Dubai Panorama (credit: Stephen Wiltshire)

How can we explain “acquired savants” — people with extraordinary talent who’ve miraculously developed artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities as a result of a brain injury, or temporarily from a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) session — since they weren’t born with the talent and didn’t learn it later?

For example, how is it that somebody like Derek Amato (video below), who’d never demonstrated any musical talent before hitting his head at the bottom of a pool, could suddenly handle jazz and classical pieces of astounding complexity without training?

Darold A. Treffert, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and consultant for the movie Rain Man, speculates that it could be the result of  what he calls “genetic memory” (“ancestral memory”) that is triggered by rewiring of the brain to compensate for the injury.

See also:

Savant Syndrome (Darold Treffert website)

Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant, Darold Treffert and Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011

“Ancestral” or “Genetic” Memory: Factory Installed Software Darold Treffert, 2011

Conversations on Creativity with Darold Treffert, Psychology Today, April 27, 2011 (open access)

Augmenting Cognition,  Idan Segev and Henry Markram, EFPL Press, 2011

Stephen Wiltshire MBE

While the article in The Atlantic does not cover new findings, it summarizes some of the key ideas well. — Ed.

This year, 2012, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)  gave its stamp of approval to and seed funded — 100 Year Starship (100YSS) — a private organization to achieve perhaps the most daring initiative ever in space exploration:  human travel beyond our solar system to another star!

The Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence was selected by DARPA to receive seed funding to form 100 Year Starship (100YSS), an independent, non-governmental, long-term initiative that will ensure that the capabilities for human interstellar flight exist as soon as possible, and definitely within the next 100 years.

The winning 100YSS proposal, “An Inclusive, Audacious Journey Transforms Life Here on Earth and Beyond,” was created by Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence with team members Icarus Interstellar and the Foundation for Enterprise Development.

Alongside the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, a non-profit organization that promotes science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) awareness and achievement, the principal 100 Year Starship team members are: Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit research and development organization dedicated to the research that will enable interstellar flight; and the Foundation for Enterprise Development, centered on governance, innovation, entrepreneurship, technology and R&D based organizational planning, management, and strategic planning. The SETI Institute, a private, non-profit organization dedicated to astronomy, life sciences, education, and public outreach, will hold a permanent seat on the 100YSS Advisory Council.

To sign up for e-mail alerts from 100 Year Starship or learn more about the 100YSS Public Symposium visit www.100YSS.org. Follow 100 Year Starship on Twitter (@100YSS). Contact 100 Year Starship at info@100YSS.org.

(Credit: Julius Schorzman/Wikimedia Commons)

Older adults who drank coffee — caffeinated or decaffeinated — had a lower risk of death overall than others who did not drink coffee, according a study by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and AARP.

Coffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections, although the association was not seen for cancer.

These results from a large study of older adults were observed after adjustment for the effects of other risk factors on mortality, such as smoking and alcohol consumption.

Researchers caution, however, that they can’t be sure whether these associations mean that drinking coffee actually makes people live longer.

Neal Freedman, Ph.D., Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, NCI, and his colleagues examined the association between coffee drinking and risk of death in 400,000 U.S. men and women ages 50 to 71 who participated in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study. Information about coffee intake was collected once by questionnaire at study entry in 1995-1996. The participants were followed until the date they died or Dec. 31, 2008, whichever came first.

The researchers found that the association between coffee and reduction in risk of death increased with the amount of coffee consumed. Relative to men and women who did not drink coffee, those who consumed three or more cups of coffee per day had approximately a 10 percent lower risk of death. Coffee drinking was not associated with cancer mortality among women, but there was a slight and only marginally statistically significant association of heavier coffee intake with increased risk of cancer death among men.

“Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in America, but the association between coffee consumption and risk of death has been unclear. We found coffee consumption to be associated with lower risk of death overall, and of death from a number of different causes,” said Freedman. “Although we cannot infer a causal relationship between coffee drinking and lower risk of death, we believe these results do provide some reassurance that coffee drinking does not adversely affect health.”

The investigators caution that coffee intake was assessed by self-report at a single time point and therefore might not reflect long-term patterns of intake. Also, information was not available on how the coffee was prepared (espresso, boiled, filtered, etc.); the researchers consider it possible that preparation methods may affect the levels of any protective components in coffee.

“The mechanism by which coffee protects against risk of death — if indeed the finding reflects a causal relationship — is not clear, because coffee contains more than 1,000 compounds that might potentially affect health,” said Freedman. “The most studied compound is caffeine, although our findings were similar in those who reported the majority of their coffee intake to be caffeinated or decaffeinated.”

Ref.: Neal D. Freedman et al., Association of Coffee Drinking with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality, New England Journal of Medicine, 2012, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1112010

Wireless power transfer experimental setup (credit: Z. Pantic and S. Lukic)

Researchers from North Carolina State University (NC State) have developed a new way to fine-tune wireless power transfer (WPT) receivers, making the systems more efficient and functional. WPT systems hold promise for charging electric vehicles, electronic devices, and other technologies.

Researchers have previously shown that it is possible to transmit power wirelessly by using magnetic resonance, but even minor changes in how the transmitter or receiver is tuned can result in faulty power transmission when the resonant frequencies don’t match.

A new prototype developed at NC State addresses the problem by automatically and precisely re-tuning the receivers in WPT systems. The researchers focused on receivers because methods already exist that allow researchers to use electronics to precisely tune the transmitters.

“We’re optimistic that this technology moves us one step closer to realizing functional WPT systems that can be used in real-world circumstances,” says Dr. Srdjan Lukic, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research.

How it works

Structure of the WPT system

WPT systems work by transmitting magnetic waves on a specific frequency from a transmitter to a receiver. These magnetic waves interact with a coil in the receiver to induce an electric current. If the coil is tuned so that its resonant frequency matches the frequency of the magnetic waves, the current it produces is amplified.

However, if the receiver and the transmitter frequencies differ even slightly, the system becomes inefficient and doesn’t transfer a significant amount of power. This is a problem because many factors can affect the tuning of a receiver or transmitter, such as temperature or proximity to other magnetic objects. In other words, a hot summer day could wreak havoc on the tuning of a receiver.

The engineers developed an electronic prototype that incorporates additional circuitry into the receiver that does two things: it injects small amounts of reactive power into the receiver coil as needed to maintain its original resonant frequency; and if the transmitter’s tuning changes, the prototype can read the trace amount of current being transmitted and tune the receiver’s frequency to match. The effect is similar to autotuning vocal pitch in pop music.

“Because we are using electronics to inject reactive power into the receiver coil, we can be extremely precise when tuning the receiver,” Lukic says. “This degree of fine-tuning maximizes the efficiency of the WPT system. The next step is to try incorporating this work into technology that can be used to wirelessly charge electric vehicles.”

Z. Pantic, S. Lukic, Framework and Topology for Active Tuning of Parallel Compensated Receivers in Wireless Power Transfer Systems, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 2012, DOI: 10.1109/TPEL.2012.2196055

New York City Stock Exchange (credit: Norbert Nagel/Wikimedia Commons)

World stocks fell Friday after credit downgrades slapped on Spanish banks unnerved investors already worried about the stability of the 17-country euro currency union.

Political turmoil in Greece has increased the likelihood that it could leave the 17-country monetary union, a move that could have ripple effects throughout Europe and the world’s financial markets.

Markets were jolted by Moody’s downgrade Thursday of 16 Spanish banks, said Jackson Wong, vice president at Tanrich Securities in Hong Kong.

In currencies, the euro fell to $1.2686 from $1.2714 late Thursday in New York. The dollar rose slightly to 79.30 yen from 79.28 yen.

Network showing genes that are regulated by FOS and SP1 genes. It contains many literature-associated and highly correlated genes. Genes reported in the literature associated with pancreatic cancer survival are represented with larger circles. The absolute correlation coefficient of gene expression with survival in the screening dataset is shown in red. (Credit: C. Winter et al./PLoS)

The algorithm Google uses to rank search results can now scan cancers to see which molecules best reveal the risks patients face, researchers have found, Txchnologist reports.

By seeing how proteins are linked in a kind of molecular Facebook, search engine algorithms could also help unearth new targets for drugs to help combat tumors, investigators added.

NetRank

The algorithm Google uses to rank which results pop up first in search queries, PageRank, orders results based on how other web pages are connected to them via hyperlinks.

Researchers modified PageRank to develop NetRank, which scans how genes and proteins in a cell are similarly connected through a network of interactions with their neighbors — “‘friends’ in the social network analogy,” said researcher Christof Winter, a medical doctor and computational biologist at Lund University in Sweden.

The investigators focused on pancreatic cancer, the most common form of which, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, accounts for approximately 130,000 deaths each year in Europe and the United States. Very few tests exist to find out a prognosis for the disease — how it might progress, whether a patient might live or die.

The researchers used NetRank on about 20,000 proteins to see which ones were the best indicators for survival. They identified seven proteins that could help assess how aggressive a patient’s tumor is and guide clinicians to decide if the prognosis was worth trying chemotherapy or not.

As to how accurate prognoses based on these seven markers were, roughly speaking, “our markers are right in two-thirds of cases, and wrong in one-third,” Winter said. These markers were 6 to 9 percent more accurate at prognoses compared with those relying on conventional clinical parameters.

Monte Carlo cross-validation workflow to evaluate the accuracy of methods for ranking genes for outcome prediction (credit: C. Winter et al./PLoS)

In addition to improving prognoses of cancer, this research could also help identify new targets to help destroy tumors.

Currently Winter and his colleagues are analyzing DNA and RNA data from breast cancer. The hope is “to develop a DNA-based prognostic blood test for breast cancer patients,” he said.

Ref.: Christof Winter et al., Google Goes Cancer: Improving Outcome Prediction for Cancer Patients by Network-Based Ranking of Marker Genes, PLoS Computational Biology, 2012, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002511 (open access)

“Moving away from copper lines is an example of abandoning obsolete technology and embracing technology that is faster, better, cheaper and more convenient,” said Rob Frieden, Pioneers Chair in Cable Television and professor of telecommunications and law. “But the risk is that we may be creating a digital divide — not necessarily a divide between the rich and poor, but between the information rich and information poor.”

Telephone companies are lobbying for government regulators to free them of their traditional role as a public utility, citing the convergence and availability of new communication technologies, such as cellular phones and fiber optic cable, that make copper-based telephone land lines obsolete, according to Frieden. However, not all these alternatives are as affordable and as ubiquitous as copper landlines, a problem that could leave many rural residents underserved, he said.

Frieden said rural customers could replace land line telephones with cellular phones, for example, but most cell phone companies charge a fee for each minute of use — metering — while most fees for land lines are unmetered and are paid through a fixed monthly charge. He also doubts that cellular service will be as dependable as landlines.

“Cell phone companies have these colorful maps that show how well they cover areas,” Frieden said. “But there are lots of places — including places in rural Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York — that do not have cell phone service, or offer limited services not suitable for broadband, Internet access.”

Fiber optic lines are glass wires that can carry voice, television and Internet signals. For instance, fiber optic equipment is often used for Voice Over Internet Protocol — VOIP — a technology that uses broadband Internet to carry such services as voice, texting and fax.

While fiber optic lines are more common now, they are usually not found in rural or remote areas.

“The phone companies are right,” said Frieden. “There are other forms of competition now, but these alternatives are not fair or adequate everywhere.”

As communication technologies merge, telephone companies face stiff competition from cable companies, which are classified as information service providers by the government and face limited regulation. Frieden said that telephone companies, however, are regulated as a utility. As a utility, phone companies — called carriers of last resort — are obligated to provide service to customers. To increase profitability, telephone companies would like to be released from the carrier-of-last-resort designation that binds them to providing high-cost, labor-intensive telephone landline service.

Frieden said that the push to end the phone company’s status as carriers of last resort may be the first step toward complete deregulation.

While telephone company lobbyists suggest that the market forces will ensure that all customers will eventually receive equal service in a deregulated environment, Frieden is skeptical about this promise.

“Everyone wants to say, the marketplace is great,” Frieden said. “But there’s also something called market failure particularly in rural and low-income areas.”

Ref.: Rob Frieden, The mixed blessing of a deregulatory endpoint for the public switched telephone network, presented at the End of the Phone System workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania, under review by the Journal of Information Policy

Reconstruction of Gage's skull and brain tissue (credit: John Darrell Van Horn et al./UCLA)

In 1848, Phineas Gage, the supervisor for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad in Vermont was using a 13-pound, 3-foot-7-inch rod to pack blasting powder into a rock when he triggered an explosion that drove the rod through his left cheek and out of the top of his head.

Miraculously, Gage lived, becoming the most famous case in the history of neuroscience because of the injury’s reported effects on his personality and behavior, which were said to be profound.

Gage went from being an affable 25-year-old to one that was fitful, irreverent and profane. His friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.”

Over the years, various scientists have studied and argued about the exact location and degree of damage to Gage’s cerebral cortex and the impact it had on his personality. Now, for the first time, researchers at UCLA, using brain-imaging data that was lost to science for a decade, have broadened the examination of Gage to look at the damage to the white matter “pathways” that connect various regions of the brain.

Reporting in the May 16 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, Jack Van Horn, a UCLA assistant professor of neurology, and colleagues note that while approximately 4 percent of the cerebral cortex was intersected by the rod’s passage, more than 10 percent of Gage’s total white matter was damaged. The passage of the tamping iron caused widespread damage to the white matter connections throughout Gage’s brain, which likely was a major contributor to the behavioral changes he experienced.

Because white matter and its myelin sheath — the fatty coating around the nerve fibers that form the basic wiring of the brain — connect the billions of neurons that allow us to reason and remember, the research not only adds to the lore of Phineas Gage but may eventually lead to a better understanding of multiple brain disorders that are caused in part by similar damage to these connections.

“What we found was a significant loss of white matter connecting the left frontal regions and the rest of the brain,” said Van Horn, who is a member of UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI). “We suggest that the disruption of the brain’s ‘network’ considerably compromised it. This may have had an even greater impact on Mr. Gage than the damage to the cortex alone in terms of his purported personality change.”

LONI is part of an ambitious joint effort with Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Institutes of Health to document the trillions of microscopic links between every one of the brain’s 100 billion neurons — the so-called “connectome.” And because mapping the brain’s physical wiring eventually will lead to answers about what causes mental conditions that may be linked to the breakdown of these connections, it was appropriate, as well as historically interesting, to take a new look at the damage to Gage’s brain.

Since Gage’s 189-year-old skull, which is on display in the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School, is now fragile and unlikely to again be subjected to medical imaging, the researchers had to track down the last known imaging data, from 2001, which had been lost due to various circumstances at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard, for some 10 years.

The authors were able to recover the computed tomographic data files and managed to reconstruct the scans, which revealed the highest-quality resolution available for modeling Gage’s skull. Next, they utilized advanced computational methods to model and determine the exact trajectory of the tamping iron that shot through his skull.

Finally, because the original brain tissue was, of course, long gone, the researchers used modern-day brain images of males that matched Gage’s age and (right) handedness, then used software to position a composite of these 110 images into Gage’s virtual skull, the assumption being that Gage’s anatomy would have been similar.

Van Horn found that nearly 11 percent of Gage’s white matter was damaged, along with 4 percent of the cortex.

“Our work illustrates that while cortical damage was restricted to the left frontal lobe, the passage of the tamping iron resulted in the widespread interruption of white matter connectivity throughout his brain, so it likely was a major contributor to the behavioral changes he experienced,” Van Horn said.

“Connections were lost between the left frontal, left temporal and right frontal cortices and the left limbic structures of the brain, which likely had considerable impact on his executive as well as his emotional functions.”

And while Gage’s personality changed, he eventually was able to travel and find employment as a stagecoach driver for several years in South America. Ultimately, he died in San Francisco, 12 years after the accident.

A modern parallel

“The extensive loss of white matter connectivity, affecting both hemispheres, plus the direct damage by the rod, which was limited to the left cerebral hemisphere, is not unlike modern patients who have suffered a traumatic brain injury,” he said.

“And it is analogous to certain forms of degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease or frontal temporal dementia, in which neural pathways in the frontal lobes are degraded, which is known to result in profound behavioral changes.”

Van Horn noted that the quantification of the changes to Gage’s brain’s pathways might well provide important insights for clinical assessment and outcome-monitoring in modern-day brain trauma patients.

The work was performed as part of the Human Connectome Project.

Ref.: John Darrell Van Horn et al., Mapping Connectivity Damage in the Case of Phineas Gage, PLoS ONE, 2012 (open access)

Debrief tool used in the experiment displays a video replay of the operator console (similar to this map display), and a timeline of events suggested by AEMASE for discussion during debrief. The tool also includes visualizations of entity movement over time. (Credit: S. M. Stevens-Adams et al.)

Navy pilots and other flight specialists soon will have a new “smart machine” installed in training simulators that learns from expert instructors to more efficiently train their students.

Sandia National Laboratories’ Automated Expert Modeling & Student Evaluation (AEMASE, pronounced “amaze”) is being provided to the Navy as a component of flight simulators.

Components are now being used to train Navy personnel to fly H-60 helicopters and a complete system will soon be delivered for training on the E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, said Robert G. Abbott, a Sandia computer scientist and AEMASE’s inventor. The work is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.

AEMASE is a cognitive software application that updates its knowledge of experts’ performance on training simulators in real time to prevent training sessions from becoming obsolete and automatically evaluates student performance, both of which reduce overall training costs, Abbott said.

“AEMASE is able to adapt and is aware of what’s going on,” he said. “That’s what’s driving our cognitive modeling and automated systems that learn over time from the environment and from their interactions with people.”

Previous flight simulators have not done well with ambiguous or new situations that required time-consuming reprogramming, making it difficult for the military to adapt quickly to changing environments and tactics.

AEMASE bypasses lengthy interviews of instructors and reprogramming once the simulator is running. Instead, instructors fly the simulator themselves to capture their expertise, a feature that works particularly well in ambiguous situations where it’s difficult to program a set of explicit rules, Abbott said.

Melissa Walwanis, a senior research psychologist at the Naval Air Warfare Center’s Training System Division in Orlando, Fla., said AEMASE will give Navy trainees specific ways to improve performance through machine learning, automated performance measurement, and recordings of trainees’ voices during the training sessions.

AEMASE addresses a needle-in-a-haystack problem. Just as search engines find certain words across the Internet, AEMASE scans hundreds of training sessions to find specific actions or scenarios and makes comparisons, Abbott said.

The software is designed for context recognition. It searches until it recognizes a situation it has seen before and determines whether the students are making a desirable decision, Abbott said.

The software recognizes there may be multiple right answers that incorporate different ways of responding to the situation, Forsythe added. For example, AEMASE tracks certain flight parameters — say distance, the angle of the aircraft from the ground and velocity — to create vectors that are treated as points within a multidimensional space defined by the parameters.

Different “right” answers are expressed as points in the space, but will tend to gather in one area, while poor performance can be measured by a point’s distance from the “expert” points.

But for instructors, AEMASE’s interface is simple. They can flag actions by pushing a one-click thumbs-up button to record good behavior or a thumbs-down button when students fly too low or too close together in the simulation, Abbott said.

AEMASE places those flagged events on a timeline display, so instructors and students can review errors in recordings of student performance. Then AEMASE uses that information to recognize other instances of the errors, helping the instructors become more efficient by automatically flagging errors for them to review with other students.

These flags are the seeds for the model’s future development as scenarios and preferred actions evolve over time, Forsythe said.

AEMASE also incorporates speech recognition technology to assess how effectively teams communicate.

Sandia is adapting the software to similar training aids for computer security analysts. Potential applications include driver’s education, automating robots, and many other areas, Abbott said.

Prototype of EEG-driven bionic legs (credit: Joy Wilson, University of Houston)

Dr. José Contreras-Vidal of the University of Houston has designed a pair of bionic legs that respond directly to signals from the brain.

The problem with the current brain-computer interface approach — implanting electrodes into a brain, as in the BrainGate2 system, is that it’s a dangerous procedure and can also lead to infections. It also requires a bulky hardware system.

Contreras-Vidal’s approach gets round these difficulties by employing electroencephalography (EEG), which measures those electrical signals from the brain that reach the scalp. The recording electrodes can be carried by a skull cap, and nothing has to penetrate the skin.

Such second-hand signals are not as precise as ones collected directly from the brain itself, and probably could not control the complex movements required of an arm and a hand, but he and colleagues at the University of Maryland were able to do this by analyzing what goes on in the brain when someone moves his limbs.

They used a system of cameras to record the movement patterns of a set of able-bodied volunteers who were walking on a treadmill, and then correlated the result with the electrical signals detected simultaneously at their scalps.

Even a simple task, like wiggling a toe, engages many parts of the brain. These include the frontal cortex (where decisions are made), the motor cortex (which controls muscle activity), the somatosensory cortex (where the sense of touch is located) and the part of the parietal cortex that regulates kinaesthesia (the sense of bodily motion, which is built up from signals from the muscles and the vestibular systems of the ears). By choosing sites carefully, the researchers were able to cover all these areas with as few as 12 electrodes.

The next step is to turn the result into reliable instructions that can operate a set of legs. These are made by Rex Bionics, a firm based in New Zealand. They are a partial exoskeleton that allows a user to stand and walk independently, without crutches, and are normally operated by hand controls. To adapt them to thought control, a group of able-bodied people will first don the cap and perambulate in the legs around a laboratory, to refine the process. Then — with luck, some time this summer — a full-scale trial in collaboration with a group of paralysed volunteers will start.

If the trial works, Dr Contreras-Vidal and his colleagues believe their technique will transform the lives of those with spinal injuries. It might also act as a form of physiotherapy, to help victims of strokes restore the use of their legs.

And it will certainly save a lot of money. A set of bionic legs can cost as much as $150,000. But the lifetime cost of caring for a 25-year-old with severe spinal injury is around $3m.

ZeroN (credit: MIT Media Lab)

In The Avengers, Tony Stark manipulates objects in thin air. MIT Media Lab researchers Jinha Lee and  Rehmi Post have actually created a similar tactile user interface for manipulating real floating objects in 3D space, called the ZeroN.

It’s essentially a small field in which gravity doesn’t overcome an object. Through the efforts of finely tuned electromagnetism, a user can place a metal ball in midair as easily as they’d place something on a shelf.

The ball can be repositioned by hand or by computer, it can be animated on a path, and with the help of software, it can even serve as a virtual camera or light source in a 3-D scene (a sort of 3-D animation suite that you can touch).

Lee has hidden the real magic just above where there’s a 3-D actuator housing an electromagnet. It’s this arm that provides the perfectly tuned magnetic loop (requiring a circuit built by Rehmi Post from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms), to keep the ball stable. But to drag that ball around lateral space, the actuator actually just repositions itself, moving in tandem with object, and keeping an eye out on its position with 3-D infrared cameras (as you see in the Kinect).

“ZeroN can remember how it has been moved. Physical motions of people can be collected in this medium to preserve and play them back indefinitely. When the users move and release the ZeroN, it continues to float and starts to move along the same path. This allows a unique, tangible record of a user’s physical presence and motion which will continue to exist even after the death of the person,” Lee explains.

“With this functionality, ZeroN can be adopted in many applications: animation prototyping, physics simulation/education, and 3-D design studios, etc. Many of the control that users had to have with mouse and a screen can be tangible and more intuitive.”

Alginate-based "pearls" containing antiaging ingredients are mixed into an activating cream in three layers, including 20- to 200-nm nanoemulsions to encapsulate lipophilic actives (credit: Capsum)

Growing demand for “enhanced cosmetics” is fostering research on micro-capsules and other technology to package those ingredients in creams, lotions and other products to take advantage of a global market valued at $425 billion in 2011.

To meet that demand, chemical companies are looking for better ways to encapsulate these additives — which can reduce inflammation, repair hair or prevent wrinkles — to stop them from breaking down in the bottle or help deliver them to the skin and hair more effectively.

A surfactant concentrated in the lamellar phase and engineered to form an onionlike vehicle has voids that can encapsulate and deliver active ingredients to skin and hair (credit: Rhodia)

Active ingredient delivery systems are already incorporated into 10 to 20 percent of cosmetics on the market today, a number predicted to grow to 35 or 45 percent in five years.

Cosmetics makers are adopting novel delivery systems for skin using a variety of micelles, vesicles, surfactants, and polymers, but they don’t often reveal those details to the public. Exceptions include:

• Air Products & Chemicals has adapted an insulin sugar delivery system to make better sunscreen.
• Microcapsules help coat the skin with protective ingredients, while another capsule system carries vitamins C and E beneath the skin as a second line of defense.
• Rovi’s Dermoprotectyl, a skin care ingredient, that combines two systems for delivering actives has two systems. One, based on inulin sugar nanoscale vesicles, places sunscreen ingredients on the surface of the skin. A second system, using lipid protective spheres, deposits vitamins E and C just below the surface of the skin for a second line of defense against sun-induced damage.
• A product from Evonik Industries uses water droplets coated in silica to make a “dry water.” When combined with a powder containing fragrances or vitamins and rubbed on skin or in hair, the water is released to form a cream that delivers the ingredients.

Ref.: Marc S. Reisch, Enhancing Cosmetics, Chemical & Engineering News, 2012 (open access)

Artist's view of a dust torus surrounding the accretion disk and central black hole in active galactic nuclei (credit: Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet)

By combining the light of three powerful infrared telescopes, an international research team has observed the active accretion phase of a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy tens of millions of light years away, yielding an unprecedented amount of data for such observations.

The resolution at which they were able to observe this highly luminescent active galactic nucleus (AGN) has given them direct confirmation of how mass accretes onto black holes in centers of galaxies.

“This three-telescope interferometry is a major milestone toward directly imaging the growth phase of supermassive black holes,” said Sebastian Hoenig, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Santa Barbara Department of Physics.

Very Large Telescope Interferometer at the ESO/Paranal Observatory in Chile (credit: Sebastian Hoenig)

They found that a ring of hot dust that marks the transition from a more-distant mixture of gas and dust in a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) structure to a gaseous disk closer to the black hole. The dusty part is interesting because it dominates the infrared emission of active galactic nuclei and can be easily observed, said Gerd Weigelt, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

By using the AMBER interferometry instrument to simultaneously combine the light from three 8-meter telescopes at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the research team was able to achieve the angular resolution needed to observe the hot dust ring. The Paranal Observatory is operated by the European Southern Observatories (ESO). To achieve the needed angular resolution in a single telescope, it would have to be 130 meters in diameter.

The combination of the light from the three telescopes was no small feat, as the tiny differences in the arrival of light in the individual telescopes have to undergo constant correction with an accuracy of a few microns.

Participating institutions:

• Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastronomy
• UCSB Department of Physics
• Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Firenze
• INAF — Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri
• Lagrange Laboratory,  University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, CNRS
• University Joseph Fourier (UJF) — Grenoble
• Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble (IPAG)

Ref.: G. Weigelt et al., VLTI/AMBER observations of the Seyfert nucleus of NGC 3783, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2012, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201219213 (open access)

Demonstration of ultrafast disintegration of matter by 2 keV LCLS pulses: The team combined techniques commonly used in solid state physics (Bragg reflection) with techniques from plasma physics (spectroscopy of diffusely-scattered light) to characterize ultrafast heating in graphite. (Credit: LLNL)

For the first time, scientists have seen an X-ray-irradiated mineral go to two different states of matter in about 40 femtoseconds (a femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second).

Using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford, Stefan Hau-Riege of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and colleagues heated graphite to induce a transition from solid to liquid and to warm-dense plasma.

Ultrafast phase transitions from solid to liquid and plasma states are important in the development of new material-synthesis techniques, in ultrafast imaging, and high-energy density science.

By using different pulse lengths and calculating different spectra, the team was able to extract the time dependence of plasma parameters, such as electron and ion temperatures and ionization states.

“We found that the heating and disintegration of the ion lattice occurs much faster than anticipated,” Hau-Riege said.

The research provides new insights into the behavior of matter irradiated by intense hard X-rays. Though the study ultimately serves as a breakthrough in plasma physics and ultrafast materials science, it also affects other fields such as single molecule biological imaging and X-ray optics.

For single-molecule bioimaging, the team found that in certain cases it may be substantially more difficult than anticipated because energy transfer is surprisingly fast. In X-ray optics, they found that the damage threshold is lower than anticipated.

This is the first XFEL high-energy density science experiment that used inelastic X-ray scattering as a plasma diagnostic.

In addition to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, participating institutions include Universitat Duisburg-Essen; Max Planck Advanced Study Group, Center for Free Electron Laser Science; Max Planck Institut fur medizinische Forschung; and Max Planck Institut fur Kernphysik, all of Germany.

Ref.: Forthcoming in May 21 edition of Physical Review Letters.

(Credit: Soctech/Flickr)

Greek officials are cobbling together an emergency plan after talks to form a coalition government disintegrated Tuesday. In the meantime, Greeks have withdrawn $900 million from local banks.

With Greece in deep political turmoil (some are even talking apocalyptically of civil war) after voters backed an incoherent constellation of anti-austerity parties, European central bankers and finance ministers have been warning it that its departure from the euro is inevitable if it does not abide by the terms of its bail-out.

Also see:

Groping towards Grexit
The Bank Runs In Greece Will Soon Be Followed By Bank Runs In Other European Nations
Nationalized Spanish Bank Plummets On News Of Bank Run

Georgia Tech researchers adjust optics as part of research into the production of single photons for use in optical quantum information processing and the study of certain physical systems (credit: John Toon)

Researchers at Georgia Tech have used lasers to reliably and individually produce single photons from individual atoms in a cloud of ultra-cooled rubidium gas.

Single photons are an essential element for guaranteed secure communications in quantum cryptography — where an attacker can use extra or stray photons to eavesdrop on a message — and to address individual qubits in quantum memory architectures, where single atoms may serve as the storage unit.

This reliable, high-speed method of creating single photons can also be used to distribute entanglement to remote locations, as used in quantum teleportation, thus making the method a potential enabler for quantum repeaters for long-distance quantum communications, says Georgia Tech prof. Alex Kuzmich, lead investigator for the research.

“We are able to convert single-atom excitations into single photons with very substantial efficiency, for investigating entangled states of atoms, spin waves and photons,” he explained . “This new photon source is about 1,000 times faster than any existing system.”

Creating single photons: (A) A cold dense sample of atomic Rubidium gas is prepared as an optical lattice. Two light fields (Ω1 and Ω2) excite a single atom from the ground state to produce a spin wave. A readout laser pulse (Ω3) converts the spin wave into a single photon. Two detectors, D1 and D2, measure the photon. (B) Relevant quantum energy levels for the Rubidium gas; and electronic, hyperfine, and Zeeman quantum numbers. (Credit: Y. O. Dudin et al/Science)

“The next goal may to develop a quantum gate between light fields to deterministically create complex entangled states of atoms and light, which would add valuable capabilities [such as scalable, complex quantum memories] to the fields of quantum networks and computing,” explained Kuzmich. “With further increases in efficiency and generation rate — and integration with long-lived quantum memories — such a single-photon source may make optical quantum information processing possible.”

“Our results also hold promise for studies of dynamics and disorder in many-body systems with tunable interactions,” Kuzmich explained. “In particular, translational symmetry breaking, phase transitions and non-equilibrium many-body physics could be investigated in the future, using strongly-coupled Rydberg excitations of an atomic gas.”

A primary feature of these systems is that the interaction between the atoms can can be tuned — from very strong, to none at all. This tunable interaction may enable physicists to understand the behavior of complex materials, and to create entirely new, exotic quantum phases of matter that don’t yet exist in nature.

Ref.: Y. O. Dudin, A. Kuzmich, “Strongly Interacting Rydberg Excitations of a Cold Atomic Gas,” Science, April 2012 DOI:10.1126/science.1217901

Google Knowledge Graph

Google has launched the Knowledge Graph, which it says will help you discover new information quickly and easily, according to the Official Google Blog.

Think of it as Google + Wikipedia + Wolfram Alpha + Bing.

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine, the words [taj mahal] have been just that — two words.

So Google has been working on an intelligent model — a “graph” — that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not text strings.

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about — landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more — and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query.

“This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do,” the Google blog says.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook, but it’s also augmented at a much larger scale — “because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth,” the blog says. “It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.”

The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:

1. Find the right thing

Language can be ambiguous — do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean — just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results.

This is one way the Knowledge Graph makes Google Search more intelligent — your results are more relevant because we understand these entities, and the nuances in their meaning, the way you do.

2. Get the best summary

With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so it can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries.

How do we know which facts are most likely to be needed for each item? For that, we go back to our users and study in aggregate what they’ve been asking Google about each item. For example, people are interested in knowing what books Charles Dickens wrote, whereas they’re less interested in what books Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and more in what buildings he designed.

The Knowledge Graph also helps us understand the relationships between things. Marie Curie is a person in the Knowledge Graph, and she had two children, one of whom also won a Nobel Prize, as well as a husband, Pierre Curie, who claimed a third Nobel Prize for the family. All of these are linked in our graph. It’s not just a catalog of objects; it also models all these inter-relationships. It’s the intelligence between these different entities that’s the key.

3. Go deeper and broader

The Knowledge Graph can help you make some unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a whole new line of inquiry. Do you know where Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons, got the idea for Homer, Marge and Lisa’s names? It’s a bit of a surprise.

“We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want,” says the blog. “And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for.

“For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him. In fact, some of the most serendipitous discoveries I’ve made using the Knowledge Graph are through the magical ‘People also search for’ feature. One of my favorite books is The White Tiger, the debut novel by Aravind Adiga, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Using the Knowledge Graph, I discovered three other books that had won the same prize and one that won the Pulitzer. I can tell you, this suggestion was spot on!

Google has begun to gradually roll out the Knowledge Graph to U.S. English users. It’s also going to be available on smartphones and tablets.

Using a new microscopy method called multifocal SIM (MSIM), nanoscale cell structures such as microtubules (shown here) can be observed in living fish embryos (credit: NIH, KIT)

A new hybrid method to visualize cell structures in living fish larvae has been developed by researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“The zebrafish is perfectly suited for genetic studies of cells, as its larvae are completely transparent,” explains Marina Mione of KIT.

Microtubules, a key component of the the cell’s cytoskeleton, have a length of about 100 µm and a diameter of about 20 nm, corresponding to a hundred thousandth of a human hair.

The new hybrid microscopy method is called multifocal SIM (MSIM), which combines the resolution-doubling characteristics of structured illumination microscopy (SIM) with the physical optical sectioning of confocal microscopy. The method uses commercially available parts and open-source software, allowing for easy integration with wide-field microscopes.

The object is not illuminated completely, but only at a certain spot with special light. Scattered light is minimized and the illuminated detail is represented sharply. A series of images taken at variable illumination is then processed by a computer.

Smart illumination even allows for adjusting the depth of field to image various depth levels, and to combine them into a 3D image on the computer.

The researchers observed the early stage of the fish’s lateral line, which develops about 45 µm below the skin of the fish. Via this organ, the fish perceives movement stimuli in water. Such images of living organisms also provide valuable findings regarding the development of vertebrates on the cellular level.

The tropical zebrafish living in freshwater has several advantages as a genetic model organism. It is sufficiently small for easy cultivation and large enough to easily distinguish individual organs. It has a short generation cycle and produces many offsprings. And as a vertebrate, it has a number of microbiological properties in common with human beings.

Ref.: Andrew G York et al., Resolution doubling in live, multicellular organisms via multifocal structured illumination microscopy, Nature Methods, 2012, DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.2025

(Credit: Brown University)

On April 12, 2011, nearly 15 years after she became paralyzed and unable to speak, a woman controlled a robotic arm by thinking about moving her arm and hand to lift a bottle of coffee to her mouth and take a drink, using the BrainGate neural interface system.

That achievement is one of the advances in brain-computer interfaces, restorative neurotechnology, and assistive robot technology by the BrainGate2 collaboration of researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Brown University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

The BrainGate2 Neural Interface System: an implanted microelectrode array detects brain signals, which are converted by a computer into machine instructions, allowing control of robotic devices by thought (credit: Brown University)

A 58-year-old woman and a 66-year-old man participated in the study. They had each been paralyzed by a brainstem stroke years earlier, which left them with no functional control of their limbs.

In the research, the participants used neural activity to directly control two different robotic arms, one developed by the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics and the other by DEKA Research and Development Corp., to perform reaching and grasping tasks across a broad three-dimensional space.

The BrainGate2 pilot clinical trial employs the investigational BrainGate system initially developed at Brown University, in which a baby aspirin-sized device with a grid of 96 tiny electrodes is implanted in the motor cortex — a part of the brain that is involved in voluntary movement.

The electrodes are close enough to individual neurons to record the neural activity associated with intended movement. An external computer translates the pattern of impulses across a population of neurons into commands to operate assistive devices, such as the DLR and DEKA robot arms used in the study.

BrainGate participants have previously demonstrated neurally based two-dimensional point-and-click control of a cursor on a computer screen and rudimentary control of simple robotic devices.

The study represents the first demonstration and the first peer-reviewed report of people with tetraplegia using brain signals to control a robotic arm in three-dimensional space to complete a task usually performed by their arm.

“Our goal in this research is to develop technology that will restore independence and mobility for people with paralysis or limb loss,” said lead author Dr. Leigh Hochberg, a neuroengineer and critical care neurologist who holds appointments at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Brown University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard.

Hochberg adds that even after nearly 15 years, a part of the brain essentially “disconnected” from its original target by a brainstem stroke was still able to direct the complex, multidimensional movement of an external arm — in this case, a robotic limb. The researchers also noted that one patient was able to perform the tasks more than five years after the investigational BrainGate electrode array was implanted. This sets a new benchmark for how long implanted brain-computer interface electrodes have remained viable and provided useful command signals.

John Donoghue, the VA and Brown neuroscientist who pioneered BrainGate more than a decade ago and who is co-senior author of the study, said the paper shows how far the field of brain-computer interfaces has come since the first demonstrations of computer control with BrainGate.

“This paper reports an important advance by rigorously demonstrating in more than one participant that precise three-dimensional neural control of robot arms is not only possible, but also repeatable,” said Donoghue, who directs the Brown Institute for Brain Science.

“We’ve moved significantly closer to returning everyday functions, like serving yourself a sip of coffee, usually performed effortlessly by the arm and hand, for people who are unable to move their own limbs. We are also encouraged to see useful control more than five years after implant of the BrainGate array in one of our participants. This work is a critical step toward realizing the long-term goal of creating a neurotechnology that will restore movement, control, and independence to people with paralysis or limb loss.”

In the research, the robots acted as a substitute for each participant’s paralyzed arm. The robotic arms responded to the participants’ intent to move as they imagined reaching for each foam target. The robot hand grasped the target when the participants imagined a hand squeeze. Because the diameter of the targets was more than half the width of the robot hand openings, the task required the participants to exert precise control.

In 158 trials over four days, subject S3 was able to touch the target within an allotted time in 48.8 percent of the cases using the DLR robotic arm and hand and 69.2 percent of the cases with the DEKA arm and hand, which has the wider grasp. In 45 trials using the DEKA arm, T2 touched the target 95.6 percent of the time. Of the successful touches, S3 grasped the target 43.6 percent of the time with the DLR arm and 66.7 percent of the time with the DEKA arm. T2’s grasp succeeded 62.2 percent of the time.

T2 performed the session in this study on his fourth day of interacting with the arm; the prior three sessions were focused on system development. Using his eyes to indicate each letter, he later described his control of the arm: “I just imagined moving my own arm and the [DEKA] arm moved where I wanted it to go.”

The study used two advanced robotic arms: the DLR Light-Weight Robot III with DLR five-fingered hand and the DEKA Arm System. The DLR LWR-III, which is designed to assist in recreating actions like the human arm and hand and to interact with human users, could be valuable as an assistive robotic device for people with various disabilities.

Patrick van der Smagt, head of bionics and assistive robotics at DLR, director of biomimetic robotics and machine learning labs at DLR and the Technische Universität München, and a co-senior author on the paper said: “This is what we were hoping for with this arm. We wanted to create an arm that could be used intuitively by varying forms of control. The arm is already in use by numerous research labs around the world who use its unique interaction and safety capabilities. This is a compelling demonstration of the potential utility of the arm by a person with paralysis.”

DEKA Research and Development developed the DEKA Arm System for amputees, through funding from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA said, “One of our dreams for the Luke Arm [as the DEKA Arm System is known informally] since its inception has been to provide a limb that could be operated not only by external sensors, but also by more directly thought-driven control.

“We’re pleased about these results and for the continued research being done by the group at the VA, Brown and MGH.” The research is aimed at learning how the DEKA arm might be controlled directly from the brain, potentially allowing amputees to more naturally control this prosthetic limb.

Over the last two years, VA has been conducting an optimization study of the DEKA prosthetic arm at several sites, with the cooperation of veterans and active duty service members who have lost an arm. Feedback from the study is helping DEKA engineers to refine the artificial arm’s design and function. “Brain-computer interfaces, such as BrainGate, have the potential to provide an unprecedented level of functional control over prosthetic arms of the future,” said Joel Kupersmith, M.D., VA chief research and development officer. “This innovation is an example of federal collaboration at its finest.”

Story Landis, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which funded the work in part, noted: “This technology was made possible by decades of investment and research into how the brain controls movement. It’s been thrilling to see the technology evolve from studies of basic neurophysiology and move into clinical trials, where it is showing significant promise for people with brain injuries and disorders.”

Ref.: Leigh R. Hochberg et al., Reach and grasp by people with tetraplegia using a neurally controlled robotic arm, Nature, 2012, DOI: 10.1038/nature11076

(Additional videos available on the Nature website)

(Credit: Iván J. Cajigas et al./Neuron)

Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Brain Research researchers have used new-generation sequencing to directly identify a very large number (more than 2500) of mRNA molecules present in axons and dendrites. The finding my help explain how proteins establish long-term memories.

During learning, information is stored at the synapses, the junctions connecting nerve cells. Synapses also require new proteins to show changes in their strength (synaptic plasticity). Historically, scientists have focused on the neuron cell body as the place where the required proteins are synthesized.

However, in recent years there has been increasing focus on the dendrites and axons (the compartments that meet to form synapses) as a potential site for protein synthesis. Protein synthesis machines have been observed there, as well as a limited number of their templates, the messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules.

However., the limited number of mRNAs observed in dendrites and axons placed constraints on the constellation of proteins that could be synthesized to help synapses work and change. Using microarray approaches and in situ hybridization techniques, many different research groups had each identified a hundred or so mRNAs that might reside in the dendrites.

By comparing these studies, the Schuman team discovered something surprising: not a single mRNA type was found in all three studies. This observation made the scientists at the MPI for Brain Research wonder whether the already discovered mRNAs are just the tip of the iceberg and whether there were many more mRNA molecules waiting to be discovered.

To find out, the researchers dissected the neuropil layer of the rat hippocampus. This layer comprises a high concentration of axons and dendrites, but lacks the cell bodies of pyramidal neurons (the principal cell type in the hippocampus and other brain areas). By using sensitive high-resolution sequencing techniques, mRNAs could be detected which, due to their lower concentrations, were not discovered before.

The researchers found an impressive number of 2550 unique mRNAs present at the dendrites and/or axons. To determine the relative abundance in the neuronal cells, the scientists at Erin Schuman’s lab used the Nanostring nCounter, a new technique allowing for high-resolution visualization and quantification of single mRNA molecules. They found that the concentration of mRNAs in the neuronal cells varies by three orders of magnitude.

Additionally, the researchers were able to classify many of the mRNAs and determine their function in synaptic plasticity. These include signalling molecules, scaffolds and the receptors for neurotransmitter molecules. In addition, many mRNAs coding for protein implicated in diseases like autism were discovered in the dendrites and axons. Finally, by using advanced imaging techniques, the researchers could directly visualize some of the mRNAs in the neuronal dendrites, hundreds of microns (millionths of meter) from the cell body.

These results reveal a previously unappreciated enormous potential for the local protein synthesis machinery to supply, maintain and modify the dendritic and synaptic protein population. It seems that neurons use a local control mechanism much in the same way that modern societies have learned that the most efficient means to distribute goods to the population is to use local distribution centers.

Ref.: Iván J. Cajigas et al.,  The Local Transcriptome in the Synaptic Neuropil Revealed by Deep Sequencing and High- Resolution Imaging, Neuron, 2012, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.02.036

Top candidate genes for schizophrenia. CFG, convergent functional genomics; GWAS, genome-wide association study; ISC, International Schizophrenia Consortium. (Credit: M Ayalew et al./Molecular Psychiatry)

An Indiana University-led research team and collaborators have identified and prioritized a comprehensive group of genes most associated with schizophrenia and that can generate a score indicating whether an individual is at higher or lower risk of developing the disease.

They used a convergent functional genomics approach that incorporates a variety of experimental techniques.

The scientists also were able to apply a panel of their top genes to data from other studies of schizophrenia and successfully identify which patients had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and which had not.

Evaluating the biological pathways in which the genes are active, the researchers also proposed a model of schizophrenia as a disease emerging from a mix of genetic variations affecting brain development and neuronal connections along with environmental factors, particularly stress.

“At its core, schizophrenia is a disease of decreased cellular connectivity in the brain, precipitated by environmental stress during brain development, among those with genetic vulnerability,” said principal investigator Alexander B. Niculescu III, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and medical neuroscience at the IU School of Medicine and director of the Laboratory of Neurophenomics at the Institute of Psychiatric Research at the IU School of Medicine.

“For first time we have a comprehensive list of the genes that have the best evidence for involvement in schizophrenia,” said Niculescu, who is also staff psychiatrist and investigator at the Richard L. Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Schizophrenia is a relatively widespread psychiatric disease, affecting about 1 percent of the population, often with devastating impact. People with schizophrenia can have difficulty thinking logically and telling the difference between real and unreal experiences, and may engage in bizarre behavior.

When the test estimating the risk for schizophrenia is refined, it could provide guidance to caregivers and health care professionals about young people in families with a history of the disease, prompting early intervention and treatment when behavioral symptoms of schizophrenia occurred among those at higher risk, Dr. Niculescu said.

He stressed that a score indicating a higher risk of schizophrenia “doesn’t determine your destiny. It just means that your neuronal connectivity is different, which could make you more creative, or more prone to illness.”

“It’s all on a continuum; these genetic variants are present throughout the population. If you have too many of them, in the wrong combination, in an environment where you are exposed to stress, alcohol and drugs, and so on, that can lead to the development of the clinical illness,” he said.

The prototype test was able to predict whether a person was at a higher or lower risk of schizophrenia in about two-thirds of cases.

Convergent functional genomics

To identify and prioritize the genes reported Tuesday, the researchers combined data from several different types of studies. These included genome-wide association studies, gene expression data derived from human tissue samples, genetic linkage studies, genetic evidence from animal models, and other work. This approach, called convergent functional genomics, has been pioneered by Niculescu and colleagues, and relies on multiple independent lines of evidence to implicate genes in clinical disorders.

The authors noted that the results were stronger when analyses were performed using gene-level data, rather than analyses based on individual mutations — called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs — in those genes. Multiple different SNPs can spark a particular gene’s role in the development of schizophrenia, so evidence for the genes, and the biological mechanisms in which they play a role, was much stronger from study to study than was the evidence for individual SNPs.

“Finally now, by better understanding the genetic and biological basis of the illness, we can develop better tests for it, as well as better treatments. The future of medicine is not just treatment but prevention, so we hope this work will move things in the right direction.”

Ref.: M Ayalew et al., Convergent functional genomics of schizophrenia: from comprehensive understanding to genetic risk prediction, Molecular Psychiatry, 2012, DOI: 10.1038/mp.2012.37 (open access)

Armageddon film (credit: Touchstone Pictures)

NASA is training a team of astronauts to land on an asteroid to explore its surface, search for minerals, and even learn the skills they may need to destroy it should one pose a threat to the Earth.

Direct GFP fluorescence in shaved back skin of mice treated with the indicated vectors (credit: Bruno Bernardes de Jesus et al./EMBO Molecular Medicine)

Mouse lifespan was extended up to 24 percent with a single gene treatment in research at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), using gene therapy, a strategy never before employed to combat aging.

Mice treated at the age of one lived longer by 24% on average, and those treated at the age of two, by 13%. The therapy, furthermore, produced an appreciable improvement in the animals’ health, delaying the onset of age-related diseases – like osteoporosis and insulin resistance – and achieving improved readings on ageing indicators like neuromuscular coordination.

The gene therapy utilised consisted of treating the animals with a DNA-modified virus, the viral genes having been replaced by those of the telomerase enzyme, with a key role in aging. Telomerase repairs the extremes of chromosomes, known as telomeres, and in doing so slows the cell’s and therefore the body’s biological clock. When the animal is infected, the virus acts as a vehicle depositing the telomerase gene in the cells.

This study “shows that it is possible to develop a telomerase-based anti-aging gene therapy without increasing the incidence of cancer,” the authors affirm. “Aged organisms accumulate damage in their DNA due to telomere shortening, [this study] finds that a gene therapy based on telomerase production can repair or delay this kind of damage.”

‘Resetting’ the biological clock

Telomeres are the caps that protect the end of chromosomes, but they cannot do so indefinitely: each time the cell divides the telomeres get shorter, until they are so short that they lose all functionality. The cell, as a result, stops dividing and ages or dies. Telomerase gets round this by preventing telomeres from shortening or even rebuilding them. What it does, in essence, is stop or reset the cell’s biological clock.

But in most cells the telomerase gene is only active before birth; the cells of an adult organism, with few exceptions, have no telomerase. The exceptions in question are adult stem cells and cancer cells, which divide limitlessly and are therefore immortal – in fact several studies have shown that telomerase expression is the key to the immortality of tumor cells.

It is precisely this risk of promoting tumor development that has set back the investigation of telomerase-based anti-ageing therapies.

In 2007, CNIO scientists proved that it was feasible to prolong the lives of transgenic mice whose genome had been permanently altered at the embryonic stage, by causing their cells to express telomerase and, also, extra copies of cancer-resistant genes. These animals live 40% longer than is normal and do not develop cancer.

The mice subjected to the gene therapy now under test are likewise free of cancer. Researchers believe this is because the therapy begins when the animals are adult so do not have time to accumulate sufficient number of aberrant divisions for tumours to appear.

Also important is the kind of virus employed to carry the telomerase gene to the cells. The authors selected demonstrably safe viruses that have been successfully used in gene therapy treatment of haemophilia and eye disease. Specifically, they are non-replicating viruses derived from others that are non-pathogenic in humans.

Although this therapy may not find application as an anti-aging treatment in humans, in the short term at least, it could open up a new treatment option for ailments linked with the presence in tissue of abnormally short telomeres, as in some cases of human pulmonary fibrosis.

The vector the scientists use expresses the target gene (telomerase) over a long period, so they were able to apply a single treatment. This might be the only practical solution for an anti-ageing therapy, since other strategies would require the drug to be administered over the patient’s lifetime, multiplying the risk of adverse effects.

Bruno Bernardes de Jesus et al., Telomerase gene therapy in adult and old mice delays ageing and increases longevity without increasing cancer, EMBO Molecular Medicine, 2012 DOI: 10.1002/emmm.201200245

Flexure-FET biosensor (credit: Purdue University)

An ultrasensitive biosensor that could allow for early detection of cancer and for personalized medicine tailored to the specific biochemistry of individual patients has been developed by Purdue University researchers.

The Flexure-FET biosensor combines a mechanical sensor, which identifies a biomolecule based on its mass or size, with an electrical sensor that identifies molecules based on their electrical charge.

The new sensor detects both charged and uncharged biomolecules, allowing a broader range of applications than either type of sensor alone.

The sensor makes it possible to detect small quantities of DNA fragments and proteins deformed by cancer long before the disease is visible through imaging or other methods, said Muhammad A. Alam, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The sensor’s mechanical part is a vibrating cantilever, a sliver of silicon that resembles a tiny diving board. Located under the cantilever is a transistor, which is the sensor’s electrical part.

In other mechanical biosensors, a laser measures the vibrating frequency or deflection of the cantilever, which changes depending on what type of biomolecule lands on the cantilever. Instead of using a laser, the new sensor uses the transistor to measure the vibration or deflection.

The sensor maximizes sensitivity by biasing both the cantilever and transistor. The cantilever is biased using an electric field to pull it downward as though with an invisible string and the transistor is biased by applying a voltage.

“You can make the device sensitive to almost any molecule as long as you configure the sensor properly,” Alam said.

A key innovation is the elimination of a component called a “reference electrode,” which is required for conventional electrical biosensors but cannot be miniaturized, limiting practical applications. This makes it feasible for low-cost, point-of-care applications in doctors’ offices, Alam said.

Ref.: Ankit Jain, P. R. Nair, M. A. Alam, The Flexure-FET Biosensor: How to Break the Fundamental Sensitivity Limits of Nanobiosensors using Nonlinear Electromechanical Coupling, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012, in press

Increased expression of α2δ and β subunits leads to increased P/Q Ca2+ channel accumulation at synapses: (4) Synapse with neurotransmitter released; (6) Calcium channel (credit: Creative Commons)

Weill Cornell Medical College scientists have discovered that single protein alpha 2 delta controls the volume of neurotransmitters and other chemicals that flow between the synapses of brain neurons.

The study shows how brain cells talk to each other through these signals, relaying thoughts, feelings and action, and this powerful molecule plays a crucial role in regulating effective communication.

In the study, the investigators also suggest how the widely used pain drug Lyrica might work. The alpha 2 delta protein is the target of this drug and the new work suggests an approach to how other drugs could be developed that effectively turn particular neurotransmitter signals on and off to treat neurological disorders.

“We are amazed that any single protein has such power,” says the study’s lead investigator Dr. Timothy A. Ryan, professor of Biochemistry and associate professor of Biochemistry in Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medical College. “It is indeed rare to identify a biological molecule’s function that is so potent, that seems to be controlling the effectiveness of neurotransmission.”

The researchers found that alpha 2 delta determines how many calcium channels will be present at the synaptic junction between neurons. The transmission of chemical signals is triggered at the synapse by the entry of calcium into these channels, so the volume and speed of neurotransmission depends on the availability of these channels.

Researchers discovered that taking away alpha 2 delta from brain cells prevented calcium channels from getting to the synapse. “But if you add more alpha 2 delta, you can triple the number of channels at synapses,” Dr. Ryan says. “This change in abundance was tightly linked to how well synapses carry out their function, which is to release neurotransmitters.”

Before this study, it was known that Lyrica, which is used for neuropathic pain, seizures and fibromyalgia, binds to alpha 2 delta, but little was understood about how this protein works to control synapses.

Lifting up the Hood

Dr. Ryan is building what he calls a “shop manual” of neurological function, much of which centers on synaptic neurotransmission. In 2007 and 2008, he discovered crucial clues to how neurons repackage the chemicals used to signal across synapses. In 2011, Dr. Ryan discovered that distinct neurons differently tune the speed by which they package these chemicals. And in a recent study published April 29 in Nature Neuroscience, he described, for the first time, the molecular mechanisms at the synapse that control the release of dopamine, a crucial neurotransmitter.

“We are looking under the hood of these machines for the first time,” he says. “Many neurological diseases are considered to arise from pathologies of synaptic function. The synapse is so complex; at least a few thousand genes control how they work. Repairing them through treatment requires that we understand how they work.”

Dr. Ryan and his team often use two tools to conduct these studies — they pin fluorescent tags on to molecules involved in synaptic function, and use ultra-sensitive microscopy technology to watch these molecules up close and in real-time.

The researchers used the same toolkit to examine the function of calcium channels, which triggers neurotransmission. “At all synapses, the secretion of a neurotransmitter is driven by the arrival of an electric impulse, initiated by another neuron,” Dr. Ryan says. When this impulse arrives at the nerve terminal it triggers the opening of calcium channels. The calcium that rushes in is the key trigger that drives a synapse to secrete its neurotransmitter.

“We have known for the past half century that calcium is a key controller of neurotransmission,” he says. “Any small change in calcium influx has a big impact on neurotransmission.”

Protein Label

But the number of calcium channels at the synapse is not static. Neurons constantly replace worn out channels, and to do this, they build the channels in the neuron’s cell body and then package them up and ship them to the nerve terminal. In some cases, that is a very long journey — as much as a few feet, such as the distance between the brain and the base of the spinal cord or the length of a leg.

In the study, researchers tagged fluorescent proteins onto a gene that encodes protein that makes a calcium channel and delivered it to neurons. They then watched the progress of the newly formed channels as they made their way, from day four to day seven, from the bodies of neurons to the synapse.

They also manipulated the levels of alpha 2 delta, a suspected calcium channel partner, and discovered that when the protein was increased, more calcium channels were moved to the synapse. Less alpha 2 delta reduced the flow. “We discovered that alpha 2 delta made the decision of how many calcium channels should be shipped the length of the neuron to the synapse,” Dr. Ryan says. “It’s like the channels couldn’t be transported without an alpha 2 delta shipping label.”

The research team found however that alpha 2 delta must work in at least two steps. When they impaired a piece of alpha 2 delta that resembles proteins that are involved in how cells bind to each other, they found that this broken alpha 2 delta could still help get calcium channels shipped down to synapses. But once there, they no longer helped drive neurotransmitter release. “This means that not only does alpha 2 delta help to get calcium channels shipped out, but it also implies that something at the synapse has to sign-off on receiving the calcium channels, putting them in the right place for them to do their job,” Dr. Ryan says.

The researchers suggest that Lyrica might work by interfering with this final step since the piece of alpha 2 delta they “broke” that prevents the signing-off resembles parts of proteins that allows them to stick to each other in a kind of handshake.

These findings suggest that future therapies designed to manipulate neurotransmission could try to target this handshaking process, Dr. Ryan says. To do this will require that researchers identify the missing partner in the handshake.

“We hope these exciting findings are providing a new direction in how to make better drugs to control communication between brain cells,” Dr. Ryan says.

Ref.: Michael B. Hoppa, Beatrice Lana, Wojciech Margas, Annette C. Dolphin, Timothy A. Ryan, α2δ expression sets presynaptic calcium channel abundance and release probability, Nature, 2012, DOI: 10.1038/nature11033

Today ten years have passed since A New Kind of Science (”the NKS book”) was published. But in many ways the development that started with the book is still only just beginning. And over the next several decades I think its effects will inexorably become ever more obvious and important.

Indeed, even at an everyday level I expect that in time there will be all sorts of visible reminders of NKS all around us. Today we are continually exposed to technology and engineering that is directly descended from the development of the mathematical approach to science that began in earnest three centuries ago. Sometime hence I believe a large portion of our technology will instead come from NKS ideas. It will not be created incrementally from components whose behavior we can analyze with traditional mathematics and related methods. Rather it will in effect be “mined” by searching the abstract computational universe of possible simple programs.

And even at a visual level this will have obvious consequences. For today’s technological systems tend to be full of simple geometrical shapes (like beams and boxes) and simple patterns of behavior that we can readily understand and analyze. But when our technology comes from NKS and from mining the computational universe there will not be such obvious simplicity. Instead, even though the underlying rules will often be quite simple, the overall behavior that we see will often be in a sense irreducibly complex.

So as one small indication of what is to come—and as part of celebrating the first decade of A New Kind of Science—starting today, when Wolfram|Alpha is computing, it will no longer display a simple rotating geometric shape, but will instead run a simple program (currently, a 2D cellular automaton) from the computational universe found by searching for a system with the right kind of visually engaging behavior.

This doesn’t look like the typical output of an engineering design process. There’s something much more “organic” and “natural” about it. And in a sense this is a direct example of what launched my work on A New Kind of Science three decades ago. The traditional mathematical approach to science has had great success in letting us understand systems in nature and elsewhere whose behavior shows a certain regularity and simplicity. But I was interested in finding ways to model the many kinds of systems that we see throughout the natural world whose behavior is much more complex.

And my key realization was that the computational universe of simple programs (such as cellular automata) provides an immensely rich source for such modeling. Traditional intuition would have led us to think that simple programs would always somehow have simple behavior. But my first crucial discovery was that this is not the case, and that in fact even remarkably simple programs can produce extremely complex behavior—that reproduces all sorts of phenomena we see in nature.

And it was from this beginning—over the course of nearly 20 years—that I developed the ideas and results in A New Kind of Science. The book focused on studying the abstract science of the computational universe—its phenomena and principles—and showing how this helps us make progress on a whole variety of problems in science. But from the foundations laid down in the book much else can be built—not least a new kind of technology.

This is already off to a good start, and over the next decade or two I expect dramatic progress in the application of NKS to all sorts of technology. In a typical case, one will start from some objective one wants to achieve. Then, either through knowledge of the basic science of the computational universe, or by some kind of explicit search, one will find a system that achieves this objective—often in ways no human would ever imagine or come up with. We have done this countless times over the years for algorithms used inMathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. But the same approach applies not just to programs implemented in software, but also to all kinds of other structures and processes.

Today our technological world is full of periodic patterns and other simple forms. But rarely will these ultimately be the best ways to achieve the objectives for which they are intended. And with NKS, by mining the computational universe, we have access to a much broader set of possibilities—which to us will typically look much more complex and perhaps random.

How does this relate to the kinds of patterns and forms that we see in nature? One of the discoveries of NKS is that nature samples a broader swath of the computational universe than we reach with typical methods of mathematics or engineering. But it too is limited, whether because natural selection tends to favor incremental change, or because some physical process just follows one particular rule. But when we create technology, we are free to sample the whole computational universe—so in a sense we can greatly generalize the mechanisms that nature uses.

Some of the consequences of this will be readily visible in the actual forms of technological objects we use. But many more will involve internal structures and processes. And here we will often see the consequences of a central discovery of NKS: thePrinciple of Computational Equivalence—which implies that even when the underlying rules or components of a system are simple, the behavior of the system can correspond to a computation that is essentially as sophisticated as anything. And one thing this means is that a huge range of systems are capable in effect not just of acting in one particular way, but of being programmed to act in almost arbitrary ways.

Today most mechanical systems we have are built for quite specific purposes. But in the future I have no doubt that with NKS approaches, it will for instance become common to see arbitrarily “programmable” mechanical systems. One example I expect will be modular robots consisting of large numbers of fairly simple and probably identical elements, in which almost any mechanical action can be achieved by an appropriate sequence of small-scale motions, typically combined in ways that were found by mining the computational universe.

Similar things will happen at a molecular level too. For example, today we tend to have bulk materials that are either perfect periodic crystals, or have atoms arranged in a random amorphous way. NKS implies that there can also be “computational materials” that are grown by simple underlying rules, but which end up with much more elaborate patterns of atoms—with all sorts of bizarre and potentially extremely useful properties.

When it comes to computing, we might think that to have a system at a molecular scale act as a computer we would need to find microscopic analogs of all the usual elements that exist in today’s electronic computers. But what NKS shows us is that in fact there can be much simpler elements—more readily achievable with molecules—that nevertheless support computation, and for which the effort of compiling from current traditional forms of computation is not even too great.

An important application of these kinds of ideas is in medicine. Biology is essentially the only existing example where something akin to molecular-scale computation already occurs. But existing drugs tend to operate only in very simple ways, for example just binding to a fixed molecular target. But with NKS methods one can expect instead to create “algorithmic drugs”, that in effect do a computation to determine how they should act—and can also be programmable for different cases.

NKS will also no doubt be important in figuring out how to set up synthetic biological organisms. Many processes in existing organisms are probably best understood in terms of simple programs and NKS ideas. And when it comes to creating new biological mechanisms, NKS methods are the obvious way to take underlying molecular biology and find schemes for building sophisticated functionality on the basis of it.

Biology gives us ways to create particular kinds of molecular structures, like proteins. But I suspect that with NKS methods it will finally be possible to build an essentially universal constructor, that can in effect be programmed to make an almost arbitrary structure out of atoms. The form of this universal constructor will no doubt be found by searching the computational universe—and its operation will likely be nothing close to anything one would recognize from traditional engineering practice.

An important feature of NKS methods is that they dramatically change the economics of invention and creativity. In the past, to create or invent something new and original has always required explicit human effort. But now the computational universe in effect gives us an inexhaustible supply of new, original, material. And one consequence of this is that it makes all sorts of mass customization broadly feasible.

There are many immediate examples of this in art. WolframTones did it for simple musical pieces. One can also do it for all sorts of visual patterns—perhaps ever changing, and selected from the computational universe and then grown to fit into particular spatial or other constraints. And then there is architecture. Where one can expect to discover in the computational universe new forms that can be used to create all sorts of structures. And indeed in the future I would not be surprised if at first the most visually obvious everyday examples of NKS were forms of things like buildings, their dynamics, decoration and structure.

Mass production and the legacy of the industrial revolution have led to a certain obvious orderliness to our world today—with many copies of identical products, precisely repeating processes, and so on. And while this is a convenient way to set things up if one must be guided by traditional mathematics and the like, NKS suggests that things could be much richer. Instead of just carrying out some processes in a precisely repeating way, one computes what to do in each case. And putting together many such pieces of computation the behavior of the system as a whole can be highly complex. And finding the correct rules for each element—to achieve some set of overall objectives—is no doubt best done by studying and searching the computational universe of possibilities.

Viewed from the outside, some of the best evidence for the presence of our civilization on Earth comes from the regularities that we have created (straight roads, things happening at definite times, radio carrier signals, satellite orbits, and so on). But in the future, with the help of NKS methods, more and more of these regularities will be optimized out. Vehicles will move in optimized patterns, radio signals will be transferred in complicated sequences of local hops… and even though the underlying rules may be simple, the actual behavior that is seen will look highly complex—and much more like all sorts of systems in physics and elsewhere that we already see in nature.

There are other—more abstract—situations where computation and NKS ideas will no doubt become increasingly important. One example is in commerce. Already there is an increasing trend toward algorithmic pricing. Increasingly commercial terms and contracts of all kinds will be stated in computational terms. And then—a little like a market of algorithmic traders—there will be what amounts to an NKS issue of what the overall consequences of many separate transactions will be. And again, finding the appropriate rules for these underlying transactions will involve understanding and searching the computational universe—and presumably various kinds of mass customization, that eventually make concepts like money as a simple numerical quantity quite obsolete.

Future schemes for such things as auctions and voting may also perhaps be mined from the computational universe, and as a result may be mass customized on demand. And, more speculatively, the same might be true for future corporate or political organizational structures. Or for example for mechanisms for social and other human networks.

In addition to using NKS in “technology mode” as a way to create things, one can also use NKS in “science mode” as a way to model and understand things. And typically the goal is to find in the computational universe some simple program whose behavior captures the essence of whatever system or phenomenon one is trying to analyze. This was an important focus of the NKS book, and has been a major theme in the past decade of NKS research. In general in science it has been difficult to come up with new models for things. But the computational universe is an unprecedentedly rich source—and I would expect that before long the rate of new models derived from it will come to far exceed all those from traditional mathematical and other sources.

An important trend in today’s world is the availability of more and more data, often collected with automated sensors, or in some otherwise automated way. Often—as we see in many areas of Wolfram|Alpha or in experiments on personal analytics—there are tantalizing regularities in the data. But the challenge that now exists is to find good models for the data. Sometimes these models are important for basic science; more often they are important for practical purposes of prediction, anomaly detection, pattern matching and so on.

In the past, one might find a model from data by using statistics or machine learning in effect to fit parameters of some formula or algorithm. But NKS suggests that instead one should try to find in the computational universe some set of underlying rules that can be run to simulate the essence of whatever generates the data. At present, the methods we have for finding models in the computational universe are still fairly ad hoc. But in time it will no doubt be possible to streamline this process, and to develop some kind of highly systematic methodology—a rough analog of the historical progression from calculus to statistics.

There are many areas where it is clear that NKS models will be important—perhaps because the phenomenon being modeled is too complex for traditional approaches, or perhaps because, as is becoming so common in practice, the underlying system has elements that are specifically set up to be computational.

One area where NKS models seem likely to be particularly important is medicine. In the past, most disorders that medicine successfully addressed were fundamentally either structural or chemical. But today’s most important challenge areas—like aging, cancer, immune response and brain functioning—all seem to be associated more with large-scale systems containing many interacting parts. And it certainly seems plausible that the best models for these systems will be based on simple programs that exist in the computational universe.

In recent times, medicine has slowly been becoming more quantitative. But somehow it is still always based on small collections of numbers, that lead to a small set of possible diagnoses. But between the coming wave of automated data acquisition, and the use of underlying NKS models, I suspect that the future of medicine will be more about dynamic computation than about specific discrete diagnoses. But even given a good predictive model of what is going on in a particular medical situation, it will still often be a challenge to figure out just what intervention to make—though the character of this problem will no doubt change when algorithmic drugs and computational materials exist.

What would be the most spectacular success for NKS models? Perhaps models that lead to an understanding of aging, or cancer. Perhaps more accurate models for social or economic processes. Or perhaps a final fundamental theory of physics.

In the NKS book, I started looking at what might be involved in finding the underlying rules for our physical universe out in the computational universe. I developed some network-based models that operate in a sense below space and time, and from which I was already able to derive some surprisingly interesting features of physics as we know it. Of course, we have no guarantee that our physical universe has rules that are simple enough to be found, say, by an explicit search in the computational universe. But over the past decade I have slowly been building up the rather large software and analysis capabilities necessary to mount a serious search. And if successful, this will certainly be an important piece of validation for the NKS approach—as well as being an important moment for science in general.

Beyond science and technology, another important consequence of a new worldview like NKS is the effect that it can have on everyday thinking. And certainly the mathematical approach to science has had a profound effect on how we think about all kinds of issues and processes. For today, whether we’re talking about business or psychology or journalism, we end up using words and ideas—like “momentum” and “exponential”—that come directly from this approach. Already there are analogs from NKS that are increasingly used—like “computationally irreducible” and “intrinsically random”. And as such concepts become more widespread they will inform thinking about more and more things—whether it’s describing the operation of an organization, or working out what could conceivably be predictable for purposes of liability.

Beyond everyday thinking, the ideas and results of NKS will also no doubt have increasing influence on many areas of philosophical thinking. In the past, most of the understanding for what science could contribute to philosophy came from the mathematical approach to science. But now the new concepts and results in NKS in a sense provide a large number of new “raw facts” from which philosophy can operate.

The principles of NKS are important not only at an intellectual level, but also at a practical level. For they give us ideas about what might be possible, and what might not. For example, the Principle of Computational Equivalence in effect implies that there can be nothing general and abstract that is special about intelligence, and that in effect all its features must just be reflections of computation. And it is this that made me realize soon after the NKS book appeared that my long-term goal of making knowledge broadly computable might be achievable “just with computation”—which is what led me to embark on the Wolfram|Alpha project.

I have talked elsewhere about some of the consequences of the principles of NKS for the long-range future of the human condition. But suffice it to say here that we can expect an increasing delegation of human intellectual activities to computational systems—but with ultimate purposes still of necessity defined by humans and the history of human culture and civilization. And perhaps the place where NKS principles will enter most explicitly is in making future legal and other distinctions about what really constitutes responsibility, or a mind, or a memory as opposed to a computation.

As we look at the future of history, there are some inexorable trends, and then there are some wild cards. If we find the fundamental theory of physics, will we be able to hack it to achieve something like instantaneous travel? Will we find some key principle that lets us reverse aging? Will we be able to map memories directly from one brain to another, without the intermediate step of language? Will we find extraterrestrial intelligence? About all these questions, NKS has much to say.

If we look back at the mathematical approach to science, one of its societal consequences has been the injection of mathematics into education. To some extent, a knowledge of mathematical principles is necessary to interact with the world as it exists today. It is also an important foundation for understanding fields that have made serious use of the mathematical approach to science. And certainly learning mathematics to at least some level is a convenient way to teach precise structured thinking in general.

But I believe NKS also has much to contribute to education. At an elementary level, it can be viewed as a kind of “pre-computer science”, introducing fundamental notions of computation in a direct and often visual way. At a more sophisticated level, NKS provides a conceptual framework for understanding the foundations of many computational fields. And even from what I have seen over the past decade, education about NKS—a little like physics before it—seems to provide a powerful springboard for people entering all sorts of modern areas.

What about NKS research? There is much to be done in the many applications of NKS. But there is also much to be done in pure NKS—studying the basic science of the computational universe. The NKS book—and the decade of research that has followed it—has only just begun to scratch the surface in exploring and investigating the vast range of possible simple programs. The situation is in some ways a little like in chemistry—where there are an infinite variety of possible chemical compounds each with their own features, that can be studied either for their own sake, or for the purpose of inferring general principles, or for diverse potential applications. And where even after a century or more, only a small part of what is possible has been done.

In the computational universe it is quite remarkable how much can be said about almost any simple program with nontrivial behavior. And the more one knows about a given program, the more potential there is to find interesting applications of it, whether for modeling, technology, art or whatever. Sometimes there are features of programs that can be almost arbitrarily difficult to determine. But sometimes they can be important. And so, for example, it will be important to get more evidence for (or against) the Principle of Computational Equivalence by trying to establish computation universality for a variety of simple programs (rule 30 would be a particularly important achievement).

As more is done in pure NKS, so its methodologies will become more streamlined. And for example there will be ever clearer principles and conventions for what constitutes a good computer experiment, and how the results of investigations on simple programs should be communicated. There are fields other than NKS—notably mathematics—where computer experiments also make sense. But my guess is that the kind of exploratory computer experimentation that is a hallmark of pure NKS will always end up largely classified as pure NKS, even if its subject matter is quite mathematical.

If one looks at the future of NKS research, an important issue is how it is structured in the world. Some part of it—like for mathematics—may be driven by education. Some part may be driven by applications, and their commercial success. But in the long term just how the pure basic science of NKS should be conducted is not yet clear. Should there beprizes? Institutions? Socially oriented value systems? As a young field NKS has the potential to take some novel approaches.

For an intellectual framework of the magnitude of NKS, a decade is a very short time. And as I write this post, I realize anew just how great the potential of NKS is. I am proud of the part I played in launching NKS, and I look forward to watching and participating in its progress for many years to come.

Source: Stephen Wolfram Blog 

Credit: A. Deiters/ACS Chemical Biology)

North Carolina State University researchers are using light-activated molecules to turn gene expression on and off. Their method enables greater precision when studying gene function, and could lead to targeted therapies for diseases like cancer.

NC State chemist Dr. Alex Deiters decided to use Triplex-forming oligonucleotides (TFOs), which are molecules that can prevent gene transcription by binding to double-stranded DNA. To more precisely control TFOs, he attached a light-activated “cage” to a TFO. After exposing TFO to ultraviolet (UV) light and removing the cage, the TFO is free to bind with DNA, inhibiting transcription of the gene of interest.

“In the absence of light, transcription activity is 100 percent,” says Deiters. “When we turn on the light, we can take it down to about 25 percent, which is a significant reduction in gene expression.”

Additionally, Deiters fine-tuned the process by attaching a caged inhibitor strand to the TFO. In the absence of UV light, the TFO behaves normally, binding to DNA and preventing gene expression. However, when exposed to UV light, the caged inhibitor activates and stops the TFO from binding with DNA, turning gene transcription on.

“We’ve created a tool that allows for the light-activation of genetic transcription,” Deiters says. “By giving researchers greater temporal and spatial control over gene expression, we’ve expanded their ability to study the behavior of particular genes in whichever environment they choose.”

Ref.: Alexander Deiters et al., Regulation of Transcription through Light-Activation and Light-Deactivation of Triplex-Forming Oligonucleotides in Mammalian Cells, ACS Chemical Biology, 2012, DOI: 10.1021/cb300161r

23andme finished sample bag (credit: David Orban/Flickr)

Patients see potential benefits from direct-to-consumer genetic testing, but are also concerned about how the test results will be used, and are generally unwilling to pay more than $10 or $20 for them, according to focus groups conducted by researchers at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

More than a dozen companies, including 23andMe, deCODE Genetics and Navigenics, now test consumers’ genomes for single-gene disorders such as cystic fibrosis; for risks of developing complex disorders involving multiple genes, such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes; for sensitivities to drugs such as Coumadin; and for traits such as hair color, eye color and baldness.

Costs range from about $100 to $1,500. Consumers can order these tests directly and receive results without the involvement of a qualified health-care professional, such as a geneticist or genetic counselor.

Findings:

• Many participants were willing to pay in the $10 to $20 range (the equivalent of a co-pay). A few were willing to pay $100 to $400. Direct-to-consumer genetic tests are not covered by insurance companies. “This situation could exacerbate inequalities in the health-care system, with those having greater financial resources being able to access this elective health-related information while those with fewer resources are unable to pay for it,” researchers wrote.
• Participants generally expressed willingness to test their children, including adopted and foster children. They said testing for disease risks would provide helpful information for the future. But these views are contrary to professional and ethical guidelines, which recommend testing children only if there is an effective intervention for the disease that’s being tested. Otherwise, the children should wait until adulthood and decide for themselves. “Children could be tested without understanding its implications, and parents might take actions that are inappropriate and potentially harmful, based on results without consulting a qualified health professional,” researchers wrote.
• Main reasons to get direct-to-consumer genetic tests: to gain information, seek prevention, seek interventions or help others.
• Main concerns about genetic testing: Are the tests accurate? Who will interpret them? Should results be shared with consumers’ physicians and entered in medical records? And do the tests raise ethical issues such as risks to privacy and confidentiality?

Ref.: Wasson K, Hogan, NS, Sanders TN, Helzlsouer KJ, Primary care patients’ attitudes and decision-making process regarding direct-to-consumer personalized genome testing, American Journal of Bioethics Primary Research, 2012, DOI: 10.1080/21507716.2011.650344

Baidu phone (credit: Baidu)

Baidu, the Chinese answer to Google, has announced details of its soon-to-launch new smartphone and the cloud-centric operating system (OS) that will power it.

The Foxconn-built Changhong H5018 will be the first device powered by Baidu’s “Cloud Smart Terminal” platform, marking ”the arrival of a new era” of sub $150 (1,000 RMB) devices in China.

Every H5018 phone owner will be given a generous 100 GB of storage on Baidu’s Netdrive, a beta service known locally as Wangpan. The Google Drive-like service will store multimedia content in the cloud while linking back to the desktop service, while standard services like Baidu Music, Baidu Map and other applications will come with the phone.

Baidu is also preparing its own dedicated app store — the Baidu Cloud Store — which it says will provide access to “a huge range” of apps to cater for the needs of smartphone owners.

Technode has spotted the arrival of Baidu Xiangce (Baidu Album), a photo-upload service that will sync to Baidu Cloud-powered devices and also be offered standalone.

HyQ robot outdoor test (credit: Italian Institute of Technology)

Researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology took their quadruped robot HyQ for a test run outside the lab for the first time to test new tricks HyQ has learned, including the ability to trot over obstacles without falling, IEET Spectrum Automaton reports. 

The robot is still a strange headless creature, and though a sensor head is in the works, this quadruped might get even weirder with a new hardware addition: arms.

The goal: an autonomous, versatile machine capable of running, jumping, and negotiating rough terrain that could find applications in search-and-rescue operations and exploratory missions.

New Apple maps image based on C3 3D technology (credit: Apple)

It was widely reported yesterday that Apple will likely announce at its WWDC in June that the new version of the built-in maps app in iOS6 will not be fed by Google maps. Instead, Apple has developed its own, in-house 3-D mapping database, based on the acquisition of three mapping software companies between 2009 and 2011, Placebase, C3 Technologies, and Poly9.

The stunning 3D image above is from C3, which, according to the company, uses “previously classified image processing technology… automated software and advanced algorithms… to rapidly assemble extremely precise 3D models, and seamlessly integrate them with traditional 2D maps, satellite images, street level photography and user generated images.” The video below shows a flyover of Oslo using C3′s technology.

Powering a display with electricity generated from viruses (credit: Berkeley Lab)

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.

The generator produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.

Their generator is the first to produce electricity by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of a biological material. Piezoelectricity is the accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to mechanical stress.

The milestone could lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks such aswalking or shutting a door.

The M13 bacteriophage has a length of 880 nanometers and a diameter of 6.6 nanometers. It’s coated with approximately 2700 charged proteins that enable scientists to use the virus as a piezoelectric nanofiber. (Credit: Berkeley Lab)

It also points to a simpler way to make microelectronic devices. Using self-assembly, the viruses arrange themselves into an orderly film that enables the generator to work.

“More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics,” says Seung-Wuk Lee, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division and a UC Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering.

The materials used to make piezoelectric devices are toxic and very difficult to work with, which limits the widespread use of the technology.

Lee and colleagues used the M13 bacteriophage, which only attacks bacteria and is benign to people, would work. Being a virus, it replicates itself by the millions within hours, so there’s always a steady supply and it’s easy to genetically engineer.

And large numbers of the rod-shaped viruses naturally orient themselves into well-ordered films, much the way that chopsticks align themselves in a box.

To increase the virus’s piezoelectric strength, they used genetic engineering to add four negatively charged amino acid residues to one end of the helical proteins that coat the virus.

The top atomic force microscopy image maps the film's structure-dependent piezoelectric properties, with higher voltages a lighter color. The bottom topographic image shows how the viruses align themselves side-by-side in a film. (Credit: Berkeley Lab)

These residues increase the charge difference between the proteins’ positive and negative ends, which boosts the voltage of the virus.

The scientists further enhanced the system by stacking films composed of single layers of the virus on top of each other. They found that a stack about 20 layers thick exhibited the strongest piezoelectric effect.

When pressure is applied to the generator, it produces up to six nanoamperes of current and 400 millivolts of potential. That’s enough current to flash the number “1” on the display, and about a quarter the voltage of an AAA battery.

“We’re now working on ways to improve on this proof-of-principle demonstration,” says Lee. “Because the tools of biotechnology enable large-scale production of genetically modified viruses, piezoelectric materials based on viruses could offer a simple route to novel microelectronics in the future.”

Ref.: Byung Yang Lee et al., Virus-based piezoelectric energy generation, Nature Nanotechnology, 2012, DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2012.69 (open access)

See also: New low-cost wearable energy source from piezoelectric nanocomposite

The first part of the video shows how Berkeley Lab scientists harness the piezoelectric properties of a virus to convert the force of a finger tap into electricity. The second part shows the “viral-electric” generators in action, first by pressing only one of the generators, then by pressing two at the same time, which produces more current.

The first FDA-approved glucose sensor that plugs into an iPhone (credit: iBGStar)

Fitness trends and health-care problems are creating demand for tiny computers we won’t even notice we’re carrying.

What if your doctor had already received the information from a tiny device built into your cell phone, wallet, or undershirt? Sonny Vu, a cofounder of the medical-device company AgaMatrix, believes a device like this could fundamentally change health care.

He created the first FDA-approved glucose sensor that plugs into an iPhone; it hit Apple stores this month under the brand name iBGStar.

Now he’s heading a new company called Misfit Wearables, which is developing health monitoring devices that he says will fit unobtrusively into the clothing and objects we use every day, and make it possible automatically provide medical services such as remote monitoring of patients or automatic detection of falls.

A photovoltaic retinal prosthesis --- a flexible sheet of silicon pixels that convert light into electrical signals that can be picked up by neurons in the eye. A scanning-electron micrograph shows the implant in a pig’s eye. (Credit: Nature Photonics/Stanford)

Using tiny solar-panel-like cells surgically placed underneath the retina, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a system that may someday restore sight to people who have lost vision because of certain types of degenerative eye diseases.

This device — a new type of retinal prosthesis — involves a specially designed pair of goggles, which are equipped with a miniature camera and a pocket PC designed to process the visual data stream. The resulting images would be displayed on a liquid crystal microdisplay embedded in the goggles, similar to what’s used in video goggles for gaming, corresponding to approximately 30 degrees of visual field .

Unlike the regular video goggles, though, the images would be beamed from the LCD using laser pulses of near-infrared light to a photovoltaic array on a silicon chip  — one-third as thin as a strand of hair — implanted beneath the retina. It would have 25 micron (millionths of a meter, about 1/1000th of an inch) pixels, each containing a ~10 micron stimulating electrode.

Electric currents from the photodiodes on the chip would then trigger signals in the retina, which then flow to the brain, enabling a patient to regain vision.

The retinal chip is approximately 3 mm in diameter, corresponding to 10 degrees of visual field. The 30 degree visual field is accessible by eye scanning.

A portable computer processes video images captured by a head-mounted camera. Video goggles then project these images onto the retina using pulsed infrared (880–915 nm) illumination. Electric currents from the photodiodes on the chip then trigger signals in the retina that then flow to the brain, enabling a patient to regain vision. (Credit: K. Mathieson et al./Keith Mathieson et al./Nature Photonics)

Scientists tested the photovoltaic stimulation using the prosthetic device’s diode arrays in rat retinas in vitro and how they elicited electric responses, which are widely accepted indicators of visual activity, from retinal cells . The scientists are now testing the system in live rats, taking both physiological and behavioral measurements, and are hoping to find a sponsor to support tests in humans.

There are several other retinal prostheses being developed, and at least two of them are in clinical trials. A device made by the Los Angeles-based company Second Sight was approved in April for use in Europe, and another prosthesis-maker, a German company called Retina Implant AG, announced earlier this month results from its clinical testing in Europe.

Unlike these other devices — which require coils, cables or antennas inside the eye to deliver power and information to the retinal implant — the Stanford device uses near-infrared light to transmit images, thereby avoiding any need for wires and cables, and making the device thin and easily implantable.

“The current implants are very bulky, and the surgery to place the intraocular wiring for receiving, processing and power is difficult,” said Daniel Palanker, PhD, associate professor of ophthalmology. The device developed by his team, he noted, has virtually all of the hardware incorporated externally into the goggles. “The surgeon needs only to create a small pocket beneath the retina and then slip the photovoltaic cells inside it.” What’s more, one can tile these photovoltaic cells in larger numbers inside the eye to provide a wider field of view than the other systems can offer, he added.

The current design allows for 178 pixels per square millimeter. By comparison, the first retinal prosthesis to go to market, made by Second Sight of Sylmar, California, has 60 pixels in total and requires bulkier hardware.

However, thousands of pixels are likely to be required for functional restoration of sight, such as reading and face recognition, Palanker said on his Stanford page.

Conceptual diagram of the photovoltaic pixels with pillar electrodes (1) penetrating into the inner nuclear layer. The return electrodes (2) are located in the plane of the photodiodes. (Credit: Daniel Palanker)

Stanford University holds patents on two technologies used in the system, and Palanker and colleagues would receive royalties from the licensing of these patents.

Clinical trials are expected in a few years.

A prosthesis for retinal degenerative diseases

The proposed prosthesis is intended to help people suffering from retinal degenerative diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. The former is the foremost cause of vision loss in North America, and the latter causes an estimated 1.5 million people worldwide to lose sight, according to the nonprofit group Foundation Fighting Blindness.

In these diseases, the retina’s photoreceptor cells slowly degenerate, ultimately leading to blindness. But the inner retinal neurons that normally transmit signals from the photoreceptors to the brain are largely unscathed. Retinal prostheses are based on the idea that there are other ways to stimulate those neurons.

The Stanford device uses near-infrared light, which has longer wavelength than normal visible light. It’s necessary to use such an approach because people blinded by retinal degenerative diseases still have photoreceptor cells, which continue to be sensitive to visible light. “To make this work, we have to deliver a lot more light than normal vision would require,” said Palanker. “And if we used visible light, it would be painfully bright.” Near-infrared light isn’t visible to the naked eye, though it is “visible” to the diodes that are implanted as part of this prosthetic system, he said.

For this study, Palanker and his team fabricated a chip about the size of a pencil point that contains hundreds of these light-sensitive diodes. To test how these chips responded, the researchers used retinas from both normal rats and blind rats that serve as models of retinal degenerative disease. The scientists placed an array of photodiodes beneath the retinas and placed a multi-electrode array above the layer of ganglion cells to gauge their activity. The scientists then sent pulses of light, both visible and near-infrared, to produce electric current in the photodiodes and measured the response in the outer layer of the retinas.

In the normal rats, the ganglions were stimulated, as expected, by the normal visible light, but they also presented a similar response to the near-infrared light: That’s confirmation that the diodes were triggering neural activity.

In the degenerative rat retinas, the normal light elicited little response, but the near-infrared light prompted strong spikes in activity roughly similar to what occurred in the normal rat retinas. “They didn’t respond to normal light, but they did to infrared,” said Palanker. “This way the sight is restored with our system.” He noted that the degenerated rat retinas required greater amounts of near-infrared light to achieve the same level of activity as the normal rat retinas.

While there was concern that exposure to such doses of near-infrared light could cause the tissue to heat up, the study found that the irradiation was still one-hundredth of the established ocular safety limit.

Since completing the study, Palanker and his colleagues have implanted the photodiodes in rats’ eyes and been observing and measuring their effect for the last six months. He said preliminary data indicates that the visual signals are reaching the brain in normal and in blind rats, though the study is still under way.

While this and other devices could help people to regain some sight, the current technologies do not allow people to see color, and the resulting vision is far from normal, Palanker said.

Ref.: Keith Mathieson et al., Photovoltaic retinal prosthesis with high pixel density, Nature Photonics, 2012, DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2012.104

Inmarsat plans to launch three satellites into orbit in the years to come, with the first one planned for 2013. The firm says the project, called Global Xpress, will provide global coverage and essentially make in-flight Wi-fi fast, cheap, reliable, and available anywhere, even on long-haul flights.

The promised speeds are 50Mbps (megabits per second) for downloading content during flight and 5Mbps for uploading content.

Right now, U.S. firm Gogo is the most popular in-flight Wi-fi service provider in the world, equipping more than 85% of all North American airplanes. It uses existing mobile phone base stations, without a need for a satellite. Coverage is limited to aircraft flying over land.

A user tries the Brainput system (credit: Erin Treacy Solovey)

Postdoctoral MIT researcher Erin Treacy Solovey and her team have designed Brainput, a system using a headband that recognizes when a person’s workload is excessive and automatically modifies a computer interface to make it easier.

The researchers used a lightweight, portable brain monitoring technology called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which senses brain activitythrough the skull (no electrodes neeed).

Analysis of the brain scan data was then fed into a system that adjusted the user’s workload at those times.

Solovey suggests that such a system could potentially be used to help drivers, pilots, and supervisors of unmanned aerial vehicles. She says future work will investigate other cognitive states that can be reliably measured using fNIRS.

Hospital social media accounts (credit: Peter D. DeVries/International Journal of Electronic Finance)

A new social media platform geared towards healthcare might enable patients to share information with other patients and gain knowledge — and enable physicians to share and learn from their peers more readily, says a study in the International Journal of Electronic Finance.

The meshing of these two threads could also make improve doctor-patient communication, and healthcare industry as a whole,by reducing inefficiencies and making healthcare provision and advice more immediate and engaging at lower cost.

Peter DeVries of the Department of Finance, Accounting, and CIS, at the University of Houston – Downtown, suggests that from the perspective of healthcare providers social media might also open up new revenue streams that could bolster an industry currently in economic turmoil.

DeVries says there is likely to be a 124,000 shortfall of full-time physicians in the USA by 2025, while there will be a need for almost 140,000 family physicians by 2020 if Americans are to have adequate access to primary healthcare.

The projected shortage of physicians demands innovation in the healthcare industry, says DeVries. “Doctors and hospitals must find ways to provide healthcare in more productive and efficient ways,” he adds. “If a growing number of patients are finding themselves as users of Web 2.0, then Web 2.0 might be the answer to alleviate the forecasted overcrowding.”

Ref.: Peter D. DeVries, Electronic social media in the healthcare industry, International Journal of Electronic Finance, 2012, DOI: 10.1504/IJEF.2012.046593

The dolphin speaker prototype

To gain new insights into how dolphins communicate, researchers at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology and  Fusion Inc. created a prototype of an extremely broadband “dolphin speaker” capable of projecting dolphins’ communication sounds, whistles, burst-pulse sounds, as well as detection sounds such as echolocation clicks.

Dolphins rely on the combination of a variety of vocalizations and vastly better acoustic abilities than humans to communicate with each other or to detect their surroundings and prey in the dark sea.

The researchers will present their research at the Acoustics 2012 meeting in Hong Kong, May 13-18.

Dolphins can hear and produce sounds of up to 150 kHz, which are too high for humans to hear, and can vocalize at a variety of frequencies simultaneously.

“Acoustic studies of dolphins that have been done so far focus mainly on recordings of vocalizations and hearing abilities, but relatively few playback experiments have been conducted,” explains Yuka Mishima. “There were no speakers that could project from low to high frequencies like dolphins, although some could project the low-frequency sounds or parts of dolphin sounds. We succeeded in developing a prototype broadband transducer for an echosounder … by using new types of piezoelectric elements that had never been used for underwater acoustic transducers.”

Their dolphin speaker prototype can project sounds in the 7 to 170 kHz range.

“The dolphin speaker will enable us to play back a variety of dolphin sounds to dolphins, which will help to broaden the research of their acoustic abilities,” notes Mishima.

Ref.: Yuka Mishima, ‘Dolphin Speaker’ to Enhance Study of Dolphin Vocalizations and Acoustics, ASA Lay Language Papers, 163rd Acoustical Society of America Meeting, 2012 (open access)

Ref.: Yuka Mishima et al., Evaluation of playback sounds by a newly developed dolphin-speaker, Acoustics 2012 meeting in Hong Kong, May 13–18, 2012 [Abstract]

An MRI of the human head (credit: Wellcome Images)

New functional and imaging-based diagnostic tests that measure communication and signaling between different brain regions may provide valuable information about consciousness in patients unable to communicate.

The new tests, described in an open-access survey article, are functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) combined with electroencephalograpy (EEG), and response to neuronal perturbation, measuring, for example, sensory evoked potentials (ERP).

Disorders of consciousness such as coma or a vegetative state caused by severe brain injury are currently poorly understood and their diagnosis has relied mainly on patient responses and measures of brain activity.

Ref.: Mélanie Boly et al., Brain Connectivity in Disorders of Consciousness, Brain Connectivity, 2012, DOI: 10.1089/brain.2011.0049 (open access)

(Credit: Euro-Med)

The Internet and social media have opened up new vistas for people to share preferences in films, books and music, providing what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing.” But a world of automatic, always-on disclosure should give us pause,” says Neil M. Richards, JD, privacy law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

“’Frictionless sharing’ isn’t really frictionless – it forces on us the new frictions of worrying who knows what we’re reading and what our privacy settings are wherever and however we read electronically. It’s also not really sharing – real sharing is conscious sharing, a recommendation to read or not to read something rather than a data exhaust pipe of mental activity.

“Rather than ‘over-sharing,’ we should share better, which means consciously, and we should expand the limited legal protections for intellectual privacy rather than dismantling them.”

Richards says that what’s at stake is “intellectual privacy,” his term for the idea that records of our reading and movie watching deserve special protection compared to other kinds of personal information.

“The films we watch, the books we read, and the websites we visit are essential to the ways we try to understand the world we live in,” he says.”

“Intellectual privacy protects our ability to think for ourselves, without worrying that other people might judge us based on what we read. It allows us to explore ideas that other people might not approve of, and to figure out our politics, sexuality and personal values, among other things.

“Sharing and commenting on books, films and ideas is the essence of free speech.”

Richards notes that the work of the American Libraries Association and its Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) offers an attractive solution to the problem of reader records.

“The OIF has argued passionately and correctly for the importance of solitary reading as well as the ethical need for those who enable reading – librarians, but also Internet companies – to protect the privacy and confidentiality of reading records,” he says.

“The norms of librarians suggest one successful and proven solution — professionals and companies holding reader records must only disclose them with the express conscious consent of the reader.

“The stakes in this debate are immense. Choices we make now about the boundaries between our individual and social selves, between consumers and companies, between citizens and the state, will have massive consequences for the societies our children and grandchildren inherit.”

Read more of Richards comments on intellectual privacy on the OIF Blog.

Self-driving car (credit: Google)

The technology behind Google’s self-driving car represents a potential leap forward in auto safety.

More than 30,000 people are killed each year in crashes despite huge advances in auto safety. The overwhelming majority of those crashes are caused by human-driver error.

Computer driven cars could reduce traffic deaths by a very significant degree, said David Champion, head of auto testing at Consumer Reports, but only if all cars are computer-driven.

“I think if all the cars were self-driving, it would be a benefit,” he said. “I think a mixture would be a bit chaotic.” That’s because humans are better at predicting the behavior of other humans than computers could ever be, he said.

“When I’m approaching an intersection, I look to see of the other driver is looking at me,” said Champion. “If he’s looking somewhere else and inching forward, I’m going to lift off the gas.”

Google’s cars, modified Toyota Priuses, are still in the testing stages and aren’t available to the public. But some so-called “driver assistance” technologies are already helping to lower traffic deaths in cars you can buy now. For example, Electronic Stability Control, which uses computers to help drivers maintain control during abrupt maneuvers, has been shown to reduce fatal crashes by as much as a third.

V2V is already in advanced stages of development by a consortium of automakers and the federal government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Psychopaths show areas of reduced gray matter volume in the temporal pole (credit: Gregory, S. et al./Archives of General Psychiatry)

New research provides the strongest evidence to date that psychopathy is linked to specific structural abnormalities in the brain. The study, led by researchers at King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) is the first to confirm that psychopathy is a distinct neuro-developmental sub-group of anti-social personality disorder (ASPD).

Most violent crimes are committed by a small group of persistent male offenders with ASPD. Approximately half of male prisoners in England and Wales will meet diagnostic criteria for ASPD, characterized by emotional instability, impulsivity and high levels of mood and anxiety disorders.

However, about one third of such men will meet additional diagnostic criteria for psychopathy (ASPD+P). They are characterised by a lack of empathy and remorse, and use aggression in a planned way to secure what they want (status, money etc.).

Previous research has shown that psychopaths’ brains differ structurally from healthy brains, but until now, none have examined these differences within a population of violent offenders with ASPD.

“Using MRI scans we found that psychopaths had structural brain abnormalities in key areas of their ‘social brains’ compared to those who just had ASPD,:”Dr Nigel Blackwood from the IoP at King’s and lead author of the study. ”This adds to behavioral and developmental evidence that psychopathy is an important subgroup of ASPD with a different neurobiological basis and different treatment needs.

“There is a clear behavioral difference amongst those diagnosed with ASPD depending on whether or not they also have psychopathy. We describe those without psychopathy as ‘hot-headed’ and those with psychopathy as ‘cold-hearted’.  The ‘cold-hearted’ psychopathic group begin offending earlier, engage in a broader range and greater density of offending behaviours, and respond less well to treatment programmes in adulthood, compared to the  ‘hot-headed’ group. We now know that this behavioural difference corresponds to very specific structural brain abnormalities which underpin psychopathic behaviour, such as profound deficits in empathising with the distress of others.”

The researchers used MRI to scan the brains of 44 violent adult male offenders diagnosed with Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD). Crimes committed included murder, rape, attempted murder and grievous bodily harm.  Of these, 17 met the diagnosis for psychopathy (ASPD+P) and 27 did not (ASPD-P). They also scanned the brains of 22 healthy non-offenders.

The study found that ASPD+P offenders displayed significantly reduced grey matter volumes in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles compared to ASPD-P offenders and healthy non-offenders. These areas are important in understanding other people’s emotions and intentions and are activated when people think about moral behaviour. Damage to these areas is associated with impaired empathising with other people, poor response to fear and distress and a lack of ‘self-conscious’ emotions such as guilt or embarrassment.

Ref.: Gregory, S. et al. ‘The Antisocial Brain: Psychopathy Matters – a structural MRI investigation of antisocial male offenders’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 2012, DOI: 10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2012.222

U.S. manufacturing revival (credit: MIT)

The U.S. manufacturing sector, which is burdened by negative stereotypes, is showing signs of revival, according to speakers at The Future of Manufacturing in the U.S. conference held on May 8 and 9 at MIT.

The United States added about 50,000 manufacturing jobs this January alone, the largest monthly gain since 1998, and companies such as Ford Motor Co. have moved overseas plants back to the United States.

High energy costs (which make global shipping more expensive), along with rising foreign wages in some industries, have provided reasons for companies to consider relocating their factories in America. About 43 percent of firms in one survey would consider moving their factories back to the United States.

Manufacturing has seen major job reductions in the United States — from 18 million jobs in 2001 to 12 million today, but the sector still accounts for 70 percent of private-sector R&D spending in America and 90 percent of U.S. patents issued today.

MIT President Susan Hockfield, who co-chairs the steering committee of the White House’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), discussed some of the imminent recommendations that group is going to make: policies intended to improve the business climate for manufacturers; programs to encourage people to develop skills useful for manufacturing jobs, especially through community college education; and funding for new regional technology-development test beds called Manufacturing Innovation Institutes.

Government can further encourage innovation with tax credits that reduce moving expenses when companies bring jobs back to the United States; a permanent tax credit for R&D; a reduction in the corporate tax rate; more incentives for business investment; better worker training on the part of companies, not just within the education system; and continued innovation by U.S. firms.

Technological research that may provide the biggest platforms for economic growth: lightweight materials, flexible electronics, pharmaceuticals, rapid prototyping — such as 3-D printing — and the use of recycled materials for manufacturing.

An Apple face-recognition patent shows how 3-D imaging could provide for better system security (credit: Free Patents Online)

A new Apple patent application suggests what face-recognition technology might enable, Wired Gadget Lab reports.

The patent, “3D Object Recognition,” describes a novel way to generate 3-D models using 2-D images. It would use multiple photos or video to create a robust 3-D representation of a user’s face, which could then be compared, on the fly, to a 3-D representation built in real time from a 2-D image captured from a user’s phone.

The system has obvious applications in system security — namely, a home screen unlocking mechanism that’s not easily fooled. It could also be used to identify an entire body, or employed in medical applications to identify specific organs, or even tumors.

Another Apple patent application dealing with facial recognition discussed a lower-power-intensive way to identify a device owner when he or she approaches the system. And, of course, Apple already employs face detection for identifying people in iPhoto images, but doesn’t use the feature for system security in iOS.

An antenna design that can transmit signals on different frequencies (credit: O. N. Alrabadi, J. Perruisseau-Carrier, and A. Kalis/IEEE)

EPFL scientists have developed a single antenna that is capable of transmitting the same data as a two-antenna (or more) system, allowing for future lower-cost, more compact, energy-saving mobile devices.

Currently, MIMO (multiple-input, multiple outputs), used in devices such as wireless modems, uses several antennas to transmit and receive signals. It poses problems because it is costly and difficult to integrate into hardware.

In a MIMO system, antennas generally have to be placed at a certain distance from each other, which makes inserting them into cell phones and miniature devices a complicated process, and each separate transmitting antenna must have its own encoding and amplifying signal device, which is costly and energy-consuming.

The EPFL technique, called “Beamspace MIMO,” allows for significantly reducing the number of physical antennas, and only one coding and amplifying device is required

Ref.: O. N. Alrabadi, J. Perruisseau-Carrier, and A. Kalis, MIMO Transmission using a Single RF Source: Theory and Antenna Design, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech. and IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag. Joint Special Issue on MIMO Technology, 2012, DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2011.2173429

Ref.: O. N. Alrabadi, J. Perruisseau-Carrier, and A. Kalis, MIMO Transmission using a Single RF Source: Theory and Antenna Design, [PDF] (open access)