Testing the effects of transcranial random noise stimulation the prefrontal cortex. The orange plates are near-infrared spectroscopy devices, using infrared light to measure blood-flow changes. (Credit: Albert Snowball et al./Current Biology)

A harmless form of brain stimulation called transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS) can help you learn math faster, researchers report.

“With just five days of cognitive training and noninvasive, painless brain stimulation, we were able to bring about long-lasting improvements in cognitive and brain functions,” says Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford.

The enhancements to the speed of calculation- and memory-recall-based arithmetic learning held for a period of six months after training. No one knows exactly how TRNS works, but the researchers say the evidence suggests that it allows the brain to work more efficiently by making neurons fire more synchronously.

They applied the stimulation to the prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a key area in arithmetic, and used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) — using infrared light through the skull — to measure hemodynamic (blood flow) responses within the prefrontal cortex.

They tested two types of learning: drill learning 9ability to recall arithmetic
‘‘facts,’’ e.g., 4 x 8 = 32,  from memory (rote learning) and calculation (manipulation of numbers according to set procedures or algorithms involving one or several mathematical operations (e.g., 32 — 17 + 5 = 20),

Kadosh and his colleagues had shown previously that another form of brain stimulation called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could make people better at learning and processing new numbers. But, he says, TRNS is even less perceptible to those receiving it (people get a slight tingling on the scalp with tDCS).

TRNS also has the potential to help more people because it can improve mental arithmetic — the ability to add, subtract, or multiply a string of numbers in your head, for example — not just new number learning. Mental arithmetic is a more complex and challenging task, which more than 20 percent of people struggle with.

It might also be of particular help to those suffering with neurodegenerative illness, stroke, or learning difficulties, the researchers suggest.

In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces . . . Dante’s Inferno.

Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust . . . before the world is irrevocably altered.

Kindle version also available at this link

Insulating states and superlattice minibands in a graphene/hBN heterostructure. Schematic of the moiré pattern for graphene (gray) on hBN (red and blue), for zero misalignment angle and an exaggerated lattice mismatch of ~10%. The moiré unit cell is outlined in green. Regions of local quasi-epitaxial alignment lead to opposite signs of the sublattice asymmetry, m(r), in different regions. (Credit: B. Hunt et al./Science)

It’s been a long-sought goal that has proved elusive: how to engineer a property called a band gap into graphene, needed to use graphene in making transistors and other electronic devices.

Now MIT researchers have taken a major step toward making graphene with a band gap.

The new technique involves placing a sheet of graphene — a carbon-based material whose structure is just one atom thick — on top of hexagonal boron nitride, another one-atom-thick material with similar properties. The resulting material adds the band gap while shares graphene’s amazing ability to conduct electrons.

Graphene is an extremely good conductor of electrons, while boron nitride is a good insulator, blocking the passage of electrons. “We made a high-quality semiconductor by putting them together,” Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT, explains.

To make the hybrid material work, the researchers had to align, with near perfection, the atomic lattices of the two materials, which both consist of a series of hexagons.

The size of the hexagons (known as the lattice constant) in the two materials is almost the same, but not quite: Those in boron nitride are 1.8 percent larger. So while it is possible to line the hexagons up almost perfectly in one place, over a larger area the pattern goes in and out of register.

At this point, the researchers say they must rely on chance to get the angular alignment for the desired electronic properties in the resulting stack. However, the alignment turns out to be correct about one time out of 15, they say.

Tuning for different electronic properties

Graphene and boron nitride hexagons almost perfectly align, merging their properties (credit: B. Hunt et al./Science)

“The qualities of the boron nitride bleed over into the graphene,” Ashoori says. But what’s most “spectacular,” he adds, is that the properties of the resulting semiconductor can be “tuned” by just slightly rotating one sheet relative to the other, allowing for a spectrum of materials with varied electronic characteristics.

Others have made graphene into a semiconductor by etching the sheets into narrow ribbons, Ashoori says, but such an approach substantially degrades graphene’s electrical properties. By contrast, the new method appears to produce no such degradation.

The band gap created so far in the material is smaller than that needed for practical electronic devices; finding ways of increasing it will require further work, the researchers say.

“If … a large band gap could be engineered, it could have applications in all of digital electronics,” Jarillo-Herrero says. But even at its present level, he adds, this approach could be applied to some optoelectronic applications, such as photodetectors.

The results “surprised us pleasantly,” Ashoori says, and will require some explanation by theorists. Because of the difference in lattice constants of the two materials, the researchers had predicted that the hybrid’s properties would vary from place to place. Instead, they found a constant, and unexpectedly large, band gap across the whole surface.

In addition, Jarillo-Herrero says, the magnitude of the change in electrical properties produced by putting the two materials together “is much larger than theory predicts.”

Fractal properties

The MIT team also observed an interesting new physical phenomenon. When exposed to a magnetic field, the material exhibits fractal properties — known as a Hofstadter butterfly energy spectrum — that were described decades ago by theorists, but thought impossible in the real world. There is intense research in this area; two other research groups also report on these Hofstadter butterfly effects this week in the journal Nature.

Eva Andrei, a professor of physics at Rutgers University who was not involved in this work, says that until recently, “decades-old theoretical predictions of novel and surprising physical phenomena, expected to occur in 2-D electron systems [such as graphene], have lain dormant.” But the MIT team’s work clearly demonstrates some of these phenomena, she says.

“Perhaps most significant is their observation of a band gap in zero magnetic field,” she says. “The ability to induce a zero-field band gap in graphene may one day allow its use as a switch in transistor applications, providing a viable and inexpensive alternative to silicon electronics.”

The research included other researchers from the University of Arizona, the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and Tohoku University in Japan. The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Arrays of tree-like nanowires consisting of Si trunks and TiO2 branches facilitate solar water-splitting in a fully integrated artificial photosynthesis system (credit: Chong Liu et al./Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have developed the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis,  in which solar energy is directly converted into chemical fuels.

“Similar to the chloroplasts in green plants that carry out photosynthesis, our artificial photosynthetic system is composed of two semiconductor light absorbers, an interfacial layer for charge transport, and spatially separated co-catalysts,” says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, who led this research.

“To facilitate solar water- splitting in our system, we synthesized tree-like nanowire  heterostructures, consisting of silicon trunks and titanium oxide branches. Visually, arrays of these nanostructures very much resemble an artificial forest.

“In natural photosynthesis, the energy of absorbed sunlight produces energized charge-carriers that execute chemical reactions in separate regions of the chloroplast,” Yang says. “We’ve integrated our nanowire nanoscale heterostructure into a functional system that mimics the integration in chloroplasts and provides a conceptual blueprint for better solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies in the future.”

When sunlight is absorbed by pigment molecules in a chloroplast, an energized electron is generated that moves from molecule to molecule through a transport chain until ultimately it drives the conversion of carbon dioxide into carbohydrate sugars. This electron transport chain is called a “Z-scheme” because the pattern of movement resembles the letter Z on its side.

Yang and his colleagues also use a Z-scheme in their system, but they deploy two Earth-abundant and stable semiconductors — silicon and titanium oxide — loaded with co-catalysts and with an ohmic (low-resistance) contact inserted between them. Silicon was used for the hydrogen-generating photocathode and titanium oxide for the oxygen-generating photoanode.

The tree-like architecture was used to maximize the system’s performance. Like trees in a real forest, the dense arrays of artificial nanowire trees suppress sunlight reflection and provide more surface area for fuel-producing reactions.

Under simulated sunlight, this integrated nanowire-based artificial photosynthesis system achieved a 0.12-percent solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency. Although comparable to some natural photosynthetic conversion efficiencies, this rate will have to be substantially improved for commercial use.

This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

(Credit: Ulrich Lewark/KIT)

Researchers of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics and the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology have achieved wireless transmission of 40 Gbit/s over a distance of one kilometer, a new world record.

The technology may help provide future broadband access to the Internet in rural areas and places which are difficult to access.

Using a high frequency range between 200 and 280 GHz enables the fast transmission of large volumes of data and compact equipment. The design also allows for compatibility with fiber optic cables.

(Credit: Credit Suisse)

“The next big thing” is the rise of sophisticated wearable technology, such as smart watches, and other accessories, according to Credit Suisse semiconductor analysts, Fortune reports.

The wearables market is perhaps $3 billion to $5 billion today, rising to perhaps $30 billion to $50 billion over the next three to five years, the analysts forecast, adding that there may be upward of 15% of smartphone owners who end up buying a wearable, the authors opine, for perhaps 6% share of the total global electronics market.

The theory is that smartphones are going to be the hub connecting a proliferation of small, wireless devices that will become increasingly popular as software improves, component prices fall and new business uses emerge, says Fortune.

(Credit: Credit Suisse)

Headquarters of National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland (credit: NSA)

A book Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (PDF) produced by the The National Security Agency to uncover intelligence hiding on the web has just been released by the NSA, following a FOIA request, Wired reports.

It offers advice for using search engines, the Internet Archive, and other online tools. But the most interesting is the chapter titled “Google Hacking.” For example: to find spreadsheets full of passwords in Russia? Type “filetype:xls site:ru login.” Even on websites written in non-English languages the terms “login,” “userid,” and “password” are generally written in English, the authors helpfully point out.

Misconfigured web servers “that list the contents of directories not intended to be on the web often offer a rich load of information to Google hackers,” the authors write, then offer a command to exploit these vulnerabilities — intitle: “index of” site:kr password.

Johnny Long has been talking about this for years at hacker conferences and in his book Google Hacking, Wired notes.

Sergey Brin is half of the team that founded Google. Now he’s leading the development of special projects like Google Glass.

— TED Talks

The keyboards stabbing at Beta Love opener “Dance With Me” set the tone for the album’s overall harder, faster tempos, which peaks during the machine-gun drums on “Binary Mind,” one of the songs that speaks most directly to Ra Ra Riot’s concern with Kurzweil’s transhumanism: “Why, tell me why/ I want to read you with this binary mind/ ‘Cause if I do/ I’m sure that we’ll be complete.” [...]

• Gather anonymous real time audience analytics such as gender, age and attention time using a basic webcam.
• Use Cara to create intelligent things and interactive spaces — trigger events based on the audience. Connect the online and offline worlds.

— IMRSV

Neocortical column in Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project (Credit: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

Henry Markram’s Human Brain Project (HBP), backed by 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) funding Jan. 2013 from the European Commission, plans to integrate findings from the Allen Brain Atlas, the National Institutes of Health-funded Human Connectome Project, and the Brain (“Brain Activity Map”) project, Wired reports.

The HBP is an ambitious attempt to build a complete model of a human brain using predictive reverse-engineering and simulate it on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Markram plans to give the EU an early working prototype of this system within just 18 months.

According to Brown University neuroscientist John Donoghue, one of the key figures in the Brain project, the HBP provides a means to test ideas that would emerge from Brain Activity Map data, and Brain Activity Map data would inform the models simulated in the Human Brain Project.

Markram is simultaneously doing four things: running a wet lab that amasses data through experiments on brain tissue, building a small-scale model and simulation of the rat neocortex (his initial Blue Brain project), running the Human Brain Project, and managing the simulation aspects of the HBP, building a virtual human brain from all the incoming data.

Markram thinks that the greatest potential achievement of his sim would be to determine the causes of the approximately 600 known brain disorders. He’ll achieve this by connecting his model brain to sensor-laden robotics and simultaneously recording what the robot is sensing and “thinking” as it explores physical environments, correlating audiovisual signals with simulated brain activity as the machine learns about the world.

A neuroscientist could then play back those perceptions as distorted by a damaged brain simulation. In an immersive 3-D environment, a researcher could see the world as a schizophrenic while watching what is going on in the schizophrenic’s mind.

Markram has hinted at the possibility that a sim embodied in a robot might become conscious. Hardwired with Markram’s model and given sufficient experience of the world, the machine could actually start thinking (à la Skynet and HAL 9000).

Blue Brain Project: speed vs. memory (credit: Henry Markram)

This flexible skin-like heart monitor is small enough to wear under a bandage (credit: L.A. Cicero/Stanford University)

Engineers combine layers of flexible materials into pressure sensors to create a wearable heart monitor thinner than a dollar bill. The skin-like device could one day provide doctors with a safer way to check the condition of a patient’s heart.

Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, has developed a heart monitor thinner than a dollar bill and no wider than a postage stamp.

The flexible skin-like monitor, worn under an adhesive bandage on the wrist, is sensitive enough to help doctors detect stiff arteries and cardiovascular problems.

The devices could one day be used to continuously track heart health and provide doctors a safer method of measuring a key vital sign for newborn and other high-risk surgery patients.

“The pulse is related to the condition of the artery and the condition of the heart,” said Bao, whose lab develops artificial skin-like materials. “The better the sensor, the better doctors can catch problems before they develop.”

Detecting pulse and blood pressure

The pulse is made up of two distinct peaks. The first, larger peak is from your heart pumping out blood. Shortly after a heartbeat, your lower body sends a reflecting wave back to your artery system, creating a smaller second peak. The relative sizes of these two peaks can be used by medical experts to measure your heart’s health.

“You can use the ratio of the two peaks to determine the stiffness of the artery, for example,” said Gregor Schwartz, a post-doctoral fellow and a physicist for the project. “If there is a change in the heart’s condition, the wave pattern will change.”

To make the heart monitor both sensitive and small, Bao’s team uses a thin middle layer of rubber covered with tiny pyramid bumps. Each mold-made pyramid is only a few microns across – smaller than a human red blood cell. When pressure is put on the device, the pyramids deform slightly, changing the size of the gap between the two halves of the device. This change in separation causes a measurable change in the electromagnetic field and the current flow in the device.

The more pressure placed on the monitor, the more the pyramids deform and the larger the change in the electromagnetic field. Using many of these sensors on a prosthetic limb could act like an electronic skin, creating an artificial sense of touch.

When the sensor is placed on someone’s wrist using an adhesive bandage, the sensor can measure that person’s pulse wave as it reverberates through the body.

The device is so sensitive that it can detect more than just the two peaks of a pulse wave. When engineers looked at the wave drawn by their device, they noticed small bumps in the tail of the pulse wave invisible to conventional sensors. Bao said she believes these fluctuations could potentially be used for more detailed diagnostics in the future.

 “In theory, this kind of sensor can be used to measure blood pressure,” said Schwartz. “Once you have it calibrated, you can use the signal of your pulse to calculate your blood pressure.”

Noninvasive continuous monitoring

This non-invasive method of monitoring heart health could replace devices inserted directly into an artery, called intravascular catheters. These catheters create a high risk of infection, making them impractical for newborns and high-risk patients.  So an external monitor like Bao’s could provide doctors a safer way to gather information about the heart, especially during infant surgeries.

Bao’s team is working with other Stanford researchers to make the device completely wireless. Using wireless communication, doctors could receive a patient’s minute-by-minute heart status via cell phone.

“For some patients with a potential heart disease, wearing a bandage would allow them to constantly measure their heart’s condition,” Bao said. “This could be done without interfering with their daily life at all, since it really just requires wearing a small bandage.”

Brain wiring (credit: eyewire.org)

When the hippocampus, the brain’s primary learning and memory center, is damaged, complex new neural circuits — often far from the damaged site — arise to compensate for the lost function, say life scientists from UCLA and Australia who have pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in creating those alternate pathways.

The researchers found that parts of the prefrontal cortex take over when the hippocampus is disabled. Their breakthrough discovery, the first demonstration of such neural-circuit plasticity, could potentially help scientists develop new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and other conditions involving damage to the brain.

Learning after brain damage — a surprising finding

(Credit: The University of Melbourne)

In the research,  UCLA‘s Michael Fanselow and Moriel Zelikowsky in collaboration with Bryce Vissel, a group leader of the neuroscience research program at Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, conducted laboratory experiments with rats showing that the rodents were able to learn new tasks even after damage to the hippocampus.

While the rats needed additional training, they nonetheless learned from their experiences — a surprising finding.

“I expect that the brain probably has to be trained through experience,” said Fanselow, a professor of psychology and member of the UCLA Brain Research Institute, who was the study’s senior author. “In this case, we gave animals a problem to solve.”

After discovering the rats could, in fact, learn to solve problems, Zelikowsky, a graduate student in Fanselow’s laboratory, traveled to Australia, where she worked with Vissel to analyze the anatomy of the changes that had taken place in the rats’ brains. Their analysis identified significant functional changes in two specific regions of the prefrontal cortex.

Compensating for damage from Alzheimer’s

“Interestingly, previous studies had shown that these prefrontal cortex regions also light up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, suggesting that similar compensatory circuits develop in people,” Vissel said. “While it’s probable that the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers are already compensating for damage, this discovery has significant potential for extending that compensation and improving the lives of many.”

The hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure where memories are formed in the brain, plays critical roles in processing, storing and recalling information. The hippocampus is highly susceptible to damage through stroke or lack of oxygen and is critically involved in Alzheimer’s disease, Fanselow said.

“Until now, we’ve been trying to figure out how to stimulate repair within the hippocampus,” he said. “Now we can see other structures stepping in and whole new brain circuits coming into being.”

Zelikowsky said she found it interesting that sub-regions in the prefrontal cortex compensated in different ways, with one sub-region — the infralimbic cortex — silencing its activity and another sub-region — the prelimbic cortex — increasing its activity.

“If we’re going to harness this kind of plasticity to help stroke victims or people with Alzheimer’s,” she said, “we first have to understand exactly how to differentially enhance and silence function, either behaviorally or pharmacologically. It’s clearly important not to enhance all areas. The brain works by silencing and activating different populations of neurons. To form memories, you have to filter out what’s important and what’s not.”

Complex behavior always involves multiple parts of the brain communicating with one another, with one region’s message affecting how another region will respond, Fanselow noted. These molecular changes produce our memories, feelings and actions.

“The brain is heavily interconnected — you can get from any neuron in the brain to any other neuron via about six synaptic connections,” he said. “So there are many alternate pathways the brain can use, but it normally doesn’t use them unless it’s forced to. Once we understand how the brain makes these decisions, then we’re in a position to encourage pathways to take over when they need to, especially in the case of brain damage.

“Behavior creates molecular changes in the brain; if we know the molecular changes we want to bring about, then we can try to facilitate those changes to occur through behavior and drug therapy,” he added. I think that’s the best alternative we have. Future treatments are not going to be all behavioral or all pharmacological, but a combination of both.”

The research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the National Institutes of Health, and by the National Science Foundation.

MIT engineers have created synthetic biology circuits that can perform analog computations such as taking logarithms and square roots in living cells (cartoon) (credit: Ramiz Daniel et al./MIT)

By combining existing genetic “parts,” or engineered genes, in novel ways, MIT engineers have transformed bacterial cells into living calculators that can compute logarithms, divide, and take square roots, using three or fewer genetic parts.

The circuits perform those calculations in an analog fashion by exploiting natural biochemical functions that are already present in the cell rather than by reinventing them with digital logic.

This makes them more efficient than the digital circuits pursued by most synthetic biologists, according to MIT engineers Rahul Sarpeshkar and Timothy Lu, the two senior authors on the paper describing the circuits in the May 15 online edition of Nature.

“In analog you compute on a continuous set of numbers, which means it’s not just black and white, it’s gray as well,” says Sarpeshkar, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and the head of the Analog Circuits and Biological Systems group at MIT

Analog computation would be particularly useful for designing cellular sensors for pathogens or other molecules, the researchers say. Analog sensing could also be combined with digital circuits to create cells that can take a specific action triggered by a threshold concentration of certain molecules.

“You could do a lot of upfront sensing with the analog circuits because they’re very rich and a relatively small amount of parts can give you a lot of complexity, and have that output go into a circuit that makes a decision — is this true or not?” says Lu, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering.

Analog advantages 

Sarpeshkar has previously identified thermodynamic similarities between analog transistor circuits and the chemical circuits that take place inside cells. In 2011, he took advantage of those similarities to model biological interactions between DNA and proteins in an electronic circuit, using only eight transistors.

In the new Nature paper, Sarpeshkar, Lu and colleagues have done the reverse — mapping analog electronic circuits onto cells. Sarpeshkar has long advocated analog computing as a more efficient alternative to digital computation at the moderate precision of computation seen in biology. These analog circuits are efficient because they can take in a continuous range of inputs, and they exploit the natural continuous computing functions that are already present in cells. In the case of cells, that continuous input might be the amount of glucose present. In transistors, it’s a range of continuous input currents or voltages.

Digital circuits, meanwhile, represent every value as zero or one, ignoring the range of possibilities in between. This can be useful for creating circuits that perform logic functions such as AND, NOT and OR inside cells, which many synthetic biologists have done. These circuits can reveal whether or not a threshold level of a certain molecule is present, but not the exact amount of it.

Digital circuits also require many more parts, which can drain the energy of the cell hosting them. “If you build too many parts to make some function, the cell is not going to have the energy to keep making those proteins,” Sarpeshkar says.

Doing the math

Complex analog computation can be implemented by composing synthetic gene circuits. Here, an adder is built
by engineering two wide-dynamic-range, positive-slope logarithm circuits (modules outlined in red) to produce a common output, which is summed to yield the overall output. (credit: Ramiz Daniel et al./MIT/Nature)

To create an analog adding or multiplying circuit that can calculate the total quantity of two or more compounds in a cell, the researchers combined two circuits, each of which responds to a different input. In one circuit, a sugar called arabinose turns on a transcription factor that activates the gene that codes for green fluorescent protein (GFP). In the second, a signaling molecule known as AHL also turns on a gene that produces GFP. By measuring the total amount of GFP, the total amount of both inputs can be calculated.

To subtract or divide, the researchers swapped one of the activator transcription factors with a repressor, which turns off production of GFP when the input molecule is present. The team also built an analog square root circuit that requires just two parts, while a recently reported digital synthetic circuit for performing square roots had more than 100.

“Analog computation is very efficient,” Sarpeshkar says. “To create digital circuits at a comparable level of precision would take many more genetic parts.”

Another of the team’s circuits can perform division by calculating the ratio of two different molecules. Cells often perform this kind of computation on their own, which is critical for monitoring the relative concentrations of molecules such as NAD and NADH, which are frequently converted from one to the other as they help other cellular reactions take place.

“That ratio is important for controlling a lot of cellular processes, and the cell naturally has enzymes that can recognize those ratios,” Lu says. “Cells can already do a lot of these things on their own, but for them to do it over a useful range requires extra engineering.”

That extra engineering included modifying the circuits so that they can compute with inputs over a range of 1 to 10,000 — much wider than the range of a naturally occurring cell circuit.

The researchers are now trying to create analog circuits in nonbacterial cells, including mammalian cells. They are also working on expanding the library of genetic parts that can be incorporated into the circuits. “Right now we’re using three of the most commonly used transcription factors in biology, but we’d like to do this with additional parts and make this a generalizable platform so everyone else can use it,” Lu says.

“We have just scratched the surface of what sophisticated analog feedback circuits can do in living cells,” says Sarpeshkar, whose lab is working on building further new analog circuits in cells. He believes the new approach of what he terms “analog synthetic biology” will create a new set of fundamental and applied circuits that can dramatically improve the fine control of gene expression, molecular sensing, computation and actuation.

The research was funded by MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

The chip at the heart of one of D-Wave’s computers (credit: D-Wave)

Google, in partnership with NASA and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), has launched an initiative to investigate how quantum computing might lead to breakthroughs in machine learning, a branch of AI that focuses on construction and study of systems that learn from data..

The new lab will use the D-Wave Two quantum computer.A recent study (see “Which is faster: conventional or quantum computer?“) confirmed the D-Wave One quantum computer was much faster than conventional machines at specific problems.

The machine will be installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

“We hope it helps researchers construct more efficient and more accurate models for everything from speech recognition, to web search, to protein folding,” said Hartmut Neven, Google director of engineering.

Hybrid solutions

“Machine learning is highly difficult. It’s what mathematicians call an ‘NP-hard’ problem,” he said. “Classical computers aren’t well suited to these types of creative problems. Solving such problems can be imagined as trying to find the lowest point on a surface covered in hills and valleys.

“Classical computing might use what’s called a ‘gradient descent’: start at a random spot on the surface, look around for a lower spot to walk down to, and repeat until you can’t walk downhill anymore. But all too often that gets you stuck in a “local minimum” — a valley that isn’t the very lowest point on the surface.

“That’s where quantum computing comes in. It lets you cheat a little, giving you some chance to ‘tunnel’ through a ridge to see if there’s a lower valley hidden beyond it. This gives you a much better shot at finding the true lowest point — the optimal solution.”

Google has already developed some quantum machine-learning algorithms, Neven said. “One produces very compact, efficient recognizers — very useful when you’re short on power, as on a mobile device. Another can handle highly polluted training data, where a high percentage of the examples are mislabeled, as they often are in the real world. And we’ve learned some useful principles: e.g., you get the best results not with pure quantum computing, but by mixing quantum and classical computing.”

Wes Miles: Yeah, a lot of it comes from a book that Matt [Santos, bassist] started reading first when we were recording The Orchard, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near.

At that point, we started talking more about it and thinking about what the singularity would mean for us. Then after we got into that, there was a lot of sci-fi that I got into, specifically William Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer and a lot of other interesting books. There are a lot of things that made their way onto the record. [...]

The D-Wave Systems Fridge with Cryogenic Packaging (credit: Amherst College)

A computer science professor at Amherst College has conducted experiments to test the speed of a quantum computing system (from D-Wave) against conventional computing methods.

“Ours is the first paper to my knowledge that compares the quantum approach to conventional methods using the same set of problems,” says Catherine McGeoch, the Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society (Computer Science) at Amherst.

McGeoch, author of A Guide to Experimental Algorithmics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), has 25 years of experience setting up experiments to test various facets of computing speed.

D-Wave retained McGeoch as an outside consultant to help devise experiments that would test its machines against conventional computers and algorithms.

Thousands of times faster for specific problems

McGeoch says the calculations the D-Wave excels at involve a specific combinatorial optimization problem, comparable in difficulty to the more famous “traveling salesperson” problem that’s been a foundation of theoretical computing for decades.

Briefly stated, the traveling salesperson problem asks this question: given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the original city?

Questions like this apply to challenges such as shipping logistics, flight scheduling, search optimization, DNA analysis and encryption, and are extremely difficult to answer quickly. The D-Wave computer has the greatest potential in this area, McGeoch says.

D-Wave One systems being tested in the lab (credit: Amherst College)

“This type of computer is not intended for surfing the Internet, but it does solve this narrow but important type of problem really, really fast,” McGeoch says.

“There are degrees of what it can do. If you want it to solve the exact problem it’s built to solve, at the problem sizes I tested, it’s thousands of times faster than anything I’m aware of.

If you want it to solve more general problems of that size, I would say it competes – it does as well as some of the best things I’ve looked at. At this point it’s merely above average but shows a promising scaling trajectory.”

Whether the D-Wave computer will ever have mass market appeal is also difficult for McGeoch to assess. While the 439-qubit model she tested does have incredible computing power, there is that near-zero Kelvin chip operating temperature requirement that would make home or office use a chilly proposition. At present, she thinks the power of the D-Wave approach is too narrowly focused to be of much use to the average personal computer user.

D-Wave cryogenic packaging — fridge payload (credit: Amherst College)

“The founder of IBM famously predicted that only about five of his company’s first computers would be sold because he just didn’t see the need for that much computing power,” McGeoch says. “Who needs to solve those big problems now? I’d say it’s probably going to be big companies like Google and government agencies.”

And, while conventional approaches to solving these problems will likely continue to improve incrementally, this fast quantum approach has the potential to expand to larger variety of problems than it does now, McGeoch says.

“Within a year or two I think these quantum computing methods will solve more and bigger problems significantly faster than the best conventional computing options out there,” she says.

At the same time, she cautions that her first set of experiments represents a snapshot moment of the state of quantum computing versus conventional computing.

“This by no means settles the question of how fast the quantum computer is,” she says. “That’s going to take a lot more testing and a variety of experiments. It may not be a question that ever gets answered because there’s always going to be progress in both quantum and conventional computing.”

(Credit: Masahito Tachibana et al./Cell)

It was hailed some 15 years ago as the great hope for a biomedical revolution: production of patient-specific embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from cloning to create perfectly matched tissues that would someday cure ailments ranging from diabetes to Parkinson’s disease.

Since then, the approach has been enveloped in ethical debate. A paper published by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biology specialist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Beaverton, and his colleagues is sure to rekindle that debate, Nature News reports.

Therapeutic cloning, or somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), begins with the same process used to create Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, in 1996.

A donor cell from a body tissue such as skin is fused with an unfertilized egg from which the nucleus has been removed. The egg ‘reprograms’ the DNA in the donor cell to an embryonic state and divides until it has reached the early, blastocyst stage. The cells are then harvested and cultured to create a stable cell line that is genetically matched to the donor and that can become almost any cell type in the human body.

Mitalipov and his group began work on their new study last September, using eggs from young donors recruited through a university advertising campaign. In December, after some false starts, cells from four cloned embryos that Mitalipov had engineered began to grow. “It looks like colonies, it looks like colonies,” he kept thinking. Masahito Tachibana, a fertility specialist from Sendai, Japan, who is finishing a 5-year stint in Mitalipov’s laboratory, nervously sectioned the 1-millimetre-wide clumps of cells and transferred them to new culture plates, where they continued to grow — evidence of success. Mitalipov cancelled his holiday plans. “I was happy to spend Christmas culturing cells,” he says. “My family understood.”

The success came through minor technical tweaks. The researchers used inactivated Sendai virus (known to induce fusion of cells) to unite the egg and body cells, and an electric jolt to activate embryo development. When their first attempts produced six blastocysts but no stable cell lines, they added caffeine, which protects the egg from premature activation.

None of these techniques is new, but the researchers tested them in various combinations in more than 1,000 monkey eggs before moving on to human cells.

Public fears that the technology might be used to create human clones are a sticking point. The research might spark “cloning hysteria” that opponents of stem-cell research could capitalize on, says Bernard Siegel, executive director of the Genetics Policy Institute in Palm Beach, Florida.

(credit: César A. González)

University of California, Berkeley researchers have developed a device that uses wireless signals to provide real-time, non-invasive diagnoses of brain swelling or bleeding.

The device analyzes data from low energy, electromagnetic waves, similar to the kind used to transmit radio and mobile signals. It could potentially become a cost-effective tool for medical diagnostics and to triage injuries in areas where access to medical care, especially medical imaging, is limited.

The researchers tested a prototype in a small-scale pilot study of healthy adults and brain trauma patients admitted to a military hospital for the Mexican Army. The results from the healthy patients were clearly distinguishable from those with brain damage, and data for bleeding was distinct from those for swelling.

(credit: César A. González)

“There are large populations in Mexico and the world that do not have adequate access to advanced medical imaging, either because it is too costly or the facilities are far away,” said César A. González, a professor at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Escuela Superior de Medicina (National Polytechnic Institute’s Superior School of Medicine) in Mexico.

“This technology is inexpensive, it can be used in economically disadvantaged parts of the world and in rural areas that lack industrial infrastructure, and it may substantially reduce the cost and change the paradigm of medical diagnostics. We have also shown that the technology could be combined with cell phones for remote diagnostics.”

Boris Rubinsky, Professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, who led the research team, noted that symptoms of serious head injuries and brain damage are not always immediately obvious, and for treatment, time is of the essence. For example, the administration of clot-busting medication for certain types of strokes must be given within three hours of the onset of symptoms.

“Some people might delay traveling to a hospital to get examined because it is an hour or more away or because it is exceedingly expensive,” said Rubinsky. “If people had access to an affordable device that could indicate whether there is brain damage or not, they could then make an informed decision about making that trip to a facility to get prompt treatment, which is especially important for head injuries.”

The researchers took advantage of the characteristic changes in tissue composition and structure in brain injuries. For brain edemas, swelling results from an increase in fluid in the tissue. For brain hematomas, internal bleeding causes the buildup of blood in certain regions of the brain. Because fluid conducts electricity differently than brain tissue, it is possible to measure changes in electromagnetic properties. Computer algorithms interpret the changes to determine the likelihood of injury.

The study involved 46 healthy adults, ages 18 to 48, and eight patients with brain damage, ages 27 to 70.

The engineers fashioned two coils into a helmet-like device, fitted over the heads of the study participants. One coil acts as a radio emitter and the other serves as the receiver.   Electromagnetic signals are broadcast through the brain from the emitter to the receiver.

“We have adjusted the coils so that if the brain works perfectly, we have a clean signal,” said Rubinsky. “Whenever there are interferences in the functioning of the brain, we detect them as changes in the received signal. We can tell from the changes, or ‘noises,’ what the brain injury is.”

Rubinsky noted that the waves are extremely weak, and are comparable to standing in a room with the radio or television turned on.

The device’s diagnoses for the brain trauma patients in the study matched the results obtained from conventional computerized tomography (CT) scans.

Diagnostics for the Aging brain

The tests also revealed some insights  into the aging brain. “With an increase in age, the average electromagnetic transmission signature of a normal human brain changes and approaches that of younger patients with a severe medical condition of hematoma in the brain,” said González.

“This suggests the potential for the device to be used as an indication for the health of the brain in older patients in a similar way in which measurements of blood pressure, ECG, cholesterol or other health markers are used for diagnostic of human health conditions.”

González started the research with the support of the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS), an academic research program that supports collaborations between Mexico and the UC system, and Mexico’s Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (National Council of Science and Technology), the government agency promoting science and technology research and activities.

New Google Maps: search results are labeled directly on the map (credit: Google)

On Wednesday, Google unveiled a new Google Maps, by far the biggest redesign since it introduced Maps eight years ago, The New York Times reports.

When users who are logged into Google visit Maps, they will see the places they frequently visit highlighted, like restaurants, museums and their home. Google learns the places they go by drawing information from all of Google’s services — including search and Maps history, Google Plus posts and information in users’ Gmail in-boxes.

When users visit a new city, Google will recommend places to go based on their preferences and those of people with similar tastes. The maps change in real time, so if you click on a museum, other museums in the city pop up and the small roads and landmarks needed to navigate to that museum appear.

The new service is available only to people who sign up for it to start, It will come to mobile devices later.

Google Earth, which shows 3-dimensional satellite imagery, is now incorporated into the online version of Google Maps, instead of being accessible only as an app to download. Google can do this because of a new technology that renders graphics inside a browser, instead of downloading images from a server.

(Credit: Google)

Google revealed some new search tools on Wednesday at I/O, its annual developers conference, The New York Times reports. Taken together, they are another step toward Google’s trying to become the omnipotent, human-like “Star Trek” search engine that its executives say they want it to be.

When people ask Google certain questions, it will now try to predict the person’s follow-up questions and answer them, too. Ask for the population of India, for instance, and you will also get the population of China and the United States, because Google knows those are the most common follow-up questions.

This is an extension of Google’s knowledge graph — its semantic search product that aims to understand the meaning of things, not just keywords.

Google Now, the service that sends you information on traffic and weather before you even ask for it, is also digging deeper into our minds. Google is adding more entertainment alerts, like new music based on videos watched on YouTube, and turning Google Now into a robotic to-do list and a stronger competitor to Apple’s Siri.

Google is also trying to make search more conversational by encouraging people to talk to their phones and computers and hear answers out loud. Google announced that people can now talk to its Chrome browser to perform a search, by saying, “O.K. Google.” Google also uses location information to answer questions.

In another step to personalize search, Google is expanding its tool that plucks information from Gmail and presents it in search results.

“OK, Google…”: what this conversational experience will look like in Chrome on your desktops and laptops (credit: Google)

These images show differences in collagen buildup (which interferes with implants) in two tissue samples. Collagen is shown in blue. The left image shows a thick collagen wall (arrow) forming in the presence of a poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate), a material that’s currently widely used for implantable devices. In contrast, collagen in the right image is more evenly dispersed in the tissue after the UW-engineered hydrogel has been implanted. (Credit: Lei Zhang/University of Washington)

University of Washington engineers have demonstrated in mice a way to prevent failure of implants and prostheses, using a synthetic hydrogel biomaterial that fully resists the body’s natural attack response to foreign objects.

Medical devices such as artificial heart valves, prostheses and breast implants could be coated with this polymer to prevent the body from rejecting an implanted object.

How medical implants fail

The body’s biological response to implanted devices — medical technologies that often cost millions to develop — has frustrated experts for years. After an implant, the body usually creates a protein wall around the medical device, cutting it off from the rest of the body. Scientists call this barrier a collagen capsule. Collagen is a protein that’s naturally found in our bodies, particularly in connective tissues such as tendons and ligaments.

If a device such as an artificial valve or an electrode sensor is blocked off from the rest of the body, it usually fails to work. Physicians and scientists have tried to minimize this, but they haven’t been able to eliminate it, said Buddy Ratner, co-author and a UW professor of bioengineering and of chemical engineering.

The foreign-body reaction occurs in response to implants made of many materials, including teflon, polyurethane, silicone rubber, polyethylene, poly(methyl methacrylate), poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG), Dacron, gold, titanium and alumina, including other hydrogels, such as poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (PHEMA), the authors say in a Nature Biotechnology paper.

Improved hydrogel

Ratner’s collaborator and co-author Shaoyi Jiang, a UW professor of chemical engineering, and his team implanted an improved hydrogel polymer substance, known as poly(carboxybetaine methacrylate)
(PCBMA), into the bodies of mice.

A hydrogel is a flexible biomedical material that swells with water. It’s made from a polymer that deflects all proteins from sticking to its surface. (Scientists have found that proteins appearing on the surface of a medical implant are the first signs that a larger collagen wall will form.)

After three months, Jiang and his team found that collagen was loosely and evenly distributed in the tissue around the polymer, suggesting that the mice bodies didn’t even detect the polymer’s presence.

For humans, the first three weeks after an implant are the most critical, because by then the body will show signs of isolating the implant by building a collagen wall. If this hasn’t happened in the first several weeks, it’s likely the body won’t default to an attack response toward the object.

Human tests

UW researchers and others have worked for nearly 20 years to find a way to help the body accept implants. In 1996, the National Science Foundation-funded UW Engineered Biomaterials (UWEB) research center opened at the UW, with Ratner serving as director. Since that time, researchers have been trying to make a material that is invisible to the body’s immune response and could eliminate the body’s negative reaction to medical implants.

The UW researchers plan to test this material in humans, likely by working with manufacturers to coat an implantable device with the polymer, then measure its ability to ward off protein build-up.

The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, UWEB and the UW Department of Chemical Engineering.

Machines that outthink, outlive, and outmaneuver us at every turn. Siri, anyone? And other events too bizarre to even imagine, but that will cause us all to rethink everything. That’s the world you inherit, graduates, and must somehow negotiate. [...]

Ray Kurzweil, in his best-selling book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, confirmed that we are in early stages of a medical revolution. “By 2026,” Kurzweil says, “biotech upgrades will add more than one year of life expectancy to our lives each year.” [...]

However, the Kurzweil software costs as much as $1,500 a seat, while some of the other PC-based text-to-speech products cost $50 to $70, Chen said. “We charge $10 for the app, plus $2 or $3 for a voice,” he pointed out. He hasn’t actually written his own text-to-speech software, instead taking advantage of commercially available software for mobile devices that is approaching commodity pricing, combined with his own user interface. Alternate voices for the app are sold separately. [...]

As far as competitive landscape, Google is perhaps the most important player in this developing market. They already use deep learning techniques for voice recognition in their Google mobile app.

They have also made several key hires in the past several months, perhaps most notably Geoffrey Hinton and Ray Kurzweil, both titans in the field. However, Google does not currently have a product that offers other businesses the ability to use this technology in their own products. [...]

Scorned by over 500 publishers and literary agents around the world, his philosophical thriller has been called “revolutionary” and “socially dangerous” by readers, scholars, and religious authorities. The novel debuts a challenging original philosophy, which rebuffs modern civilization by inviting the end of the human species — and declaring the onset of something greater.

Set in the present day, the novel tells the story of transhumanist Jethro Knights and his unwavering quest for immortality via science and technology. Fighting against him are fanatical religious groups, economically depressed governments, and mystic Zoe Bach: a dazzling trauma surgeon and the love of his life, whose belief in spirituality and the afterlife is absolute.

Exiled from America and reeling from personal tragedy, Knights forges a new nation of willing scientists on the world’s largest seasteading project, Transhumania. When the world declares war against the floating city, demanding an end to its renegade and godless transhuman experiments and ambitions, Knights strikes back, leaving the planet forever changed.

Kindle version also available here.

Zoltan Istvan’s The Transhumanist Wager is an epic story of radical libertarian ideas, their enemies, and the violent global conflict that ensues, painted in strong saturated colors with little room for intermediate shades and character development.

After reading cover to cover, and then reading it more carefully, I have mixed love/hate feelings about this novel.

It’s a page turner. Istvan — a former journalist for the National Geographic Channel and The New York Times, whose award-winning coverage of the war in Kashmir gained worldwide attention — knows how to tell a compelling story.

There are strong parallels with Atlas Shrugged. Jethro Knights, the main character of The Transhumanist Wager, is a modern John Galt — a transhumanist and even-more -radical version of Ayn Rand’s hero.

Jethro is obsessed with and focused on attaining personal immortality via biological life extension and especially mind uploading and eternal cybernetic life.

America is in a deep economic recession, with rising unemployment and domestic terrorism. Transhumanist ideas are in the limelight, violently opposed by a “politically correct” establishment, inept politicians, and a domineering, violent religious right movement, led by arch-villain Reverend Belinas.

In the first third of the book, partly autobiographic, we follow Jethro in his solo circumnavigation of the world in a sailboat that he built himself, working as a travel and war journalist on the side. On his boat, Jethro meditates on the big questions and issues. And when he returns to New York five years later, he is ready to fight Belinas and take over the world. And yes, there is a love story. It begins in a Kashmir war zone, and continues after Jethro’s return.

Militant libertarianism

Jethro’s philosophy is an extreme, militant version of the radically libertarian formulation of transhumanism championed by the Extropy Institute in the 90s. Attaining immortality is a prerequisite for becoming all-powerful “Omnipotenders” and moving on to dominate the universe. So life extension must have the highest priority, without letting unnecessary distractions like empathy, compassion, or love stand in the way.

Jethro is a two-dimensional icon in an epic story. From the (few) attempts to give him depth, we can see that there is probably a nice person at his core, but he is a fundamentalist like Reverend Belinas where his goals and philosophical outlook are concerned. In the final confrontation with Belinas, Jethro kills his enemy after a powerful clash of ideas, but not without Belinas scoring some points. Yes, Jethro would commit atrocities in pursuit of his objectives, and even kill the persons he loves most.

I’m a radical transhumanist, but I find Jethro’s approach alienating. I can find worthy elements in different worldviews, but I don’t think any worldview has all the answers. I think militant fundamentalism — the certainty of having all the answers, and the will to crush the unbelievers — is at the root of most evils. Religion can be good, but the Inquisition was an atrocity. Atheism can be good, but oppressive, authoritarian, militant atheism is not. Libertarianism is good, but indifference to the pain of others is not. Transhumanism is good, but I hope it will prevail without the violence described in the novel.

Toward the end of the book, Jethro’s missiles destroy the Vatican, killing the Pope and hundreds of believers in prayer in St. Peter’s square. Jethro would answer that violent acts of war were initiated by others (first the U.S. government, then an international coalition), and the transhumanists retaliated in self-defense, after warning the population to leave the targeted areas, to minimize collateral damage. But what I find much more difficult to accept is that Jethro considers other persons as expendable, and would not stop even at large-scale genocidal mass murder.

In contrast, transhumanist leader Preston Langmore is a nice soft-spoken guy, a visionary humanist who is happy enough thinking that perhaps his grandchildren will be immortal, without really hoping to see immortality in his lifetime. But he doesn’t have what it takes to defend transhumanists from more and more violent attacks. After a leading transhumanist scientist working on alternative substrates for mind uploading is savagely murdered and beheaded by Belinas’ thugs, with the silent complicity of the government, it’s Jethro who must take the lead.

Transhumania — the ultimate Galt’s Gulch

Jethro’s more and more popular Transhumanist Citizens movement trumps and exposes a terrorist attack against a cryonics facility. But Belinas’ religious right — this time with the full and open support of the government — in a now-dystopian police-state America, threatens massive violent repression against transhumanists.

Jethro escapes and creates the ultimate Galt’s Gulch: Transhumania, a high-tech floating seasteading community populated by the world’s best and brightest. The citizens of Transhumania develop amazingly advanced science and technology — and powerful weapons for the final confrontation that they know will come soon.

Of course the good guys win … but are they still good guys? They impose a strict “transhumanian” rule over the rest of the planet, with many good things like scientific education and opportunity for all. But also some fascist measures that don’t seem libertarian to me, not at all.

In The Artilect War, Hugo de Garis says that the transhumanist drive to develop technologies to transcend the human condition, in particular more-than-human artificial intelligences, is on an inescapable collision course with traditional morality, religion, and social organization. He believes a massive conflict with billions of deaths is bound to happen someday, perhaps in this century. The Transhumanist Wager is probably the first novel to address de Garis’ doomsday scenario (Jethro would annihilate the rest of humanity if he had to.)

I really hope Istvan’s fiction will remain fiction, but it seems disturbingly plausible. If transhumanists will need to defend themselves, a Jethro will probably emerge.

Quantum Zen

My favorite character is the delicious Zoe Bach, Jethro’s one and only love. With a mixed Western and Eastern heritage, Zoe is a spiritual transhumanist who shares Jethro’s enthusiasm for becoming immortal and transcending the human condition by means of advanced technology. But at the same time, she remains open to the more spiritual forms of transcendence found in Eastern mysticism.

In her “Quantum Zen” outlook, Zoe is not so focused on immortality: she imagines that future super-science will be able to resurrect the dead. Jethro agrees, but he considers far-future speculations as a distraction from his overpowering drive to launch his transhumanist revolution and attain immortality here and now. The tension between Jethro’s and Zoe’s philosophies is, for me, the most interesting aspect of the novel.

Pitching transhumanism

Zoltan told me that “the main goal with book was to create a powerful artistic statement for the current and younger generation of thinkers and readers, to pull young people away from fantasy genres into transhumanism. My novel is trying to tell them that transhumanism is every bit as exciting and rewarding as anything commercial Hollywood puts out there for them.

“I’m hoping that a young person who is in college or high school might read my book and decide that they would rather pursue a career in science and technology than, let’s say business, law, or advertising. If my novel will convince people to pursue science and reason in their daily lives instead of fantasy and commercialism, then I will be a happy, fulfilled person.”

I think The Transhumanist Wager is a very powerful artistic statement indeed, but one that promotes an interpretation of transhumanism that I find far too militant and devoid of compassion.

At the same time, while Zoltan and Jethro don’t have all the answers, they do ask important questions, and offer some valid answers. I find their libertarianism too militant and uncompromising, but at the same time, I think it’s important to affirm libertarian ideas loud and clear in today’s dull, politically correct, anti-libertarian cultural climate.

I don’t think science will advance as fast as Zoltan hopes, not even in a real-world Transhumania, but I think it’s important to offer younger generations compelling artistic visions of a solar, positive future powered by transhumanist science.

Zoltan’s book has the potential to become a cult book. I hope it will be widely read and discussed.

Salk scientists developed J147, a synthetic drug shown to improve memory and prevent brain damage in mice with Alzheimer’s disease (credit: Salk Institute for Biological Studies)

A drug developed by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, known as J147, reverses memory deficits and slows Alzheimer’s disease in aged mice following short-term treatment.

The findings may pave the way to a new treatment for Alzheimer’s disease in humans.

“J147 is an exciting new compound because it really has strong potential to be an Alzheimer’s disease therapeutic by slowing disease progression and reversing memory deficits following short-term treatment,” says lead study author Marguerite Prior, a research associate in Salk’s Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory.

Despite years of research, there are no disease-modifying drugs for Alzheimer’s. Current FDA-approved medications, including Aricept, Razadyne and Exelon, offer only fleeting short-term benefits for Alzheimer’s patients, but they do nothing to slow the steady, irreversible decline of brain function that erases a person’s memory and ability to think clearly.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the sixth leading cause of death in the country and the only one among the top 10 that cannot be prevented, cured or even slowed.

J147 was developed at Salk in the laboratory of David Schubert, a professor in the Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory. He and his colleagues bucked the trend within the pharmaceutical industry, which has focused on the biological pathways involved in the formation of amyloid plaques, the dense deposits of protein that characterize the disease.

Instead, the Salk team used living neurons grown in laboratory dishes to test whether their new synthetic compounds, which are based upon natural products derived from plants, were effective at protecting brain cells against several pathologies associated with brain aging. From the test results of each chemical iteration of the lead compound, they were able to alter their chemical structures to make them much more potent. Although J147 appears to be safe in mice, the next step will require clinical trials to determine whether the compound will prove safe and effective in humans.

“Alzheimer’s disease research has traditionally focused on a single target, the amyloid pathway,” says Schubert, “but unfortunately drugs that have been developed through this pathway have not been successful in clinical trials. Our approach is based on the pathologies associated with old age — the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases-rather than only the specificities of the disease.”

To test the efficacy of J147 in a much more rigorous preclinical Alzheimer’s model, the Salk team treated mice using a therapeutic strategy that they say more accurately reflects the human symptomatic stage of Alzheimer’s. Administered in the food of 20-month-old genetically engineered mice, at a stage when Alzheimer’s pathology is advanced, J147 rescued severe memory loss, reduced soluble levels of amyloid, and increased neurotrophic factors essential for memory, after only three months of treatment.

In a different experiment, the scientists tested J147 directly against Aricept, the most widely prescribed Alzheimer’s drug, and found that J147 performed as well or better in several memory tests.

“In addition to yielding an exceptionally promising therapeutic, both the strategy of using mice with existing disease and the drug discovery process based upon aging are what make the study interesting and exciting,” says Schubert, “because it more closely resembles what happens in humans, who have advanced pathology when diagnosis occurs and treatment begins.” Most studies test drugs before pathology is present, which is preventive rather than therapeutic and may be the reason drugs don’t transfer from animal studies to humans.

Prior and her colleagues say that several cellular processes known to be associated with Alzheimer’s pathology are affected by J147, including an increase in a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which protects neurons from toxic insults, helps new neurons grow and connect with other brain cells, and is involved in memory formation. Postmortem studies show lower than normal levels of BDNF in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.

Because of its broad ability to protect nerve cells, the researchers believe that J147 may also be effective for treating other neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), as well as stroke, although their study did not directly explore the drug’s efficacy as a therapy for those diseases.

The Salk researchers say that J147, with its memory enhancing and neuroprotective properties, along with its safety and availability as an oral medication, would make an “ideal candidate” for Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials. They are currently seeking funding for such a trial.

The work was supported by the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, the Bundy Foundation, the Fritz Burns Foundation, the George E. Hewitt Foundation, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the National Institutes of Health.

It would be interesting to know which plants they used that were effective, so patients could experiment on themselves if they so chose to. The cited Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy paper mentions withania somnifera (its roots are used in ayurvedic medicine to prepare the herbal remedy ashwagandha, which has been traditionally used to treat various symptoms and conditions) and Gypenoside LXXIV (G-74), a major constituent of gynostemma pentaphyllum, used in Chinese medicine as an herbal medicine reputed to have powerful antioxidant and adaptogenic effects purported to increase longevity. Obligatory disclaimer: KurzweilAI does not advocate self-experimentation without medical supervision. — Editor

Credit: National Cancer Institute/Wikimedia Commons)

The frontal lobes in humans vs. other species are not — as previously thought — disproportionately enlarged relative to other areas of the brain, according to a study by Durham and Reading universities.

It concludes that the size of our frontal lobes — an area in the brain of mammals located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere — cannot solely account for humans’ superior cognitive abilities.

The study also suggest that supposedly more “primitive” areas, such as the cerebellum, were equally important in the expansion of the human brain. These areas may therefore play unexpectedly important roles in human cognition and its disorders, such as autism and dyslexia, say the researchers.

The scientists argue that many of our high-level abilities are carried out by more extensive brain networks linking many different areas of the brain. They suggest it may be the structure of these extended networks more than the size of any isolated brain region that is critical for cognitive functioning.

The Durham and Reading researchers, funded by The Leverhulme Trust, analyzed data sets from previous animal and human studies using phylogenetic (“evolutionary family tree”) methods, and found consistent results across all their data. They used a new method to look at the speed with which evolutionary change occurred, concluding that the frontal lobes did not evolve especially fast along the human lineage after it split from the chimpanzee lineage.

Kava (Piper methysticum) (credit: Forest & Kim Starr/Wikimedia Commons)

A world-first completed clinical study by an Australian team has found Kava, a medicinal South Pacific plant, significantly reduced the symptoms of people suffering anxiety.

The study, led by the University of Melbourne, revealed Kava could be an alternative to pharmaceutical products for the hundreds of thousands of Australians who suffer from generalized anxiety disorders (GAD)

“In this study we’ve been able to show that Kava offers a potential natural alternative for the treatment of chronic clinical anxiety; unlike some other options, it has less risk of dependency and less potential for side effects,” said lead researcher, Dr Jerome Sarris from Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne.

The study also found that people’s genetic differences (polymorphisms) of certain neurobiological mechanisms called GABA transporters may modify their response to Kava.

“If this finding is replicated, it may pave the way for simple genetic tests to determine which people may be likely to have a beneficial anxiety-reducing effect from taking Kava,” Sarris said.

‘I’ll have what she’s having’

An additional novel finding of the study, recently published in Phytotherapy Research, was that Kava increased women’s sex drive compared to those in the placebo group, believed to be due to the reduction of anxiety, rather than any aphrodisiac effect.

Future studies confirming the genetic relationship to therapeutic response, and any libido-improving effects from Kava is now required. Dr Sarris said these significant findings are of importance to sufferers of anxiety and to the South Pacific region, which relies on Kava as a major export.

The study was funded by the NHMRC and Integria Healthcare who manufacture MediHerb and Thompson’s Kava products.

“Although scientific studies provide some evidence that kava may be beneficial for the management of anxiety, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a warning that using kava supplements has been linked to a risk of severe liver damage.” — NIH National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine,

“Heavy use of kava with comorbid alcohol consumption or an existing liver condition appears to lead to malnutrition, weight loss, liver damage (causing elevated serum γ -glutamyltransferase and high-density lipoproteincholesterol levels), renal dysfunction, rashes, pulmonary hypertension, macrocytosis of red cells, lymphocytopenia, and decreasing platelet volumes. —  Fu PP, Xia Q, Guo L, Yu H, Chan PC (2008). “Toxicity of kava kava”. J Environ Sci Health C Environ Carcinog Ecotoxicol Rev 26 (1): 89–112 [98]. doi:10.1080/10590500801907407.PMID 18322868.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kava for more.

— Editor

UPDATE 5/15: Dangers of Kava cited in editorial statement.

(Credit: iStockphoto)

Researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of DNA that may contribute to genius in an ethically controversial study.

They are scouring the genomes of 1,600 U.S. adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s, Nature News reports.

Some geneticists say that the study is highly unlikely to find anything of interest because the sample size is too small and intelligence is too complex.

But scientists from BGI’s Cognitive Genomics group hope that their super-smart sample will give them an edge, because they  are  also using DNA samples from the SMPY recruits, plus samples from more than 500 people BGI recruited — albeit less selectively.

Tiny, intelligent things all around us, coordinating their activities. There are few more appropriate guides to this impending future than Alex Hawkinson, whose DC-based startup, SmartThings, has built what’s arguably the most advanced hub to tie connected objects together, Wired reports.

At his house, more than 200 objects, from the garage door to the coffeemaker to his daughter’s trampoline, are all connected to his SmartThings system. His office can automatically text his wife when he leaves and tell his home A/C system to start powering up.

In this future, the intelligence once locked in our devices now flows into the universe of physical objects, Technologists have struggled to name this emerging phenomenon. Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols. Other observers, paying homage to the stripped-down tech embedded in so many smart devices, are calling it the Sensor Revolution.

But here’s a better way to think about what we’re building: It’s the Programmable World. [...]

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Organic Photovoltaics: Plasmonic Enhanced Organic Photovoltaics, cover of Advanced Materials, May 2013

Qiaoqiang Gan, University at Buffalo assistant professor of electrical engineering, is developing a new generation of photovoltaic cells that produce more power and cost less to manufacture than what’s available today.

One of his more promising efforts involves the use of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials. These devices don’t match traditional solar cells in terms of energy production but they are less expensive and — because they are made (or processed) in liquid form — can be applied to a greater variety of surfaces.

Currently, solar power is produced with either thick polycrystalline silicon wafers or thin-film solar cells made up of inorganic materials such as amorphous silicon or cadmium telluride. Both are expensive to manufacture, Gan said.

His research involves thin-film solar cells, too, but unlike what’s on the market, he’s using organic photovoltaic materials such as polymers and small molecules that are carbon-based and less expensive.

“Compared with their inorganic counterparts, organic photovoltaics can be fabricated over large areas on rigid or flexible substrates,” Gan said, and applied to surfaces as easily as paint is on walls.

There are drawbacks to organic photovoltaic cells. They have to be thin due to their relatively poor electronic conductive properties, so without sufficient material to absorb light, it limits their optical absorption and lowers power conversion efficiency.

Their power conversion efficiency needs to be 10 percent or more to compete in the market, Gan said.

To achieve that benchmark, Gan and other researchers are incorporating metal nanoparticles and/or patterned plasmonic nanostructures into organic photovoltaic cells.

Recent material studies suggest they are succeeding, he said. Gan and his co-authors argue that, because of these breakthroughs, there should be a renewed focus on how nanomaterials and plasmonic strategies can create more efficient and affordable thin-film organic solar cells.

Yaroslav Urzhumov and the 3D-printed invisibility cloak (credit: Duke University)

Seven years ago, Duke University engineers demonstrated the first working invisibility cloak in complex laboratory experiments. Now it appears creating a simple cloak has become a lot simpler, by using a 3D printer..

Yaroslav Urzhumov, assistant research professor in electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, said producing a cloak in this fashion is inexpensive and easy.

He and his team made a small one at Duke that looks like a Frisbee disc made out of Swiss cheese.

Algorithms determined the location, size and shape of the holes to deflect microwave beams. The fabrication process takes from three to seven hours.

Just like the 2006 cloak, the newer version deflects microwave beams, but researchers feel confident that in the not-so-distant future, the cloak can work for higher wavelengths, including visible light.

“We believe this approach is a way towards optical cloaking, including visible and infrared,” Urzhumov said. “And nanotechnology is available to make these cloaks from transparent polymers or glass. The properties of transparent polymers and glasses are not that different from what we have in our polymer at microwave frequencies.”

The disk-like cloak has an open area in its center where the researchers placed an opaque object. When microwave beams were aimed at the object through the side of the disk, the cloak made it appear that the object was not there.

Field intensity for an uncloaked cylinder (c) compared to a cloaked cylinder (d) (simulations) (credit: Yaroslav Urzhumov et al./Optics Letters)

“The design of the cloak eliminates the ‘shadow’ that would be cast, and suppresses the scattering from the object that would be expected,” said Urzhumov. “In effect, the bright, highly reflective object, like a metal cylinder, is made invisible. The microwaves are carefully guided by a thin dielectric shell and then re-radiated back into free space on the shadow side of the cloak.”

Urzhumov said that theoretically, the technique can be used to create much larger devices.

“Computer simulations make me believe that it is possible to create a similar polymer-based cloaking layer as thin as one inch wrapped around a massive object several meters in diameter,” he said. “I have run some simulations that seem to confirm this point.”

The  research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office through a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant.

Best Keynote: Lander in 2002? Ray Kurzweil? Stephen Wolfram? Venter, Collins, Berners-Lee? I can’t pick. But I would give special commendation to BioTeam cofounder Chris Dagdigian’s annual unofficial fourth keynote, “Trends from the Trenches.” [...]

Inferno

Many SF authors, along with outlier scientists such as Ray Kurzweil, have long pondered such a utopian, or dystopian, future. But thanks to Inferno, the neo-Malthusians, the “Population Apocalypse Equation”, and even a long-forgotten crackpot who changed his name to “FM-2030”, will soon enjoy their 15 minutes or more of fame. [...]

Comparing biographical, professional and educational data against the career path of a “typical” systems analyst, Identified can now predict that Palantir, for example, might be the best (and most logical) next step in the career path for that particular analyst.

The data schema and learning algorithms behind SYMAN, Wallace says, are inspired by pioneering neuroscience research proposed by Jeff Hawkins (the founder of Palm and Handspring) and Ray Kurzweil, who recently joined Google to develop a similar technology and apply it to pattern recognition. [...]

Some of you are going to nod right along, some of you are going to think I’m crazy, and any economists in the audience are going to be rolling their eyes at my rather casual use of macroeconomic trend statistics to help make my point. But I’m pretty sure none of you will be bored.

So what is my point? First off, it’s the obvious one that I think computer hardware and software are progressing fast enough that we’re not very far away from true artificial intelligence. Along the way I break exciting new ground in describing Ray Kurzweil’s “back half of the chessboard” analogy, which illustrates how continuous growth can look insignificant for a long time and then suddenly explode. [...]

Some have called the Singularity a nerd rapture. Its prophet is Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s foremost experts on artificial intelligence and the new Director of Engineering at Google, where he will direct a good portion of the company’s $6.7 billion R&D budget to making his vision come true. Like it or not, science fiction is becoming science fact. [...]

credit: Baris Simsek

This is a really interesting article about body and mind which I recently read. I wanted to share it with my readers:

The New York Times | “I am not this body”

Here is a compelling excerpt: “I do not identify with my body. I have a body but I am a mind.

“My body and I have an intimate but awkward relationship, like foreign roommates who share a bedroom but not a language.

“As the thinker of the pair, I contemplate my body with curiosity, as a scientist might observe a primitive species. Though I identify with mind, the mind itself is matter.

“My relation to my body resembles a privy council’s relation to an adolescent king. I am thoughtful and wise and know best what to do, but my capricious body possesses the power and final authority, and I must tiptoe round its whims.”

Best,
Ray Kurzweil

AP’s president and chief executive officer, Gary Pruitt, described it as “serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”.

UPDATE 5/14/2013: slanted wording removed.

Immunostained image of engrafted islet in hydrogel in diabetic mouse. (Red areas are insulin-producing cells. Green areas are blood vessels, and blue areas are DNA nuclei in cells.) (Credit: Georgia Tech)

Georgia Tech engineers and Emory University clinicians have successfully transplanted insulin-producing cells into a diabetic mouse model, reversing diabetic symptoms in the animal in as little as 10 days.

It could help lead to a possible cure for Type 1 diabetes.

The research team engineered a biomaterial to protect the cluster of insulin-producing cells — donor pancreatic islets — during injection. To foster blood vessel formation, the material also contains proteins  that allow the cells to successfully graft, survive and function within the body.

The hydrogel material is compatible with biological tissues that is a promising therapeutic delivery vehicle. This water-swollen, cross-linked polymer surrounds the insulin-producing cells and protects them during injection.

The hydrogel containing the islets was delivered to a new injection site on the outside of the small intestine, thus avoiding direct injection into the blood stream.

Once in the body, the hydrogel degrades in a controlled fashion to release a growth factor protein that promotes blood vessel formation and connection of the transplanted islets to these new vessels. In the study, the blood vessels effectively grew into the biomaterial and successfully connected to the insulin-producing cells.

Four weeks after the transplantation, diabetic mice treated with the hydrogel had normal glucose levels, and the delivered islets were alive and vascularized to the same extent as islets in a healthy mouse pancreas. The technique also required fewer islets than previous transplantation attempts, which may allow doctors to treat more patients with limited donor samples. Currently, donor cells from two to three cadavers are needed for one patient.

While the new biomaterial and injection technique is promising, the study used genetically identical mice and therefore did not address immune rejection issues common to human applications. The research team has funding from JDRF to study whether an immune barrier they created will allow the cells to be accepted in genetically different mice models. If successful, the trials could move to larger animals.

“We broke up our strategy into two steps,” said Garcia, a member of Georgia Tech’s Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “We have shown that when delivered in the material we engineered, the islets will survive and graft. Now we must address immune acceptance issues.”

Type 1 diabetes is a chronic disease that occurs when the pancreas produces little or no insulin, a hormone that allows the transport of sugar and other nutrients into tissues where they are converted to energy needed for daily life.

Most people with Type 1 diabetes currently manage their blood glucose levels with multiple daily insulin injections or by using an insulin pump. But insulin therapy has limitations. It requires careful measurement of blood glucose levels, accurate dosage calculations and regular compliance to be effective.

This work was also funded by the Regenerative Engineering and Medicine Center at Georgia Tech and Emory, and the Atlanta Clinical and Translation Science Institute from the Clinical and Translational Science Award Program.

The Center for Pediatric Healthcare Technology Innovation at Georgia Tech, the Department of Veterans Affairs Merit Review Program and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases helped fund the project as well.

Yum, crunchy! Insects food stall in Bangkok, Thailand. (Credit: Takoradee/Wikimedia Commons)

The report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that eating insects could help boost nutrition and reduce pollution, BBC News reports.

It notes than over 2 billion people worldwide already supplement their diet with insects.

Wasps, beetles and other insects are currently “underutilized” as food for people and livestock, the report says.

The authors point out that insects are nutritious, with high protein, fat and mineral content.

Insects are also “extremely efficient” in converting feed into edible meat. Crickets, for example, need 12 times less feed than cattle to produce the same amount of protein, according to the report. And they produce fewer environmentally harmful greenhouse gases than other livestock.

Insects are regularly eaten as a delicacy by many of the world’s population.

The report suggests that the food industry could help in “raising the status of insects” by including them in new recipes and adding them to restaurant menus.

Would you like

A “microrobot” to measure the eye’s oxygen supply (credit: Ergeneman O. et al./IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering)

Researchers of the robotics lab at ETH Zurich have developed what ETH calls a “microrobot” (actually, a coated magnetic particle with no onboard  intelligence) that can be used to measure the retina’s oxygen supply.

An insufficient supply of oxygen can cause blindness. Glaucoma is only one of several diseases that can decrease the oxygen supply to the retina, sometimes within mere hours.

To make a fast and correct diagnosis, physicians need to be able to assess oxygen levels within the eye. But currently available tools are not very sensitive.

Measuring just 1 mm in length and 1/3 mm in diameter, the microparticle could be guided through the vitreous (fluid) material of the eye by external magnetic fields. A fluorescent dye on its surface emits fluorescence that fades gradually. The more oxygen is present, the faster it fades.

Setup for detecting oxygen (credit: Ergeneman O. et al./IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering)

In theory, ophthalmologists could inject the microparticle with a syringe, steer it into the correct position using magnetic fields, and microscopically measure the fluorescence through the pupil. It could be easily removed the same way is was.introduced.

The disadvantage of the method is that it is slightly invasive, so it entails a risk of infection. Other tools newly on the market are non-invasive, but less sensitive in measuring oxygen. A combination of such tools might work, the researchers suggest.

Don’t let go.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney:

In theaters October 4th.

Find out What it Means That an Hour’s Work Yields a Week’s Food in chapter 1. Foresee the Teeming Cities of Mars (chap. 21). Learn why it’s Keyboards Yesterday, Mind Reading Tomorrow (chap. 3). Have you wondered — Will Artificial Intelligence Threaten Civilization? (See chap. 12.) What happens When Genomes Get Cheap (chap. 6). Prepare for an Asteroid Apocalypse (chap. 25). Why you would benefit from Wiki-wiki-wikipedia (chap. 4). How we will Live Anywhere, Work Anywhere Else (chap. 2). How the future Tastes Like the Singularity (chap. 15). Get smarter with Smart Pills’n Such (chap. 5). Experience a Soylent Spring (chap. 9). Understand nukes better by Deconstructing Nonproliferation (chap. 13). Get ready for a Space Empire (chap. 14). There’s global warming, and there’s Warm, Poison Planet (chap. 17). But let’s not forget about Big Ice (chap. 22). Things may really grow on trees with New Plant Paradigms (chap. 24). What is Sic Transit Humanitas: The Transcent of Man (chap. 26)? We all have Questions (chap. 31). And much more!

Kindle edition also available here

With thanks to Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran, Andrew Tidby and Evan Hadfield for all their hard work.

Find out more:

Twitter: twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AstronautChrisHadfield
Google+: plus.google.com/113978637743265603454/po­­sts/p/pub

— Chris Hadfield