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When Dr. Logan Schneider was in medical school, he didn’t get much sleep. “Residency training is a horribly draining experience where you get something like…four hours of sleep a night,” he says. It was during this time he realized how little we really know about sleep.

“I started prioritizing my own sleep, and also my wife’s and my kids’ — they’re sleeping champs!” he says. (In fact, his friends with newborns often turn to him when their babies won’t sleep through the night.) Originally focusing on neurology in medical school, Logan soon became so fascinated by what he was learning about sleep that he decided to study it specifically.

Dr. Schneider is part of the Google Health team that coupled sensor research with sleep science to power contactless sleep sensing in the new Nest Hub, available beginning today. Sleep Sensing, powered by Soli technology, uses a tiny, low-energy radar system to sense motion at the micrometer level. Small motions ranging from breathing to movements are detected, while identifying features like faces aren’t, to give people information about their sleep duration, routines and quality. From this data, the Nest Hub can offer personalized suggestions like waking up at a consistent time, or exercising earlier in the day.

“When we started thinking about the second-generation Nest Hub, we noticed that nearly a quarter of people currently using Nest Hubs put their devices in their bedrooms,” says product manager Ashton Udall. “So we started to look into how we could bring more value to that part of the home.” When the Nest team surveyed users about what else they could do to make the device better for bedrooms, the top request, hands down, was for assistance with their sleep. Combined with trends showing people are getting less sleep and worse sleep, there was an obvious opportunity to help.

“It’s so exciting to be in this field right now because there are so many things we’re discovering about sleep,” says Dr. Raman Malhotra from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, who advised the Nest team throughout the development process. What the medical field is learning about sleep isn’t the only exciting thing, though. Dr. Malhotra also says it’s the fact that technology companies are increasingly interested in democratizing sleep research and helping more and more people understand their sleep. 

For both doctors and patients, sleep is a “black box,” as both Dr. Malhotra and Dr. Schneider explain it; if you go to a doctor and say you’re not sleeping well, it’s not as if you can give much more information than that. You know how you feel the next day, but not necessarily why. “Traditionally, we’d bring someone into a sleep lab to measure their sleep with something called a polysomnogram which is the gold standard for certain sleep disorders — but the polysomnogram has limitations, too,” says Dr. Malhotra. “Most patients don’t want to leave their house for a night and go to an unfamiliar environment. Then, of course, we’re changing what their sleep looks like — who’s going to sleep normally with wires attached to them?” And even after all that, he says, it’s difficult to learn much from just one night.

“That’s what’s so exciting about new sleep technologies,” Dr. Malhotra explains. “We can learn about how someone’s sleeping in their normal environment over a whole bunch of nights, not just one.” Plus, he says, something like the Nest Hub is accessible to far more people than a polysomnogram.

Baking is something that I like to do to relax; spending leisurely evenings creating something beautiful with as much care and precision as possible. Baking with AI—blending my day job as a machine learning engineer with one of my favorite hobbies—makes this experience even better. Plus, the serendipitous nature of building the model, arriving at a new and unique recipe and then testing it in the kitchen, is incredibly fun.

So, when legendary confectioner Mars Wrigley approached us for a Maltesers + AI kitchen collaboration, I jumped at the chance. Maltesers are a popular British candy made by Mars. They have an airy malted milk center with a delicious chocolate coating.

Like so many others, I jumped on the baking bandwagon during the pandemic and baked up a storm throughout 2020. According to Google Search Trends, in 2021 people searched for “baking” 44% more when compared to the same time last year. You might even say the trend continues to rise.

But what were people actually searching for in the UK and could it inspire a new recipe for Mars Wrigley? I discovered that one of the top searched questions recently regarding “sweet and salty” was “Is Marmite sweet or savory?” Knowing how popular Marmite is in the UK, I decided it must be included in my newest creation. My goal was to use machine learning to create the base recipe for this dessert, and then find tasty ways to incorporate both Maltesers and Marmite.

I created a new machine learning model and fed it hundreds of existing recipes for cakes, cookies, scones and traybakes. After the model learned the combinations of ingredients that make up these baked goods, I had it generate recipes for each of them. Unlike most ML models, this one required testing in the kitchen to make sure the ingredient combinations generated by the model produced baked goods you’d actually want to eat. Picture me and my laptop in a cloud of flour, tasting batter and frosting, and eating way too many Maltesers along the way.

And voila!

I’m skipping a lot of the ML magic! For a technical deep dive on how the AI works, see this blog post. For baking enthusiasts, these pictures share a little more of the process. Midway through baking the cake, I added three surprise Maltesers in the middle, and a cookie layer on top (which becomes the bottom when you flip these out). Yum!

Where’s the Marmite, I hear you say!? I whipped up a Marmite-infused buttercream topping. It’s delicious! Don’t believe me? See the recipe below, give it a whirl and let me know what you think. Share photos on Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #BakeAgainstTheMachine, and head over to BakeAgainsttheMachine.co.uk to learn more about this project from Mars and find more special Maltesers recipes. I can’t wait to see your creations!

You’d hardly know it from the way Google Search works, but nearly 20 years after introducing our first spell-check system, spelling remains an ongoing challenge of language understanding. Before we can even begin to start looking for relevant results for a search query, we have to know what a user is looking for, spelled correctly. But every day, one out of 10 search queries is misspelled, and new words are constantly being introduced, along with new ways to misspell them. If you’ve ever been guilty of misspelling a search only to get what you were looking for anyway, read on to learn more about the ABCs of spelling in Google Search. 

A is for All about common spelling mistakes

Our spelling mistakes tend to fall into two main categories: conceptual and slip-of-finger mistakes. We make conceptual mistakes when we’re unsure of how to spell something and try to take our best guess. Say you want to look up the meaning of “gobbledygook” and you don’t know exactly how to spell it, which wouldn’t be unusual since it’s both a difficult to spell word and has two commonly accepted spellings, including “gobbledegook.” In this case, we’ll see many best-effort spellings of the word like “garbledygook,” “gobblydegook,” “gobbleygook,” “gobbly gook,” and more.

Blogs are a powerful tool to reach a wide, global audience, but for those just starting out, it can be intimidating to get those first few readers and subscribers. We recently asked successful musicians, foodies, fitness instructors and fashionistas how they grow their blog followings. Here’s what they had to say.

Post regularly and be authentic.

The most common response we received from almost everyone we talked to was to post regularly. But about what? One strategy, according to queer, non-binary musician and lifestyle writer Rigel Gemini, is to answer common questions. “One of my top articles,” Rigel says, “answers the common question, ‘why are queer people creative?’ I wrote it without even realizing it was so heavily searched, but realized that as something that I have often wondered and thought about, so many other people have, too.“