In October, Google announced it would let users search for songs by simply humming or whistling melodies, initially in English on iOS and in more than 20 languages on Android. At the time, the search giant only hinted at how the new Hum to Search feature worked. But in a blog post today, Google detailed the underlying systems that enable Google Search to find songs using only hummed…

How much information about a person’s behavior can you ascertain from a wearable device? Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Alan Turing Institute sought to investigate this in a study involving over 280,000 hours of wrist accelerometer and wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) data. They claim they successfully trained classifiers on the dataset to capture physiologically meaningful…

In addition to announcing the release of macOS Big Sur and formally revealing its first Mac-specific M1 chips, Apple today unveiled the first Mac computers that will use its new software and hardware: M1-powered versions of the 13-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. Each of the machines will be using the M1 chip to deliver performance roughly three times the prior comparable Intel…

You can learn a lot by analyzing a person’s bodily excretions, from their income and diet to — more importantly — their health. Now a fledgling Israeli startup wants to help prevent life-threatening diseases by passively monitoring human waste, circumventing the need to collect physical samples. OutSense aims to use computer vision to “transform human waste into lifesaving medical…