In a patent application published this week, Google indicated it’s looking into how artificial intelligence can be used to watch for abnormal behavior in babies.
The system would consist of eye tracking and motion detection and could alert a parent if anything is out of the ordinary.
Google’s hefty investment in artificial intelligence might be making its way to the crib.
According to a patent application filed last year and published on Thursday, Google is researching technology that could track a baby’s eyes, movements and sounds using “intelligent” audio and video. If the behavior seems abnormal, the cloud-based system would notify parents on their device.
It’s not just grown-ups that might appreciate electrified transport. Bosch has unveiled an “eStroller” system that uses dual electric motors and sensors to not only reduce the effort involved in carting your young one around, but prevent the stroller from going in unexpected directions. It’ll automatically study the road surface to help you push uphill, brake on the descent and keep it on track during lateral slopes. The technology will also bring the stroller to a halt if you lose control or battle fierce winds.
There has been tremendous growth in the size of the world’s population in the last half century. Global population was around 3 billion in 1960. By 1987, in less than three decades, it had surpassed 5 billion and there were around 7.6 billion people in the world in 2018.
This growth varies greatly across regions. Since 1960, the largest relative growth has taken place in Sub-Saharan Africa where the population expanded from 227 million in 1960 to more than 1 billion in 2018—a nearly fivefold increase. The second largest growth over the period can be seen in Middle East and North Africa, where the population increased more than 4 times, from 105 million to 449 million.
You want the best for your kids. Even if they don’t deserve it. The world has become an ever more traumatized place, so you feel you should do ever more to give them a helping hand.
Though it surely stops before you pay a fixer $500,000 for them to go to USC. I want to help you for free, oh traumatized parent.
So I’ve just found a fascinating piece of research that might be a good guide, should you want your children to be good at the basics.
For the first time in modern history, the world’s population is expected to virtually stop growing by the end of this century, due in large part to falling global fertility rates, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the United Nations.
By 2100, the world’s population is projected to reach approximately 10.9 billion, with annual growth of less than 0.1% – a steep decline from the current rate. Between 1950 and today, the world’s population grew between 1% and 2% each year, with the number of people rising from 2.5 billion to more than 7.7 billion.
Do you remember the strange thrill of losing a tooth when you were a child? On the one hand, you had the distressing feeling of seeing blood and feeling it pop out. At the same time, you knew something exciting was going to happen when you put it under your pillow. If you were lucky, by the next morning, the tooth was gone and some money had magically appeared.
America’s baby bust isn’t over. The nation’s birth rates last year reached record lows for women in their teens and 20s, a government report shows, leading to the fewest babies in 32 years.
The provisional report, released Wednesday and based on more than 99% of U.S. birth records, found 3.788 million births last year. It was the fourth year the number of births has fallen, the lowest since 1986 and a surprise to some experts given the improving economy.
The fertility rate of 1.7 births per U.S. woman also fell 2%, meaning the current generation isn’t making enough babies to replace itself. The fertility rate is a hypothetical estimate based on lifetime projections of age-specific birth rates.
Suicide rates are on the rise in the U.S. across age groups and demographics. But in recent years, increases have been particularly pronounced among teenagers — especially girls, who die by suicide less frequently than boys but attempt it more often.
Intentional self-poisoning is the leading type of suicide attempt for adolescents (and the third-leading cause of suicide deaths), and a new study confirms that numbers here, too, are rising. The research, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, found that suicide attempts by poisoning have doubled in frequency among kids younger than 19, rising from almost 40,000 attempts in 2000 to almost 80,000 in 2018. Teen girls seemed to drive the increase in self-poisoning attempts, which can include intentional drug overdoses or exposure to other toxic substances.
When an unborn baby is diagnosed with a life-threatening defect, it can be devastating. So some scientists hope to treat the fetus in the uterus, using gene editing.
WILLIAM PERANTEAU IS the guy parents call when they’ve received the kind of bad news that sinks stomachs and wrenches hearts. Sometimes it’s a shadow on an ultrasound or a few base pairs out of place on a prenatal genetic test, revealing that an unborn child has a life-threatening developmental defect. Pediatric surgeons like Peranteau, who works at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, usually can’t try to fix these abnormalities until their patients leave their mother’s bodies behind. And by then it might be too late.
It’s with the memory of the families he couldn’t help in the back of his mind that Peranteau has joined a small group of scientists trying to bring the fast-moving field of gene editing to the womb. Such editing in humans is a long way off, but a spate of recent advances in mouse studies highlight its potential advantages over other methods of using Crispr to snip away diseases. Parents confronted with an in utero diagnosis are often faced with only two options: terminate the pregnancy or prepare to care for a child who may require multiple invasive surgeries over the course of their lifetime just to survive. Prenatal gene editing may offer a third potential path. “What we see as the future is a minimally invasive way of treating these abnormalities at their genetic origin instead,” says Peranteau.
Researchers successfully nurture extremely preterm lamb fetuses outside a natural womb. Photo: Fritz Goro
If you live for about 80 years, your nine months in the womb will represent less than 1% of your time on Earth. But those nine months represent a crucial period for growth and development.
Sometimes, though, babies are born before they get those nine full months in utero. And while the accepted protocol is to place premature infants in an artificial incubator — protecting the baby from infection and maintaining temperature and humidity — soon there may be better options.
A child’s first cell phone is increasingly becoming an earlier, and pricier, decision for parents.
While each family has its own decision to make on when the appropriate time is for their child to get their first device, Verizon is hoping a new plan will make the choice easier on the financial side of things with its new “Just Kids” plan.
The new plan, available starting Thursday, includes 5GB of 4G LTE data plus unlimited talk and text to 20 contacts pre-approved by the parents. Like other recent Verizon plans, there are no overage fees if the child goes beyond the allotted data, with the speeds simply slowed down instead.
