University of Washington

In a crowd, background noise can make it hard to hear people talking. But soon we could be wearing headphones that use AI to filter out noise that’s more than a few feet away, creating a “sound bubble” that lets you focus on your own conversation.

It would be an understatement to say that things can get pretty hectic in a hospital emergency room … enough so that staff occasionally administer the wrong medication. Soon, however, AI-enabled wearable cameras could help keep that from happening.

Ordinarily, if you want liquid to flow in only one direction through a pipe, that pipe has to have a flap-type valve – which could fail. Now, scientists have created a new type of more robust one-way-flow pipe, which was inspired by shark intestines.

Elon Musk says Neuralink's BlindSight eye implants "ultimately may exceed normal human vision" – but researchers now contend that this is highly unlikely, and new videos show what the world will look like through direct pixels-to-neurons imaging.

A new gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) has shown promise in not only slowing the progression of the disease but potentially even reversing the muscle damage, with human trials set to begin within two years.

These days, more people are getting their news from YouTube, which is known for being a hub of misinformation. But researchers have developed a browser extension that allows people to thumbs up (or down) a video's credibility by adding their own citations.

A new type of printed circuit board could drastically reduce the amount of electronic waste that ends up in landfills. Although most PCBs are difficult to recycle, such is not the case with this one, which turns into a reusable jelly when necessary.

We might find alien life as soon as 2030, suggests a new study. A lab experiment has shown instruments on a spacecraft headed to one of the most promising worlds to find life are sensitive enough to detect a single living cell in a single ice grain.

If you want to continuously monitor your body temperature, and you already wear earrings all day long, why not just have those earrings do the job? That's the thinking behind the Thermal Earring, which may someday be coming to an ear near you.

Researchers have provided the first direct evidence explaining the function of sleep. They demonstrated that sleep resets the brain’s ‘operating system,’ undermined during waking, returning it to an ideal state to optimize thinking and processing.

The animal kingdom has no shortage of weird and wonderful surprises, and this year biologists gave us some real treats to talk about. From microscopic bacteria to huge cetaceans, here are the most bizarre animal stories we covered in 2023.

No-one enjoys idling in peak-hour traffic, yet scientists have identified that a blood pressure spike during it doesn't come from frustration but from ultrafine particles flowing into the car. And the average 4.5 mm Hg spike lasts for an entire day.