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Want to send your faraway lover a kiss? A Chinese contraption with warm, moving silicon “lips” appears to have just the answer.

The device, advertised as a way to let long-distance couples share “real” physical intimacy, is causing a buzz among Chinese social media users, who have reacted with both intrigue and shock.

Equipped with pressure sensors and actuators, the device is said to be able to mimic a real kiss by replicating the pressure, movement and temperature of a user’s lips.

Summary: A newly developed sensor tracks a person’s vocal use and alerts them to overuse before vocal fatigue and potential injury occur.

Source: Northwestern University.

Northwestern University researchers have developed the first smart wearable device to continuously track how much people use their voices, alerting them to overuse before vocal fatigue and potential injury set in.

Optical pulses, which appear as a flash of light, are used to transmit information in high speed optical fibers, and are increasingly used in Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) for 3-dimensional imaging. Both of these applications demand light sensors or photodiodes that are capable of detecting very low levels of light intensity down to a few photons, where a single photon is the quantized energy unit of light.

A newly published paper, “Extremely low excess noise avalanche photodiode with GaAsSb absorption region and AlGaAsSb avalanche region,” in Applied Physics Letters, details a discovery by a Sheffield research team that has the capability to transform a single electron at its input to a cascade of electrons at its output.

This multiplication process is commonly known as avalanche breakdown, while a photodiode incorporating this process is called avalanche photodiode (APD). Though the application of reverse voltage, avalanche photodiodes (often referred to as APDs) have internal gain, which means that when compared to PIN-photodiodes they typically have a higher signal-to–.