Instead, it requires a simple mobile device.

Called MobilePoser, the new system leverages sensors already embedded within consumer mobile devices, including smartphones, smart watches and wireless earbuds. Using a combination of sensor data, machine learning and physics, MobilePoser accurately tracks a person’s full-body pose and global translation in space in real time.

“Running in real time on mobile devices, MobilePoser achieves state-of-the-art accuracy through advanced machine learning and physics-based optimization, unlocking new possibilities in gaming, fitness and indoor navigation without needing specialized equipment,” said Northwestern’s Karan Ahuja, who led the study. “This technology marks a significant leap toward mobile motion capture, making immersive experiences more accessible and opening doors for innovative applications across various industries.”

Ahuja’s team will unveil MobilePoser on Oct. 15, at the 2024 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Pittsburgh. “MobilePoser: Real-time full-body pose estimation and 3D human translation from IMUs in mobile consumer devices” will take place as a part of a session on “Poses as Input.”

An expert in human-computer interaction, Ahuja is the Lisa Wissner-Slivka and Benjamin Slivka Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where he directs the Sensing, Perception, Interactive Computing and Experience (SPICE) Lab.

Limitations of current systems

Most movie buffs are familiar with motion-capture techniques, which are often revealed in behind-the-scenes footage. To create CGI characters — like Gollum in “Lord of the Rings” or the Na’vi in “Avatar” — actors wear form-fitting suits covered in sensors, as they prowl around specialized rooms. A computer captures the sensor data and then displays the actor’s movements and subtle expressions.

“This is the gold standard of motion capture, but it costs upward of $100,000 to run that setup,” Ahuja said. “We wanted to develop an accessible, democratized version that basically anyone can use with equipment they already have.”

Other motion-sensing systems, like Microsoft Kinect, for example, rely on stationary cameras that view body movements. If a person is within the camera’s field of view, these systems work well. But they are impractical for mobile or on-the-go applications.

Predicting poses

To overcome these limitations, Ahuja’s team turned to inertial measurement units (IMUs), a system that uses a combination of sensors — accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers — to measure a body’s movement and orientation. These sensors already reside within smartphones and other devices, but the fidelity is too low for accurate motion-capture applications. To enhance their performance, Ahuja’s team added a custom-built, multi-stage artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, which they trained using a publicly available, large dataset of synthesized IMU measurements generated from high-quality motion capture data.

With the sensor data, MobilePoser gains information about acceleration and body orientation. Then, it feeds this data through AI algorithm, which estimates joint positions and joint rotations, walking speed and direction, and contact between the user’s feet and the ground.

Finally, MobilePoser uses a physics-based optimizer to refine the predicted movements to ensure they match real-life body movements. In real life, for example, joints cannot bend backward, and a head cannot rotate 360 degrees. The physics optimizer ensures that captured motions also cannot move in physically impossible ways.

The resulting system has a tracking error of just 8 to 10 centimeters. For comparison, the Microsoft Kinect has a tracking error of 4 to 5 centimeters, assuming the user stays within the camera’s field of view. With MobilePoser, the user has freedom to roam.

“The accuracy is better when a person is wearing more than one device, such as a smartwatch on their wrist plus a smartphone in their pocket,” Ahuja said. “But a key part of the system is that it’s adaptive. Even if you don’t have your watch one day and only have your phone, it can adapt to figure out your full-body pose.”

Potential use cases

While MobilePoser could give gamers more immersive experiences, the new app also presents new possibilities for health and fitness. It goes beyond simply counting steps to enable the user to view their full-body posture, so they can ensure their form is correct when exercising. The new app also could help physicians analyze patients’ mobility, activity level and gait. Ahuja also imagines the technology could be used for indoor navigation — a current weakness for GPS, which only works outdoors.

“Right now, physicians track patient mobility with a step counter,” Ahuja said. “That’s kind of sad, right? Our phones can calculate the temperature in Rome. They know more about the outside world than about our own bodies. We would like phones to become more than just intelligent step counters. A phone should be able to detect different activities, determine your poses and be a more proactive assistant.”

To encourage other researchers to build upon this work, Ahuja’s team has released its pre-trained models, data pre-processing scripts and model training code as open-source software. Ahuja also says the app will soon be available for iPhone, AirPods and Apple Watch.

The solar cycle is a natural cycle the Sun goes through as it transitions between low and high magnetic activity. Roughly every 11 years, at the height of the solar cycle, the Sun’s magnetic poles flip — on Earth, that’d be like the North and South poles swapping places every decade — and the Sun transitions from being calm to an active and stormy state.

NASA and NOAA track sunspots to determine and predict the progress of the solar cycle — and ultimately, solar activity. Sunspots are cooler regions on the Sun caused by a concentration of magnetic field lines. Sunspots are the visible component of active regions, areas of intense and complex magnetic fields on the Sun that are the source of solar eruptions.

“During solar maximum, the number of sunspots, and therefore, the amount of solar activity, increases,” said Jamie Favors, director, Space Weather Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This increase in activity provides an exciting opportunity to learn about our closest star — but also causes real effects at Earth and throughout our solar system.”

Solar activity strongly influences conditions in space known as space weather. This can affect satellites and astronauts in space, as well as communications and navigation systems — such as radio and GPS — and power grids on Earth. When the Sun is most active, space weather events become more frequent. Solar activity has led to increased aurora visibility and impacts on satellites and infrastructure in recent months.

During May 2024, a barrage of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) launched clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields toward Earth, creating the strongest geomagnetic storm at Earth in two decades — and possibly among the strongest displays of auroras on record in the past 500 years.

“This announcement doesn’t mean that this is the peak of solar activity we’ll see this solar cycle,” said Elsayed Talaat, director of space weather operations at NOAA. “While the Sun has reached the solar maximum period, the month that solar activity peaks on the Sun will not be identified for months or years.”

Scientists will not be able to determine the exact peak of this solar maximum period for many months because it’s only identifiable after they’ve tracked a consistent decline in solar activity after that peak. However, scientists have identified that the last two years on the Sun have been part of this active phase of the solar cycle, due to the consistently high number of sunspots during this period. Scientists anticipate that the maximum phase will last another year or so before the Sun enters the declining phase, which leads back to solar minimum. Since 1989, the Solar Cycle Prediction Panel — an international panel of experts sponsored by NASA and NOAA — has worked together to make their prediction for the next solar cycle.

Solar cycles have been tracked by astronomers since Galileo first observed sunspots in the 1600s. Each solar cycle is different — some cycles peak for larger and shorter amounts of time, and others have smaller peaks that last longer.

“Solar Cycle 25 sunspot activity has slightly exceeded expectations,” said Lisa Upton, co-chair of the Solar Cycle Prediction Panel and lead scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “However, despite seeing a few large storms, they aren’t larger than what we might expect during the maximum phase of the cycle.”

The most powerful flare of the solar cycle so far was an X9.0 on Oct. 3 (X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength).

NOAA anticipates additional solar and geomagnetic storms during the current solar maximum period, leading to opportunities to spot auroras over the next several months, as well as potential technology impacts. Additionally, though less frequent, scientists often see fairly significant storms during the declining phase of the solar cycle.

NASA and NOAA are preparing for the future of space weather research and prediction. In December 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission will make its closest-ever approach to the Sun, beating its own record of closest human-made object to the Sun. This will be the first of three planned approaches for Parker at this distance, helping researchers to understand space weather right at the source.

NASA is launching several missions over the next year that will help us better understand space weather and its impacts across the solar system.

Space weather predictions are critical for supporting the spacecraft and astronauts of NASA’s Artemis campaign. Surveying this space environment is a vital part of understanding and mitigating astronaut exposure to space radiation.

NASA works as a research arm of the nation’s space weather effort. To see how space weather can affect Earth, please visit NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, the U.S. government’s official source for space weather forecasts, watches, warnings, and alerts:

https://www.spaceweather.gov/

“Right now, some people have really good access to protected biking infrastructure: they can bike to work, to the grocery store or to entertainment venues,” says Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering and lead author of a new paper published in the Journal of Transport Geography.

“More lanes could increase the number of destinations they can reach, and previous work shows that will increase the number of cycle trips taken.

“However, many people have little or no access to protected cycling infrastructure at all, limiting their ability to get around. This raises a question: is it better to maximize the number of connected destinations and potential trips overall, or is it more important to focus on maximizing the number of people who can benefit from access to the network?”

Bonsma-Fisher and her team — including her co-supervisors, Professors Shoshanna Saxe and Timothy Chan, and PhD student Bo Lin — use machine learning and optimization to help inform such decisions. It’s a challenge that required new computational approaches.

“This kind of optimization problem is what’s called an NP-hard problem, which means that the computing power needed to solve it scales very quickly along with the size of the network,” says Saxe.

“If you used a traditional optimization algorithm on a city the size of Toronto, everything would just crash. But PhD student Bo Lin invented a really cool machine learning model that can consider millions of combinations of over 1,000 different infrastructure projects to test what are the most impactful places to build new cycling infrastructure.”

Using Toronto as a stand-in for any large, automobile-oriented North American city, the team generated maps of future bike lane networks along major streets, optimized according to two broad types of strategies.

The first, which they called the utilitarian approach, focused on maximizing the number of trips that could be taken using only routes with protected bike lanes in under 30 minutes — without regard for who those trips were taken by.

The second, which they termed equity-based, aimed to maximize the number of people who had at least some connection to the network.

“If you optimize for equity, you get a map that is more spread out and less concentrated in the downtown areas,” says Bonsma-Fisher.

“You do get more parts of the city that have a minimum of accessibility by bike, but you also get a somewhat smaller overall gain in average accessibility.”

“There is a trade-off there,” says Saxe.

“This trade-off is temporary, assuming we will eventually have a full cycling network across the city, but it is meaningful for how we do things in the meantime and could last a long time given ongoing challenges to building cycling infrastructure.”

Another key finding was that there are some routes that appeared to be essential no matter what strategy was pursued.

“For example, the bike lanes along Bloor West show up in all of the scenarios,” says Saxe.

“Those bike lanes benefit even people who don’t live near them and are a critical trunk to maximizing both the equity and utility of the bike network. Their impact is so consistent across models that it challenges the idea that bike lanes are a local issue, affecting only the people close by. Optimized infrastructure repeatedly turns out in our model to serve neighbourhoods quite a distance away.

The team is already sharing their data with Toronto’s city planners to help inform ongoing decisions about infrastructure investments. Going forward, the team hopes to apply their analysis to other cities as well.

“No matter what your local issues, or what choices you end up making, it’s really important to have a clear understanding of what goals you are aiming for and check if you are meeting them,” says Bonsma-Fisher.

“This kind of analysis can provide an evidence-based, data-driven approach to answering these tough questions.”

If you think all frogs croak, you’d be wrong. Seven newly discovered species from the tree frog genus Boophis, found across the rainforests of Madagascar, emit special bird-like whistling sounds in their communication with other frogs.

These whistling sounds reminded the research team, led by Professor Miguel Vences of the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, of Star Trek, where similar whistle-like sound effects are frequently used.

“That’s why we named the frogs after Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer, Burnham, and Pike — seven of the most iconic captains from the sci-fi series,” says Professor Vences.

“Not only do these frogs sound like sound-effects from Star Trek, but it seems also fitting that to find them, you often have to do quite a bit of trekking! A few species are found in places accessible to tourists, but to find several of these species, we had to undertake major expeditions to remote forest fragments and mountain peaks. There’s a real sense of scientific discovery and exploration here, which we think is in the spirit of Star Trek,” explains Assistant Professor Mark D. Scherz from the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen, who was senior author on the study.

To Drown Out the Sound of Water

The otherworldly calls of these frogs are known as “advertisement calls” — a type of self-promotion that, according to the researchers, may convey information about the male frog’s suitability as a mate to females. This particular group live along fast-flowing streams in the most mountainous regions of Madagascar — a loud background that may explain why the frogs call at such high pitches.

For fans of Star Trek, some of the frog calls might remind them of sounds from the so-called ‘boatswain whistle’ and a device called the ‘tricorder.’ To others, they might sound like a bird or an insect.

“If the frogs just croaked like our familiar European frogs, they might not be audible over the sound of rushing water from the rivers they live near. Their high-pitched trills and whistles stand out against all that noise,” explains Dr Jörn Köhler, Senior Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Germany, who played a key role in analyzing the calls of the frogs.

“The appearance of the frogs has led to them being confused with similar species until now, but each species makes a distinctive series of these high-pitched whistles, that has allowed us to tell them apart from each other, and from other frogs,” he says.

The calls also lined up with the genetic analysis the team performed.

Vulnerable to Climate Change

Madagascar is renowned for its immense biodiversity, and research in its rainforests continues to uncover hidden species, making it a true paradise for frogs. Madagascar, an island roughly the size of France, is home to about 9% of all the world’s frog species.

“We’ve only scratched the surface of what Madagascar’s rainforests have to offer. Every time we go into the forest, we find new species, and just in terms of frogs, there are still several hundred species we haven’t yet described,” says Professor Andolalao Rakotoarison of the Université d’Itasy in Madagascar. Just in the last ten years, she and the rest of this team have described around 100 new species from the island.

The researchers behind the discovery hope that this new knowledge will strengthen conservation efforts in Madagascar’s rainforests. The species often live in close geographic proximity but at different altitudes and in different microhabitats. This division makes them particularly vulnerable to changes in climate or the environment.

Thus, the research team urges greater awareness around the conservation of Madagascar’s biodiversity to ensure that these unique species and their habitats are preserved for the future. But they also hope to continue exploring, to seek out new species in forests where no scientist has gone before.

The research is important because small mammals such as the western spotted skunk face major threats from human-induced land use change, said Marie Tosa, who as an Oregon State University graduate student spent 2½ years studying the skunks. Her findings provide data to shape future skunk monitoring efforts and identify threats they face.

The western spotted skunk, which typically weighs 1 to 2 pounds and is about the size of a squirrel, is smaller than the striped skunk that is common in urban environments.

“The easiest way to describe them is a tube sock,” said Tosa, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State. “They’re a black and white tube sock. They are mostly black but they have white spots all over them. They have this giant white spot on their forehead. And they’re really, really adorable.”

The western spotted skunk prefers more undisturbed habitat, such as mountainous areas, and is nocturnal, so it is rarely seen. Yet it lives in areas from New Mexico to British Columbia and California to Colorado

“For such an abundant carnivore in these forests, we don’t really know anything about them,” said Taal Levi, an associate professor at Oregon State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and advisor to Tosa. “This project was trying to figure out more about them: trying to learn about their natural history; what they do in these forests; what do they need; how do they influence the ecosystem that they are in.”

Tosa, Levi and Damon Lesmeister of the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis studied the western spotted skunk in part because of what happened to the eastern spotted skunk, which lives in the central and southeastern United States.

The population of that species declined about 90% between 1940 and 1950 and by 99% by 1980. It is now listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and was considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act.

“Habitat loss is believed to be a factor in the population decline, but the reasons are not well understood because the species was not well studied prior to or during the decline,” said Lesmeister, who conducted research on the eastern spotted skunk in the 2000s.

Tosa conducted her research from 2017 to 2019 in the H.G. Andrews Experimental Forest, a nearly 16,000-acre research forest about an hour east of Eugene. The landscape is steep, with hills and deep valleys and elevation ranges from 1,350 to 5,340 feet.

That landscape made finding and tracking skunks difficult. Tosa started by setting trail cameras with sardines and cat food as bait to lure the skunks. Camera images gave her a general sense of where the skunks were and informed where she placed box traps, which she also baited and camouflaged with burlap, moss and bark.

She then spent hundreds of days driving thousands of miles to check more than 100 cameras and 50 to 100 traps.

When she found a skunk in a trap, she would carefully open it up, secure the animal, tranquilize it to temporarily sedate it and place a radio collar on it. This inevitably led to being sprayed. She estimates she was sprayed 50 to 100 times.

She said the spray smells like really strong raw garlic. Her method to remove the smell? A paste of hydrogen peroxide, Dawn dish soap and baking soda.

Once collared, she could use radio telemetry day and night to locate and track the skunks’ movement.

With that data, she determined that the skunks have a home range up to 12 square miles. That far exceeds similar size mammals and even deer, which have a home range of less than one-half of a square mile. She thinks the skunks are covering so much ground because of limited food resources.

Other findings included:

• The skunks appear to like old growth forests and younger forests. The younger forests are likely appealing because they contain more food, such as berries and small mammals.
• Skunks are vulnerable to winter weather, particularly cold temperatures and accumulated snow. This was particularly evident during a heavy snow event in February 2019.
• Skunks were distributed across 63% of the study area with highly overlapping home ranges, indicating a lack of territoriality.

Tosa’s field research concluded before three wildfires burned in the forest during the past four years. She speculated that the skunks are likely well adapted to fire and is interested in conducting a post-fire study of the skunks.

The research findings were recently published in Ecosphere.

The three groups of bonobos have been living separately in different regions in Central Africa for tens of thousands of years, according to the study published in Current Biology by an international research team co-led by UCL, University of Vienna, and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology scientists.

Using genetic tests, the researchers confirmed previous evidence suggesting that there are three distinct groups of bonobos, originating in central, western, and far-western regions of the bonobo range. By quantifying the differences between these groups, the research team found that they can be as different from one another as the most closely-related chimpanzee subspecies.

Bonobos, commonly seen as the peace-loving primate, are, together with chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans as our genomes differ from theirs in only 1% of genetic bases.

The bonobo is endangered, with about 20,000 individuals alive in the wild, and are the most understudied great ape as they live exclusively in the Congo Basin of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where social unrest has constrained research activities.

Joint first author Dr Sojung Han (University of Vienna, Austria, and Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, Spain) said: “Bonobos are a fascinating species, very closely related to humans, with unique patterns of social behaviour. They live in tight social groups which, despite some conflicts, are markedly peaceful and egalitarian. Interestingly, males stay in their birth social group while females migrate across groups, but females still form close alliances and can have higher dominance than males.”

The research team analysed the genomic data of 30 bonobos born in the wild but now living in captivity. They sequenced the exomes (the protein-coding part of the genome) of 20 individuals living in an African sanctuary and analysed the full genomes of 10 other bonobos. While they could not always be certain what region of the Congo basin each bonobo had originated in, the researchers cross-referenced their dataset with previously published mitochondrial DNA data collected from 136 wild bonobos to paint a fuller picture of genetic diversity across the animal’s range.

The researchers estimated that the central group diverged from the other two groups 145,000 years ago, with the two western groups diverging 60,000 years ago, with little mixing between the groups ever since.

Lead author Professor Aida Andrés (UCL Genetics Institute) said: “Bonobos may be even more vulnerable than previously thought, as their population actually consists of at least three smaller populations, some of which may historically have been amongst the smallest across similar primates.

“In order to survive, every species needs sufficient genetic diversity to adapt to a changing environment, and for bonobos, losing one of these three groups would be a devastating loss to the total genetic diversity of the species. It is vital that all three groups of bonobos are conserved in order to protect this fascinating and charismatic species.”

The researchers say the differences between the bonobo groups should be further studied and considered in conservation efforts when planning efforts such as habitat preservation, translocations or potential reintroductions in case individuals are adapted to specific environments.

Dr Sojung Han said: “Unlike modern humans, who are spread all over the world, bonobos are limited to the Congo basin, but our work shows that there are indeed genetic differences between groups. This is exciting, and it will be very interesting to study, in the future, if there are any differential adaptations among these groups.”

Joint first author Dr Cesare de Filippo (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany) said: “This work demonstrates how studying the genomes of endangered species can help better understand their populations and eventually aid conservation efforts. Even the genomes of captive individuals can help us, sometimes, understand their wild populations. Our findings show he vulnerability of bonobos as an endangered species, and stress the need to protect their environment to ensure their conservation.”

The research was supported by Wellcome and the Max Planck Society, and involved researchers based in the UK, Austria, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and Israel.