31 Dead, Several Injured at Brussels Airport Explosion.

At least two explosions rocked the check-in zone of Brussels Airport Tuesday, killing and wounding "several" people, an official said.

The blasts shook the departures hall shortly after 8 a.m. local time (3 a.m. ET).

Pictures from the scene showed bloodied victims, shattered glass and debris as well smoke pouring from the terminal and passengers fleeing the airport area with their bags.

"There was an explosion … there are several dead and wounded but we can't say how many at this point," a federal police spokesman said.

A security source told NBC News the explosion happened near check-in desk four in Departure Hall 1, which is used by international carriers including American Airlines.

Eyewitness Jef Versele was at the airport heading on a business trip to Rome when he heard an explosion.

"Soon after that one a second one hit — and everything came down," he told NBC News. "There was dust everywhere, glass everywhere there was chaos. There were people on the floor everywhere. The roofing came down. It was quite a mess."

Versele added: "A lot of people were in panic. I saw a lot of blood, a lot of people were injured. People were crying, on the floor, covered by parts of the roofing. I saw a lot of leg injuries, a lot of people couldn't move anymore. There were quite a lot of people injured. In the departure hall — you saw people storming out, it was like run for your life."

A baggage worker, who gave his name as Dirk, told RTL: "Everything is stopped. It is without doubt an attack."

Roads and public transportation leading to the airport were shut and incoming flights were diverted.

The incident comes amid a flurry of counterterrorism activity in the Belgian capital.

A raid in Brussels on Friday captured Europe's most wanted man — Salah Abdeslam, suspected Paris terror attacks plotter and aborted suicide attacker.

Abdeslam was taken into custody along with several others. His capture has been seen as a potential goldmine of information for intelligence services — if he cooperates.

The 26-year-old and several of the attackers who laid siege to Paris on Nov. 13 had ties to Belgium.

On Monday, officials named another potential suspect and asked for public assistance in locating him.

Belgium's foreign minister said following Abdeslam's arrest that the suspect had been planning to "restart something" in Brussels — the suggestion of a new attack that was taken all the more seriously given the large amounts of heavy weapons found during his arrest.

Surfers Invent Floating Trash Bin to Clean Up World's Oceans

Two Australian surfers are trying to tackle the planet's water pollution problem head-on, by developing a device that functions as an automated floating trash bin for the world's oceans.

The device, called the Seabin, can be placed in the water, attached to a floating dock in a marina, and is connected to an onshore water pump. The pump generates a flow of water into the container that collects trash and other debris, according to the inventors.

Plastics and other forms of water pollution have become a big problem, according to the Natural Resource Defense Council. Plastics, in particular, make up a significant portion of the stuff floating around in the world's oceans; scientists estimate that 4.4 million to 13.2 million (4 million to 12 million metric tons) tons of plastic washed ashore in 2010,Science magazine reported. That is the same weight as more than 435 copies of the Eiffel Tower all stacked together. [In Photos: World's Most Polluted Places]

Wearable Sensors Could Translate Sign Language Into English

These wearable sensors can sense movement and muscle activity. The information is then sent to a program that can translate sign language gestures into English. Credit: Texas A&M View full size image

Wearable sensors could one day interpret the gestures in sign language and translate them into English, providing a high-tech solution to communication problems between deaf people and those who don’t understand sign language.
Engineers at Texas A&M University are developing awearable device that can sense movement and muscle activity in a person's arms.
The device works by figuring out the gestures a person is making by using two distinct sensors: one that responds to the motion of the wrist and the other to the muscular movements in the arm. A program then wirelessly receives this information and converts the data into the English translation. [Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World]
After some initial research, the engineers found that there were devices that attempted to translate sign language into text, but they were not as intricate in their designs.
"Most of the technology ... was based on vision- or camera-based solutions," said study lead researcher Roozbeh Jafari, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Texas A&M.
These existing designs, Jafari said, are not sufficient, because often when someone is talking with sign language, they are using hand gestures combined with specific finger movements.
"I thought maybe we should look into combining motion sensors and muscle activation," Jafari told Live Science. "And the idea here was to build a wearable device."
The researchers built a prototype system that can recognize words that people use most commonly in their daily conversations. Jafari said that once the team starts expanding the program, the engineers will include more words that are less frequently used, in order to build up a more substantial vocabulary.
One drawback of the prototype is that the system has to be "trained" to respond to each individual that wears the device, Jafari said. This training process involves asking the user to essentially repeat or do each hand gesture a couple of times, which can take up to 30 minutes to complete.
"If I'm wearing it and you're wearing it — our bodies are different … ourmuscle structures are different," Jafari said.
But, Jafari thinks the issue is largely the result of time constraints the team faced in building the prototype. It took two graduate students just two weeks to build the device, so Jafari said he is confident that the device will become more advanced during the next steps of development.
The researchers plan to reduce the training time of the device, or even eliminate it altogether, so that the wearable device responds automatically to the user. Jafari also wants to improve the effectiveness of the system's sensors so that the device will be more useful in real-life conversations. Currently, when a person gestures in sign language, the device can only read words one at a time.
This, however, is not how people speak. "When we're speaking, we put all the words in one sentence," Jafari said. "The transition from one word to another word is seamless and it's actually immediate."
"We need to build signal-processing techniques that would help us to identify and understand a complete sentence," he added.
Jafari's ultimate vision is to use new technology, such as the wearable sensor, to develop innovative user interfaces between humans and computers.
For instance, people are already comfortable with using keyboards to issue commands to electronic devices, but Jafari thinks typing on devices like smartwatches is not practical because they tend to have  small screens.
"We need to have a new user interface (UI) and a UI modality that helps us to communicate with these devices," he said. "Devices like [the wearable sensor] might help us to get there. It might essentially be the right step in the right direction."
Jafari presented this research at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 12th Annual Body Sensor Networks Conference in June.

source> livescience.com