The voice fed as the ‘virtual assistant’ in Apple’s smart devices is of a real woman named Susan Bennett from Atlanta, who laid down recordings for a client eight years ago but had no idea if they will be used to communicate with over 100 million people through a smartphone.
Bennett’s voice was introduced as Apple’s voice-activated virtual ‘assistant’ Siri through the iPhone4S on October 4, 2011.
Scientists have found that when facial features are difficult to recognise, people readily use information about someone’s body to identify them, without being aware that they are doing so.
“Psychologists and computer scientists have concentrated almost exclusively on the role of the face in person recognition,” said lead researcher, Allyson Rice of the University of Texas at Dallas.
“But our results show that the body can also provide important and useful identity information for person recognition,” Rice said.
A shareholder of BlackBerry Ltd sued the company and its executives on Friday, accusing them of inflating the stock price by painting a misleadingly rosy picture of the business prospects of its BlackBerry 10 smartphone line.
Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry, formerly Research In Motion Ltd, misled investors last year by saying that the company was “progressing on its financial and operational commitments,” and that previews of its BlackBerry 10 platform were well received by developers, according to shareholder Marvin Pearlstein in a lawsuit lodged in Manhattan federal court.
A Japanese study is claiming that toxic air pollution from China is to blame for high mercury levels atop the country’s beloved Mount Fuji.
The research will likely do little to help simmering hostilities between the Asian giants, a relationship marred by historical animosities and territorial disputes.
“Whenever readings were high, winds were blowing from the continent (China),” Osamu Nagafuchi, the lead scientist on the study, told AFP yesterday.
A multi-tool gadget kept at the Smithsonian Institute holds almost every household object one can imagine, and can be called the mother of all Swiss Army knives.
The gadget includes scissors, a corkscrew, a cigar cutter, pens, a mirror, a straight razor, a cheese fork and a butter knife, in addition to a .22 caliber revolver, unlike any other similar knife, the Daily Star reported.
The knife, which was made in Germany in 1880, predates the Swiss Army knife by 11 years and holds a number of other sharp instruments that could have been meant to be used for hunting.
Scientists are one step closer to make jet lag and shift work less painful, as they have discovered the body clock “reset button”.
The findings could reduce the symptoms of travelling through different time zones and working unsociable hours, which often makes people either tired or unable to sleep, the Independent reported.
Results from the study suggest that the newly-found button could be used to switch the master clock to a new time zone, for example from London to Beijing, in just one day.
A new study has revealed the mechanistic basis for how the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacterium became such a difficult pathogen over the previous 50 years, in which time it spread rapidly across the world.
The study by researchers at university of Notre Dame and their collaborators in Spain showed how MRSA regulates the critical crosslinking of its cell wall in the face of beta-lactam antibiotics.
Modern strains of MRSA have become broadly resistant to antibiotics, including beta-lactam antibiotics, such as penicillins.
Pakistan’s southern Sindh province has reportedly decided to block access to online communication networks including Skype and WhatsApp for three months to curb terrorism.
Sindh’s Information Minister Sharjeel Memon said that the administration is compelled to ban those networks for three months over security reasons.
According to News24, police officials claim that these online applications were frequently being used by terrorists and criminal elements.
Scientists have developed a new kind of ‘X-ray vision’ that is able to peer inside an object and map the three-dimensional distribution of its nano-properties in real time.
Researchers from the University of Manchester, working with colleagues in the UK, Europe and the US, said the novel imaging technique could have a wide range of applications across many disciplines, such as materials science, geology, environmental science and medical research.
Goa Forest minister Alina Saldanha has confirmed the presence of tigers in the state wild even as Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar has been a bit reluctant to declare Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary as a tiger reserve.
“This year also we saw the magnificent national animal Tiger marking its presence in the state,” Saldanha said in her message for wildlife week celebrated between October 2-8.
The statement comes two days after Parrikar had ruled out the strong presence of tiger in Goa’s wildlife sanctuaries.
The nearby star system Fomalhaut has been discovered to be not just a double star, as astronomers had earlier thought, but one of the widest triple stars known.
Researchers have shown that a previously known smaller star in its vicinity is also part of the Fomalhaut system.
Eric Mamajek, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, and his collaborators found the triple nature of the star system through a bit of detective work.
The Internet is fast eroding people’s memories of world-changing events in history, making them more forgetful as they increasingly bank upon Google to provide the information, a new UK study has found.
The study of 2,000 adults found less than half of people surveyed could name the year when Princess Diana died, even though it happened as recently as 1997.
Many respondents did not even know the year in which the terror attacks on the World Trade Center took place while many others were clueless about when the Berlin Wall fell, the ‘Metro’ reported.
As the three-dimensional (3D) printers make artists’ and hobbyists’ dream a reality by allowing them to produce virtually anything from garden gnome figures to nuts and screws, analysts believe that the devices raise serious concerns about their potential misuse.
The concerns surround the 3-D printers’ use for designing and building custom plastic firearms, weapons that could conceivably go undetected.
Country’s second largest software services firm Infosys Thursday said it has bagged a four-year contract from Toyota Motor Europe for providing application support to the latter’s pan-European operations.
The financial details were not divulged.
The engagement will see Infosys deploy a managed service model, the Bangalore-based company said in a statement.
Scientists have discovered 60 new species of animal life during the course of a three-week expedition in the South American nation of Suriname last year, according to results of the subsequent data analysis available now.
A group of 16 scientists led by the Rapid Assessment Programme of Conservation International, a non-profit environmental organisation, scoured a never-before assessed mountainous region in southeaster Suriname in 2012.
American researchers have claimed that they can prove that the legend of Bigfoot, also called sasquatch, is real, after spending half a decade and 300,000 pounds on their research.
Scientists have alleged that they have found DNA evidence to prove that the creatures exist, the Mirror reported.
The team of researchers was led by Dr Melba Ketchum, a qualified vet, who stressed that the Sasquatch Genome Project was a “serious study”.
Ketchum asserted that she has seen the “human hybrid” for herself.
Ketchum said that the team had at least one tissue sample from a Bigfoot.
Apple will not be rolling out its new version of the iPad Mini with a high-resolution ‘retina’ display anytime before the next year amidst speculations of delayed certification of panel producers.
The retina display technology is already in use on rival tablets from Google and Amazon and Apple was scheduled to unveil its iPad Mini with the technology this month.
Apple fans who updated their smartphones to iOS7 system are reportedly facing issues while sending or receiving messages through iMessage feature.
Apple’s Trudy Muller said that the company is aware of the issue affecting a fraction of a percent of their iMessage users, and they will have a fix available in an upcoming software update.
Muller further asked users to refer to the troubleshooting documents or contact AppleCare to help resolve their issue, ABC News reports.
Researchers have copied the idea that Mary Shelley displayed in her much acclaimed novel ‘Frankenstein’ to charge a phone with a lightning bolt.
Researchers conducted the experiment in collaboration with Nokia at the University of Southampton.
The team used a transformer to recreate a lightning bolt in the lab by passing 200,000 volts across a 30cm (12in) air gap, the BBC reported.
Scientists analysing images of Mars have discovered a network of supervolcanoes that could have buried the red plant in ash when they were active billions of years ago, Sky News reported Wednesday.
The discovery by researchers at London’s Natural History Museum and NASA suggests that early Mars was more active than previously thought with massive volcanoes that may have rivalled supervolcanoes on Earth.
Software giant IBM Thursday said it has been selected by Tata Power Delhi Distribution Ltd. (TPDD) to conceptualise, design and deliver an advanced smart grid solution that will collect and analyze real-time information from smart meters and data from the communication and management infrastructure.
This will enable TPDD to better manage energy output and further reduce outages, IBM said in a release here.
In another boost to the creation of bio-engineered organs, scientists have created saliva glands and tear glands in a lab dish, using stem cells from mice.
Researchers, at the Tokyo University of Science, said that their findings could potentially help in treating the “dry eye” or “dry mouth” syndromes, which are caused by the malfunctioning glands, News 24 reported.
For the study, lead researcher, Takashi Tsuji, along with a team, grew the two glands in the lab dish from precursor cells, and transplanted the primitive organs into mice.
Google has been reportedly accused of illegally wiretapping Gmail content of its users to send them targeted ads.
The search giant has been accused by plaintiffs and privacy rights advocates over the years and the lawsuits have been merged into two separate cases, questioning the extent to the company’s wiretapping via its emailing service and its Street View mapping project.
Cloud computing is enabling unprecedented innovations in technology, like bring your own device (BOYD), but security and privacy issues are key inhibitors to cloud growth, a study by technology giants Cisco and Intel revealed.
According to study on impact of Cloud on IT consumption models, commissioned by Cisco and Intel, the explosive growth of Internet has led to about 10 billion devices connected to the Net, which will rise to around 50 billion by 2020.
India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft was shipped out of the city today for the October 28 launch from the Sriharikota spaceport, setting the stage for final preparations for the odyssey to the red planet.
“It was put in a special container where we have the monitoring of the environment inside”, an official of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told PTI here.