Star Trek style translators step closer to reality at gadget show

Once confined to the realms of science fiction, near real-time translation devices that whisper discreetly into your ear during a conversation are finally coming of age thanks to leaps in artificial intelligence and cloud ...

Learning language by playing games

MIT researchers have designed a computer system that learns how to play a text-based computer game with no prior assumptions about how language works. Although the system can't complete the game as a whole, its ability to ...

Songbirds have a thing for patterns

You might think that young children would first learn to recognize sounds and then learn how those categories of sounds fit together into words. But that isn't how it works. Rather, kids learn sounds and words at the same ...

Fraternal singing in zebra finches

The song of songbirds is usually transmitted from one generation to the next by imitation learning and is thought to be similar to the acquisition of human speech. Although song is often learnt from an adult model, there ...

Brain study: Singing mice show signs of learning

Guys who imitate Luciano Pavarotti or Justin Bieber to get the girls aren't alone. Male mice may do a similar trick, matching the pitch of other males' ultrasonic serenades. The mice also have certain brain features, somewhat ...

Enjoying massage of the future at the world's top IT fair

With all the frantic deal-making and head-spinning gadgets at the world's top IT fair, it is perhaps no surprise that a chair promising the benefit of two hours sleep in 20 minutes drew big queues.

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