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There are nearly 60 million active hikers in the US. Hiking is one of the most popular outdoor activities, and it's estimated over a hundred thousand hikers are issued overnight permits from various state and national parks each year. Where exactly are you supposed to doo-doo when exploring nature?
Tags: Toilet, Hiking, Camping, Eco-Friendly
We see a lot of tiny houses that are made for families – however, the Minuet goes in the opposite direction. It's designed for a single professional and features a storage-packed layout that cleverly maximizes available space.
Category: Tiny Houses, Lifestyle
Tags: Tiny Footprint, Micro-House, House, Home, Building and Construction
British company Swytch Bike has long been known for its clever kits that quickly convert regular bikes to ebikes – and back again, if desired. Its latest offering, the Swytch Max +, boasts features such as a built-in light and a range of up to 60 miles (97 km).
Tags: ebikes, Cycling, Conversion
Spanning nearly 100 laboratories in 45 countries, landmark research has, for the first time, shown an association between genetic brain size and neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). And while it doesn't prove causation, it's a big step forward in being able to assess risk factors and provide early intervention.
Category: Mental Health, Brain Health, Body & Mind
Tags: QIMR Berghofer, University of Southern California, ADHD, Parkinson's Disease, Genetics, Diagnosis, Brain
The world's largest prime number has been discovered, but we can't show it because it's so large it would take up 21 standard-sized novels to turn into text. Called M136279841, its shorthand version is 2136,279,841-1. That comes to 41,024,320 digits.
Category: Science
Tags: GPU, Mathematics
Sirui, a company best known for its relatively inexpensive tripods and cinema lenses, has announced a lens that may appeal to photographers and videographers looking for an inexpensive portrait lens: a full-frame 85mm F1.4 with autofocus for Nikon Z-mount, Sony E-mount, and Fujifilm X-mount. On the latter it'll provide a roughly 128mm full-frame equiv. focal length.
The company says the lens is part of its Aurora series, though it's currently the only one bearing that nameplate; that does seem to suggest that we can expect more like it in the future.
The lens features an AF/MF switch, an autofocus lock button, and a switch to control whether the aperture ring is clicked or clickless. The company also claims it has "dustproof and waterproof construction" and a fluorine coating on the front element to help repel oils and water.
Image: SiruiThe lens has 14 elements in 9 groups: 1 aspherical lens, 2 ED elements, and 3 HRI elements. It has a 15-blade aperture and a minimum focusing distance of 0.85m (2 ft., 9.5"). The E-mount version weighs 540g (1.2lb), while the X and Z-mount versions are 10 and 30g heavier, respectively.
The Aurora 85mm F1.4 has a 67mm thread and a USB-C port on the lens mount for updating its firmware.
While fast 85mm lenses with autofocus aren't exactly rare – there's even already another third-party 85 F1.4 for the notoriously locked-down Nikon Z mount from Meike – it's nice to see another option hit the market, especially one with so many features. It'll be interesting to see what the image quality is like, especially given the relatively affordable price point Sirui is selling it at; the lens will normally retail for $599, but the company is doing an 'early bird' pricing promotion until December 31st which knocks it down to $499 if you buy it directly from them.
Buy now:
$599 at Amazon.com Sirui Aurora 85mm F1.4 Specifications Principal specificationsLens typePrime lensMax Format size35mm FFFocal length85 mmImage stabilizationNoLens mountFujifilm X, Nikon Z, Sony EApertureMaximum apertureF1.4–16Minimum apertureF1.4–16Aperture ringYesNumber of diaphragm blades15OpticsElements14Groups9Special elements / coatings1 aspherical, 2 ED, 3 HRIFocusMinimum focus0.85 m (33.46″)Maximum magnification0.1152×AutofocusYesMotor typeStepper motorDistance scaleNoDoF scaleNoPhysicalWeight540 g (1.19 lb)Diameter80 mm (3.15″)Length102 mm (4.02″)SealingYesColourBlackFilter thread67 mmHood suppliedYesTripod collarNoSteering a wheelchair to the left or right can be a strenuous, inefficient process, in that you have to brake with one rear wheel while pushing harder on the other. A clever new chair addresses that problem in a brilliant fashion, by using a moveable backrest to steer.
Category: Good Thinking, Lifestyle
Tags: ETH Zurich, Wheelchairs, Ergonomic, locomotion, Steering
Treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, IBS, often includes restricting certain foods, such as carbohydrates, but that doesn’t work for everyone. A new study has found that there might be a genetic reason for this, opening the door to personalized, genetically tailored diets to treat IBS.
Category: Body & Mind
Tags: Gastrointestinal, Irritable bowel syndrome, Genetics, Diet, University of Nottingham
Shenzhen-based laser/smart projector maker Formovie has announced a Premium version of its Theater ultra-short-throw 4K laser projector. With upgraded visuals and improved audio, the new company flagship promises immersive cinema-grade viewing up to 150 inches.
Category: Home Entertainment, Consumer Tech, Technology
Tags: 4K UHD, Projectors, Laser TV, home theater, Bowers and Wilkins
This year, at Adobe's Max conference, the company announced several new AI features coming to Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe Camera Raw. We talked to some of the managers and engineers behind these products to get an idea of how those features came about and to try to get a sense of what the future holds for Adobe's photo editing suite.
Lightroom The Quick Actions UI gives you easy access to a variety of subject-specific edits.One of the major new features for Lightroom Web and Mobile is called Quick Actions. It's a panel that lets you easily adjust various parts of your image, giving you different sliders and suggestions based on what type of subject it detects.
"It really started with a multi-year investment into masking," said Rob Christensen, director of product management for Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. "We had to make sure that masking was amazing. And so for multiple years, our R&D teams and our design teams came up with an experience that was outstanding. So once we had masking in place, and you could identify a subject, hair, lips, teeth, all of that, we realized, well, let's pair that up now with edits, and we'll call them Adaptive Presets."
Quick Actions essentially serve to make that work more visible and accessible. "With Quick Actions, what you're selecting in many cases are just Adaptive Presets that are relevant to that specific photo," Christensen said. "We're building from masking, Adaptive Presets, now Quick Actions. And it's all coming together now into a unified experience – that was our vision years ago, and now it's coming to life."
Christensen said that Adobe actually quietly launched the feature on the web a few months ago. "We didn't make a lot of noise around it, but customers have been using it on the web. Part of the reason why we brought it to Web first is it's just easier. We could get some additional feedback, we could do more experimentation; the web is very easy to iterate on."
"Part of the reason we also brought it to mobile is it's really designed for the mobile user, where they want to get to a quick result," Christensen said. "They don't necessarily want to go through all the different panels. In a mobile UI, a lot of things are hidden – but what if we could surface all of these advanced capabilities for mobile users to get to an edit? A bit of a goal over the last six months that's connected with Quick Actions is how do we help users capture, import, and share an amazing photo in under 60 seconds?"
At the moment, it's unclear if the feature will be coming to the dedicated desktop apps. "We're definitely looking at and listening to customer feedback. And so far, I think there's a lot of excitement, especially from desktop users. But we're not making any official announcements at this time."
The selection tool for Generative Remove has also been improved.
Image: Adobe
Generative Remove, which lets you use AI to erase objects from a scene using AI, is also now generally available across all versions of Lightroom. It's the type of thing you could easily do if you opened an image in Photoshop, but now you don't have to leave Lightroom.
"The way we think about what we're building with Lightroom is it's purpose-built for photographers," said Christensen. "So if they have a specific use case that is important for photography, we will look at bringing that into Lightroom. Distraction removal is a great example of an area that makes sense for photography. That's how a lot of customers are using generative remove today."
Finally, for Lightroom Classic devotees worried about any plans to completely replace the older-school version of the app with the new cloud-based Lightroom, Christensen seemed to offer some reassurance. "As it stands right now, we're continuing to innovate on both surfaces. We have a lot of customers on both that love the unique benefits."
Adobe Camera RawLeft: Adobe Color. Right: Adobe Adaptive
Image: Adobe
One of the most compelling photography-related features announced at Max is the new Adobe Adaptive profile for ACR. It's meant to give you a better starting point for your own edits than older profiles like Adobe Color.
"One of the things that makes Adobe Adaptive unique is the fact that it's a lot more image content aware," said Eric Chan, a Senior Principal Scientist on the Adobe Camera Raw team. "In the past we would look at basic properties in the histogram and other attributes of the image. But with AI models now, we have a lot more semantic information about whether there's a person in it, whether there's a sky in it, etc."
That awareness helps it make base-level adjustments, giving you a better starting point to put your own edits on top. "It can do things like fix skies, fix backlit portraits, it can do things nicely with faces, and it can control a lot more attributes of the image than our previous profiles," Chan said.
You can control how intense the Adobe Adaptive look using the 'Amount' slider.Unlike pressing the 'Auto' button on other profiles, Adobe Adaptive doesn't change the sliders for parameters like exposure, contrast, highlights, etc.; those are still set to 0, allowing you room to do your own edits. " I think the other unique aspect that there's an amount slider that's underneath the profile itself," said Chan. "You can do a quick edit. Like, I like what it's doing, but maybe it's too much, let's go to 80%, or maybe you want to go beyond, like 150%. But then there's the finer-granularity control, things like color panels that you can combine with that."
The company's also bringing its Generative AI features to ACR, including Generative Remove and Generative Expand, which lets you "go beyond the boundaries of your photo using the power of AI." In other words, you ask it to make your picture wider or taller, and it will try to fill in the space in a reasonable way. Any changes you make in ACR will also apply to the AI-generated portion of your picture, and the program will add a Content Credentials tag to the image, marking it as containing AI-generated content.
Generative Expand essentially lets you 'crop out' with AI imagery.Those are interesting features to see in Adobe Camera Raw since, as the name implies, the program has previously been dedicated to adjusting the data your camera captured. Editing content using AI or other tools has been the domain of Photoshop and, to a lesser extent, Lightroom, which has had the Generative Remove feature for a while.
We asked what the thinking was behind adding Generative AI to ACR and Christensen said: "With Lightroom and ACR we're trying to ensure that photographers can observe that moment as best they can. When we talk to customers, they feel it's unfortunate if they have 90% of an amazing photo, but it's just that 10% that is not how they remember the scene. Maybe because they couldn't get the camera at the right spot at the right time." He also reiterated that using the generative AI features was completely optional.
The line about making images according to people's memories isn't new; in fact, it's very similar to how phone manufacturers like Samsung and Google are talking about their generative AI features – it's just a bit odd to hear it in reference to an app dedicated to Raw photography. However, Christensen says there's a line between what you can do in ACR, and what you can do in Photoshop. "We are not introducing capabilities like Generative Fill, where you can say 'add an elephant flying from the sky with an umbrella.' That doesn't capture the moment; that's creativity."
PhotoshopThis year, Adobe made several of its generative AI tools in Photoshop generally available and added a new "Distraction Removal" tool that can automatically remove wires, cables, and people from images. Removing wires can be done with a single click, while the people mode gives you the chance to refine the selection in case it selected people you still want in the picture, or didn't select people you want to get rid of.
The 'People' mode of the Find Distractions feature lets you decide which subjects you want to keep or to add more subjects to remove.According to Stephen Nielson, Senior Product Manager for Photoshop, Adobe plans to add an additional mode for the Distraction Removal tool to handle non-human or cable distractions. "The way we've approached this is, first, the most popular thing that people want to remove from a photo is people. So tourists or people in the background or whatever," he said. "And so the categories that we're working on are first: people. Second: cables and wires because they're a pretty specific thing. And then there's a category of basically everything else."
Nielson says the everything else category will be like the people one, where Photoshop will select what it thinks are distractions but let you add to or remove from the selection before hitting the remove button.
It's quite challenging to come up with a single model that can detect all sorts of distractonsAdobe's not currently announcing when that feature will roll out, as it's still in the process of building the model. "It's quite challenging to come up with a single model that can detect all sorts of distractions, whether it's somebody's shoulder that's in the image, or a garbage can, or a pile of leaves, or a random bicycle. It could be anything, right?"
According to Nielson, the training process involved a lot of human work. "We actually give pictures to people and say which objects are distracting?' You do that enough times, and you can train a model to say, 'Hey, this is what people usually say is distracting,'" he said. "That's not the only kind of data that's included in our training data set, but a lot of it is, like, hey, somebody's gone through and annotated data to suggest which objects are distracting."
If you want to use the Remove tool without generative AI, you can.Like many features in Photoshop, Distraction Removal can take advantage of Adobe's generative AI, though it's not 100% reliant on it. "It actually can either use Content-Aware fill or generative fill technology," said Nielson. "We've built an automatic selector that will, based on what you've selected and you're trying to remove, automatically choose either Content-Aware fill or generative fill, depending on which one's best."
Adobe has also added a drop-down menu that lets you manually select whether you want any part of the Remove tool, including the Distraction Removal feature, to use Generative AI or Content-Aware Fill. Nielson, however, recommended leaving it on auto. "Content-Aware Fill is better for areas with similar textures, areas where there's lots of noise, or higher resolution images. Whereas Generative Fill is really good at details, which Content-Aware Fill just isn't good at. So there's a good use case for both, and the auto selector we have allows the algorithm to choose which one's going to be best."
We think generative technology is huge, but it's not the answer for everythingNielson thinks Generative AI will play a big part in future Photoshop features, but it won't be the only way the company improves the program. "There's still a lot of areas where we think generative technology is going to dramatically simplify things that were previously tedious and time-consuming inside Photoshop and give you more time to be creative."
The company showed off one such example at its Sneaks presentation, which showcases tech demos that may or may not actually make it into Adobe products in the future. The demo, nicknamed 'Perfect Blend,' automatically matches lighting and color between objects you're photoshopping in to a background.
"But there's also going to be a lot of other non-gen AI improvements that we want to put into Photoshop," Nielson said. "Just making the application run smoother, faster, be more efficient, speed up workflows with non-genitive technology. We think generative technology is huge, but it's not the answer for everything. So, there's a lot of other things that we are planning just to make the app better."
Seven years after its first test flight, German electric air taxi manufacturer Lilium has run out of funding and filed for insolvency for its two primary subsidiaries.
Tags: Lilium, eVTOL, Air Taxis, Flying taxi, Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation
Insect venom may seem like an unlikely ally in the discovery of new human pain treatments, but the latest findings into the "unique" way a small ant causes us such agony is a big leap forward – and one that's expected to progress rapidly.
Category: Chronic Pain, Illnesses and conditions, Body & Mind
Tags: University of Queensland, Pain, Venom Evil, molecular biology, Chronic, ANT+
If you're ever faced with trying to pick up a grain of rice with a pair of chopsticks, spare a thought for the scientists behind this latest innovation, which has been called "a medical breakthrough on the verge of happening." They've painstakingly built a soft robot with the capacity to carry different types of drugs through the body. It's the size of a grain of rice, and can be driven to various internal targets via magnetic fields.
Category: Medical Innovations, Body & Mind
Tags: NTU, Delivery robots, Surgical robot, Drug delivery, medical-robotics
At the Anesthesiology Annual Meeting held this past week in Philadelphia, some research stood out for the wrong reasons. Among the presentations on forward-facing topics like the practicalities of space anesthesiology and the impact of AI on the profession were three separate studies dealing with a long-standing issue: racial disparity in US health care.
Category: Wellness & Healthy Living, Body & Mind
Tags: Health care, Accessibility, Racial disparity
A recent clinical trial has shown that it's possible to safely and effectively treat depression at home using a brain stimulation device. That means patients can give themselves low-intensity impulses to see positive results – and potentially enjoy a higher quality of life.
Category: Brain Health, Body & Mind
Tags: Brain stimulation, Depression, mental health
Researchers have discovered the mechanism linking the overconsumption of red meat with colorectal cancer, as well as identifying a means of interfering with the mechanism as a new treatment strategy for this kind of cancer.
Category: Body & Mind
Tags: Colorectal cancer, Telomere, Iron, Red meat, National Cancer Center Singapore
The world's largest battery manufacturer, CATL, announced on Thursday a new style of battery destined to create a cleaner, longer-range generation of plug-in hybrid vehicles. The Freevoy Super Hybrid Battery debuts to give PHEVs and extended-range electrics (EREVs) the type of zero-emissions all-electric range that was previously reserved for battery electric vehicles. Freevoy-powered hybrids will travel farther with fewer fueling stops, whether they're relying solely on battery power or tapping into an ICE drive or generator. When battery power and fuel finally do run out, drivers can choose 10-minute battery charging, refueling or both.
Category: Automotive, Transport
Tags: Battery Technology, CATL, PHEV, Extended-range, Plug-in Hybrid, Sodium battery
Two major high-performance electric motorcycle makers have filed for bankruptcy within as many days: Italian maker Energica, and FUELL, the American electric two-wheeler company. Which leaves the question: are EV motos before their time?
Category: Motorcycles, Transport
Tags: Energica, Fuell (company), Electric, Electric Motorcycles
It was April of 2018, and a day like any other until the first text arrived asking "Have you seen this yet?!" with a link to YouTube. Seconds later, former President Barack Obama was on screen delivering a speech in which he proclaimed President Donald Trump "is a total and complete [expletive]."
Category: AI & Humanoids, Technology
Tags: Deepfakes, Google DeepMind, Open AI, Creative AI, Artificial Intelligence
In order to perform trailside repairs, mountain bikers and gravel bikers need at least two things: a multitool and a compact pump. That's where the Daysaver Incredible Pump comes in, as it's a little pump that accommodates a tool (or two!) within its hollow handle.
Tags: Multitools, Pump, Cycling, Kickstarter
