man who had much of his pelvis removed got a replacement 3-D printed in titanium, the Ottawa Citizen reports. Printed titanium implants are made by spitting out titanium powder that's then fused by a laser beam. The man's doctor thought a printed replacement would fit better than a standard, handmade one. The man now walks with a cane, the Citizen reports.

In June 2011, a patient in Belgium received a 3-D printed titanium jawbone replacement. This was the first total lower jawbone replacement made to match a specific patient, the BBC reports.

And just last year, Livescience reported a Connecticut-based company received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to market a plastic replacement for 75 percent of the skull.

[Wired U.K.]