In recent reports, some dogs have been trained to literally sniff out individuals infected with COVID-19. Now, a tech company is using the power of artificial intelligence to do the same thing with an “artificial nose” handheld device.

In a recent test, BrainChip Inc. and NaNose Medical were able to successfully detect COVID-19 in exhaled breath in much the same way a breathalyzer detects alcohol.  Their COVID-19 testing results are reportedly fast and highly accurate.

BrainChip is a leading provider of ultra-low power high performance artificial intelligence technology. In a press release, the company wrote, “Using the NaNose Medical artificial nose, and Akida’s artificial brain, is a potential breakthrough in accurate, fast, inexpensive, widespread (COVID-19) testing with the potential to control outbreaks and reduce this disease’s death toll.”

This NaNose Medical technology is based on the artificial nose developed at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, by Prof. Hossam Haick, and has the same sensitivity to minute quantities of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) as a dog’s nose.

While it’s use as an instant or rapid COVID-19 test are new, the device has been used in tests to identify diseases including Parkinson’s, cancers, kidney failure, and multiple sclerosis for several years.

For the recent trials testing COVID-19, NaNose Medical collected samples from 130 patients and used that data to train its Akida neuromorphic processor. The system has now learned to recognize patterns of VOC biomarkers associated with an COVID-19 infection within seconds with a high level of accuracy.

According to a study in China, this type of breath sensor data is more accurate than current COVID-19 tests using the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).

Additionally, sensor testing like this reduces the risk to healthcare workers because the tests does not rely on saliva or mucus samples.

“Artificial intelligence in medicine and healthcare is an emerging field and one in which we are eager to contribute with our edge AI processing solution at the Edge, for the benefit of science and humanity,” said Louis DiNardo, BrainChip CEO.

Both Louis DiNardo, Brainchip CEO and Orit Marom Albeck, NaNose Medical CEO said: “Using the NaNose Medical artificial nose, and Akida’s artificial brain, is a potential breakthrough in accurate, fast, inexpensive, widespread testing with the potential to control outbreaks and reduce this disease’s death toll.”

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The $100/kWh price was registered on e-bus batteries for the Chinese market. Although this was the lowest reported price, the volume-weighted average price did not strand too high either, setting at $105/kWh.

The recorded drop in price has been consistent, as the electric vehicle battery pack prices revolve around the $126/kWh mark for volume-weighted averages. However, when considering prices reported at cell-level, battery electric vehicle (BEV) prices were down to $100/kWh. Consequently, this show that 21% of the total price of a BEV is drawn by the battery pack.

BloombergNEF (BNEF) results on the 2020 Battery Price Survey is predicting an average battery pack price of $101/kWh by 2023 for all electric vehicle categories. This includes electric passenger vehicles, e-buses, commercial electric vehicles such as trucks, as well as stationary batteries.

The importance of $100/kWh batteries

It is obvious that as battery pack prices drop, electric vehicles will follow suit, becoming cheaper and  more affordable for the public. However, the $100/kWh marks a turning point for the electric automotive industry. It is by this point that automakers should be able to break even between combustion and electric vehicles.

In other words, by 2023 automakers should be able to build and sell both combustion and electric vehicles at the same price and with the same margin, allowing for a more balanced market.

Why Electric Car prices are dropping

Lower prices on battery packs are definitely a good sign. The main reasons for which battery packs are being sold at lower prices per kWh have to do with newer manufacturing technologies, but rather with demand.

Thus, lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide batteries and their cobalt aluminum oxide counterparts are cheaper to the obsolete Li-Ion relatives. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are expected to pull prices even lower, down to $80/kWh.

On the other hand, the constant increase of demand for battery packs also helps prices to keep on going on their descending slope.

Long-term expectations

If the $101/kWh by 2023 looks certain, even though some ups and downs may arise on the way, estimates show that by 2030 battery packs should reach a historical $58/kWh minimum. Compared to 2013, that is an 11.5-fold drop in price.

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The new tech comes from Hologic, Inc. – an innovative medical tech company focused on improving women’s health through early detection and treatment of cancer.

Dubbed the Genius Digital Diagnostics System, it is a first-of-its-kind digital cytology platform. Using a new advanced AI algorithm to help analyze its digital imaging results, the system aids doctors in the identification of pre-cancerous lesions and cancer cells in women.

“Application of AI requires digital images that are of exceptional quality,” said Kevin Thornal, president, Diagnostic Solutions Division at Hologic.

“Our teams developed a breakthrough imaging technology that converts physical glass cytology slides into digital images with superior clarity. From this digitalization, advanced image analysis and improved standardization are now achievable.”

According to Hologic, the AI in the system is able to narrow down the field of thousands of cells in a Pap test slide to a handful of the most diagnostically relevant images.

This saves time for results analysis and will lead to earlier detection of anomalies. The end result is getting help to the patients sooner and with greater accuracy.

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In a press release, the company indicated that it had completed the Preliminary Product Specification gateway with help from its affiliate – Magna International Inc. Fisker touts this PPS gateway as a key engineering and purchasing milestone for completion of the Ocean SUV.

As part of this achievement, the company was able to confirm preliminary design specifications as well as key components and subsystems. It also confirms the planned timing for future gateways leading up to the launch of actual production – just over a year from now.

“Today’s announcements demonstrate our team’s ability to set aggressive targets and achieve them on time,” commented Fisker Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Henrik Fisker.

“Completing these important engineering and purchasing milestones demonstrates how well the Fisker and Magna teams are working together and keeping our rapid, capital-light product development program on-track towards the delivery of the all-electric Fisker Ocean SUV, expected to commence in Q4 2022.”

Under the terms of an agreement reached last month, the Fisker Ocean SUV will initially be manufactured exclusively by Magna in Europe.

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The company is basing their advice on years of experience as well as recent studies about online shopping habits and intentions of consumers.

McAfee recently analyzed the results of its 2020 Holiday Season: State of Today’s Digital e-Shopper survey. The results show that, “while consumers are aware of increased risks and scams via the internet, they still plan to do more shopping online – and earlier – this holiday season.”

Nearly two-thirds of consumers in America say that they believe online scams and cyber-crime are more prevalent than ever. Despite this, just over one-third of them still plan to do more holiday shopping online this year than ever before.

The study also showed that a lot of the increase in online holiday shopping is being driven by current pandemic. Over the last year consumers have come to rely more on online shopping for the majority of their purchases.

If face, the survey showed that nearly half of consumers are buying more products online since the COVID-19 pandemic began. What’s more, 18% say they buys something online every day, while 34% shop online 3-5 days a week.

All of this creates an attractive market for cyber criminals and internet scams. Criminals know that less than one-third of consumers who receive an email or text message, touting online shopping discounts, will check to verify whether the message a scam.

“With results showing the growing prevalence of online shopping, consumers need to be aware of how cybercriminals are looking to take advantage and take the necessary steps to protect themselves- and their loved ones- this holiday season,” said Judith Bitterli, VP of Consumer Marketing at McAfee.

Here are some steps to shop online safely this holiday season:

• Employ multi-factor authentication to double check the authenticity of digital users and add an additional layer of security to protect personal data and information.
  
• Browse with caution and added security using a tool like McAfee WebAdvisor to block malware and phishing sites via malicious links.
  
• Protect your identity and important personal and financial details using McAfee Identity Theft Protection, which also includes recovery tools should your identity be compromised.

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The company issuing the warning is Asigra Inc. The organization is touted as a leader in backup and recovery software that delivers comprehensive backup repository cyber protection. They have been awarded Product of the Year Gold winner, three times, by TechTarget for their Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software.

Asigra is currently working to maintain operational continuity, and productive operations, for clients as it responds to these impending threats.

“The organization has observed continuing ransomware attacks across the country and around the world. Malicious actors have adjusted their ransomware tactics over time to include pressuring victims for payment by threatening to release stolen data if they refuse to pay.” stated the US Government’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“Malicious actors increasingly use tactics such as deleting system backups, which make restoration and recovery more difficult or infeasible for impacted organizations.”

According to Asigra, most organizations are falling into a false sense of security – assuming that their backup data will be available after a ransomware attack. However, the company is warning that in many recent attacks, the backup data is targeted by the attackers.

Asigra is pointing to these 5 areas as the cyber security ransomware challenges which businesses must address in 2021 to remain in safe operations:

1.            Ransomware Attacks on Kubernetes Containers: The deployment of Kubernetes-based containers is growing rapidly as it allows software to run consistently between computing environments, making it highly portable, productive and ideal for digital transformation. Along with these advantages comes the generation of massive data volumes, making these new environments prime targets for new ransomware variants. Mitigating these attacks will require an industry-wide approach to ensuring the viability of these environments before, during and after such attacks.

2.            Cyber-targeting of SaaS-Based Applications: With the increase in distributed enterprise operations and remote work environments, there will be continued adoption of SaaS-based applications. Beyond the flexible use of these applications, they offer cost, time and scalability advantages in many cases. However, they also create a new data source that is vulnerable to ransomware and must be protected.

3.            AI-Driven Cyberattacks: Artificial intelligence and the technologies that enable it are becoming more advanced. The resulting new capabilities are allowing criminal organizations to conduct more complex and targeted attacks. To counter these more intelligent attacks, organizational defenses must also evolve.

4.            Ransomware Payments to Become Illegal: The US government has expressed intentions to align the payment of cyber ransoms with the support of terrorist organizations and will likely make these payments illegal. It is expected that other nations will enact such laws as well, especially to defend against possible nation-state sponsored actors. Without the ability to retrieve criminally encrypted data or recover properly, ransomware attacks will become business ending events.

5.            Managed Security Service Provider Registration with the Government: The US government will move to require MSPs/MSSPs that provide cybersecurity services to register their organizations with the government, adding more regulations as the ransomware trend continues to accelerate.

Ensuring that viable backup data is available and unharmed is essential to for a business to survive a ransomware attack.  

To make this happen, the organization’s backup infrastructure, including access to backup software controls, must be ensured.

“Organizations need to ready themselves to properly and quickly respond to ransomware attacks regardless of what has been attacked. One way to do this is to make backup data very difficult to hack,” said David Farajun, Chief Executive Officer, Asigra, Inc.

“Regardless of the imposing number of routes that ransomware will take in 2021, having a well-planned response plan to get your systems back up and running in the least amount of time will be critical to ensuring business viability.” Additional details about Asigra’s enhanced data protection suite is available on the company web site https://www.asigra.com.

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The new bridge designs come from a team of engineers and researchers at Texas A&M University and the University of Colorado Boulder. The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided funding for the research.

Their designs appear to result in a structure that is more damage-resistant. Less damage could mean saving billions in repair costs after a large earthquake.

So far, these designs have been limited to the lab, and are still in the early stages of development, but appear promising.

The design is based on how limbs and joints in the body work to support us while also absorbing impact and allowing for some flexibility.

Current bridge designs will crack and even break when subjected to very large quakes. They are constructed of steel and poured re-enforced concrete. There is no flexibility in these structures.

They are built to support their own weight plus expected traffic loads. But they are static structures built on a stationary surface. The problems come when the surface is no longer stationary – like with an earthquake.

The team calls their design a hybrid sliding-rocking bridge. During an earthquake, “the joints allow some of the energy from the ground motion to spread while the segments move slightly, sliding over one another rather than bending or cracking,” explains the NSF in a press release on the design.

When the team compared their ‘limb-inspired’ bridge design to current designs when subjected to a quake, the results were dramatic.

The columns in the new design “showed very little damage even when subject to motions reminiscent of a powerful once-in-a-few-thousand-years earthquake.”

What’s more, the damage that did occur could be repaired easily and inexpensively. The complete detailed of the study were published in the Journal of Structural Engineering.

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A group of engineers at Purdue University have developed an incredibly small rectangular micro robot which can travel through the human body to deliver medicine. Or they can be used as a diagnostic tool to report back on your health.

The robot as tiny as a few human hairs, according to the recent announcement by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Seen in this image of a penny, the micro-robot is the tiny speck smaller than the ‘U’ in United States.

Why are these Micro-Robots important?

Current medicines often have very negative side-effects. Much of this is due to the fact that the medicines travel throughout various areas of the body in order to reach their target. In this way, the medication can adversely impact other organs and body parts.

By placing the medicine onboard a tiny robot like this one, it can be programmed to wait until it reaches a very specific part of the body before releasing the medicine.

How do they work?

This first micro robot has been tested in live animals. It has been able to travel throughout a colon by essentially doing back flips. In the end, developers aim to use these robots eventually transport therapeutic drugs through the colons and other organs have rough terrain.

The tiny device derives its power from a magnetic field outside of the patient. Doctors would use the same field to control the robot – directing it to the target location.

“When we apply a rotating external magnetic field to these robots, they rotate just like a car tire would over rough terrain,” said David Cappelleri, a Purdue mechanical engineer. “The magnetic field also safely penetrates different types of mediums, which is important for using these robots in the human body.”

This video explains more about how the micro-robots work.

The NSF helped to fund this research. The work has been cited as the “first demonstration of a microrobot tumbling through a biological system in vivo.”

According to the study, the microrobots are nontoxic and biocompatible. They are made of polymer and metal.

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Dexcom, for example, is a groundbreaking glucose monitor that continuously monitors glucose levels. The device also transmits the results to your smart devices – all without pricking your finger.

But now there is a variety of new and emerging tech on the horizon to help with your mental health as well.

Wearables for Health

We know that there are a number of wearables in the market, including the Apple Watch, which can monitor steps, heart rate, and now even blood oxygen levels. 

A company called Sensio Solutions has introduced a bracelet called Feel. This device, lined with monitors, senses emotion and checks emotional signals throughout the day. 

With an accompanying app, the Feel bracelet helps with mood tracking. The informational feedback is the educational component to the device. Additionally, users of Feel, can also talk to a therapist who acts as a coach by creating a behavior plan based on the data.

An individual can use the wristband as part of treatment if they are suffering from anxiety and/or depression.

Health Apps

Several apps help with stress by incorporating meditation and deep breathing. Calm and Headspace are two of the more popular apps in the market. Meditation can ease stress and even change the brain when done regularly. 

New apps on the horizon are delving deeper into the psyche. Mindstrong is such an app that is being tested by California’s Department of Behavioral Health. 

Mindstrong analyzes the way users interact with their phones. The app analyzes how the user scrolls through web pages and even how the user types in order to detect moods. Through machine learning, the platform helps uncover mental health patterns.

Another app, Woebot, uses a cute little robot to guide users through situations using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Woebot engages in uplifting conversations and can even be sympathetic.

Between COVID and other stressors such as maintaining a work-life balance, mental health issues are on the rise. As such, software developers are focused on creating technology that can help improve or manage your mental health.

While tech does not take the place of professional care, it certainly can complement traditional methods.

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The 2021 Los Angeles Auto Show will run from May 21-31 at the LA Convention Center.

In addition to being the company’s first electric SUV, this launch of the Fisker Ocean represents the company’s first production vehicle. According to Fisker, Ocean will deliver class-leading range and performance, along with functional interior space which includes third-row seating.

“It’s with great excitement that we’re making the global debut of the Fisker Ocean here in our home city of Los Angeles,” said Henrik Fisker, Chairman and CEO of Fisker.

“As befits the world’s first digital car company, we are also planning to showcase several Fisker-unique technologies that will support our differentiated ownership experience and vehicle functionality.”

While Fisker is based in California, the company has developed a partnership in Europe with Magna International. Magna will assemble the Ocean in Europe, with production scheduled to being in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Despite the fact that production has not yet begun, Fisker has already inked a deal for 300 vehicles. These Oceans will be delivered to Viggo, a Danish ride-hailing service.

Viggo, plans to use the Fisker vehicles to build its all-electric fleet. With it the company hopes to set a new standard for urban transportation.

Some see Fisker as a company which could eventually become a rival to Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors. But with production of its first electric vehicle still over a year away, that could take some doing.

To learn more about Fisker and the company’s vision for eco-friendly electric vehicles, visit www.FiskerInc.com.

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