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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. government hammered away at its main arguments against Alphabet's Google on Thursday, wrapping up the evidentiary

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New technology allows doctors to listen to the gurgle of people’s digestion and other noises to monitor their health. Doctors use sound inside their patients’ bodies to gather a host of information, listening to the air as it moves through their lungs or the beats of their heart, as well as the processing of food. They can provide important ways to understand people’s health – and noticing when they change or stop could be life-saving. But there is no easy way for doctors to monitor those things continually, or from a distance. Now a new breakthrough wearable allows doctors to continuously track those sounds by sticking technology to people’s skin. The soft, small wearables can be attached on almost any part of the body, in multiple locations, and will track the sounds without wires. Researchers have already used the device on 15 premature babies, as well as 55 adults, monitoring people with a variety of different conditions such as respiratory diseases. They found that the devices performed with clinical-grade accuracy – but also that they provided entirely new ways of caring for people. “Currently, there are no existing methods for continuously monitoring and spatially mapping body sounds at home or in hospital settings,” said Northwestern’s John A Rogers, a bioelectronics pioneer who led the device development. “Physicians have to put a conventional, or a digital, stethoscope on different parts of the chest and back to listen to the lungs in a point-by-point fashion. In close collaborations with our clinical teams, we set out to develop a new strategy for monitoring patients in real-time on a continuous basis and without encumbrances associated with rigid, wired, bulky technology.” One of the important breakthroughs in the device is that it can be used at various places at once – with researchers likening it to having a collection of doctors all listening at once. “The idea behind these devices is to provide highly accurate, continuous evaluation of patient health and then make clinical decisions in the clinics or when patients are admitted to the hospital or attached to ventilators,”said Dr Ankit Bharat, a thoracic surgeon at Northwestern Medicine, who led the clinical research in the adult subjects, in a statement. “A key advantage of this device is to be able to simultaneously listen and compare different regions of the lungs. Simply put, it’s like up to 13 highly trained doctors listening to different regions of the lungs simultaneously with their stethoscopes, and their minds are synced to create a continuous and a dynamic assessment of the lung health that is translated into a movie on a real-life computer screen.” The work is described in a new paper, ‘Wireless broadband acousto-mechanical sensing system for continuous physiological monitoring’, published in Nature Medicine. Read More SpaceX is launching the world’s biggest rocket – follow live Instagram users warned about new setting that could accidentally expose secrets SpaceX to launch world’s biggest rocket again after first attempt ended in explosion

YouTube has revealed a host of new, musical artificial intelligence experiments. The features let people create musical texts by just writing a short piece of text, instantly and automatically generating music in the style of a number of artists. Users can also hum a simple song into their computer and have it turned into a detailed and rich piece of music. The new experiments are YouTube’s latest attempt to deal with the possibilities and dangers of AI and music. Numerous companies and artists have voiced fears that artificial intelligence could make it easier to infringe on copyright or produce real-sounding fake songs. One of the new features is called “Dream Track”, and some creators already have it, with the aim of using it to soundtrack YouTube Shorts. It is intended to quickly produce songs in people’s style. Users can choose a song in the style of a number of officially-licensed artists: Alec Benjamin, Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Papoose, Sia, T-Pain, and Troye Sivan. They can then ask for a particular song, deciding on the tone or themes of the song, and it can then be used in their post on Shorts. Another is called Music AI Tools, and is aimed to help musicians with their creative process. It came out of YouTube’s Music AI Incubator, a working group of artists, songwriters and producers who are experimenting with the use of artificial intelligence in music. “It was clear early on that this initial group of participants were intensely curious about AI tools that could push the limits of what they thought possible. They also sought out tools that could bolster their creative process,” YouTube said in an announcement. “As a result, those early sessions led us to iterate on a set of music AI tools that experiment with those concepts. Imagine being able to more seamlessly turn one’s thoughts and ideas into music; like creating a new guitar riff just by humming it or taking a pop track you are working on and giving it a reggaeton feel. “We’re developing prospective tools that could bring these possibilities to life and Music AI Incubator participants will be able to test them out later this year.” The company gave an example of one of those tools, where a producer was able to hum a tune and then have it turned into a track that sounded as if it had been professionally recorded. The tools are built on Google Deepmind’s Lyria system. The company said that was built specifically for music, overcoming problems such as AI’s difficulties with producing long sequences of sound that keep their continuity and do not break apart. At the same time, Deepmind said it had been working on a technology called SynthID to combine it with Lyria. That will put an audio watermark into the sound, which humans cannot hear but which can be recognised by tools so that they know the songs have been automatically generated. “This novel method is unlike anything that exists today, especially in the context of audio,” Deepmind said,. “The watermark is designed to maintain detectability even when the audio content undergoes many common modifications such as noise additions, MP3 compression, or speeding up and slowing down the track. SynthID can also detect the presence of a watermark throughout a track to help determine if parts of a song were generated by Lyria.” The announcement comes just days after YouTube announced restrictions on unauthorised AI clones of musicians. Earlier this week it said that users would have to tag AI-generated content that looked realistic, and music that “mimics an artist’s unique singing or rapping voice” will be banned entirely. Those videos have proven popular in recent months, largely thanks to online tools that allow people to easily combine a voice with an existing song and create something entirely new, such as Homer Simpson singing popular hits. Those will not be affected straight away, with the new requirements rolling out next year. Read More AI-generated faces are starting to look more real than actual ones Elon Musk unveils new sarcasm-loving AI chatbot for premium X subscribers New tech listens to your belly gurgling and monitors how well you are New tech listens to your belly gurgling and monitors how well you are SpaceX is launching the world’s biggest rocket – follow live Instagram users warned about new setting that could accidentally expose secrets

Instagram users are warning each other about a new feature that could accidentally expose your secrets. The new update means that it is possible to see who else is in a person’s “close friends”. Until now, that information had been secret, and finding out who else is considered a close friend could potentially cause fallouts or other issues. Instagram’s close friends tool lets people choose certain friends that they trust more, and place them in a list. Users can then share stories only to those friends, and they will be off limits to anybody else. In a new update rolling out this week, however, Instagram now lets people share posts and reels with only their close friends. That opens it up from just Instagram’s stories feature. That is potentially hazardous, however, since posts and reels include likes and comments. It means that anyone who sees a close friend post from a friend can now that anyone liking or commenting on that posts is also in a person’s close friends community. It as an attempt to make the app feel more private. Instagram described close friends as a “pressure-free space to connect with ​​the people that matter most”. “We hope this opens up more ways to be your most authentic self on Instagram while having more choices over who sees your content,” it said in its announcement. But it has also led to numerous warnings from TikTok users and others that users should be aware that they might accidentally compromise their privacy in uploading such a post, and that they should be aware that they might be making their close friends list slightly more public. The new close friends posts and reels are used by sharing a post as normal, and then clicking the “audience” button and choosing “close friends”. It will then only be shown to people in that close friends list and will be labelled with a green star icon to make that clear. The close friends list is the same across stories, posts and reels. It can be edited by clicking onto your own profile, choosing the three lines in the top right and then selecting the “close friends” option. Read More Meta to allow users to delete Threads accounts without losing Instagram WhatsApp might be getting its most controversial ever update Political ads on Instagram and Facebook can be deepfakes, Meta says

SpaceX is going to try and launch its Starship again – and hopes to avoid it exploding this time. Starship is both the tallest and most powerful rocket ever made. It will be the second test for the spacecraft, which Elon Musk’s private space company hopes will one day take humans to the Moon and beyond. But first Starship must successfully conduct an uncrewed orbital test, which will see it leave from its launchpad in Texas and then fly almost all the way around the Earth. The first time that SpaceX attempted to launch Starship, in April, it initially took off cleanly but ran into problems minutes later, spiralling out of control and then exploding. SpaceX hopes to launch the rocket on Friday morning local central time – though that launch could be pushed back into the weekend or even further depending on conditions.