A baby’s life was saved with this groundbreaking 3-D printed device that restored his breathing (credit: University of Michigan Health System)

A bioresorbable splint used for first time, successfully stopped life-threatening tracheobronchomalacia, a case featured in New England Journal of Medicine.

Every day, a baby, Kaiba, stopped breathing, his collapsed bronchus blocking the crucial flow of air to his lungs. Parents April and Bryan Gionfriddo watched helplessly.

They found hope at the University of Michigan, where a new, bioresorbable device that could help Kaiba was under development.  Kaiba’s doctors contacted Glenn Green, M.D., associate professor of pediatric otolaryngology at the University of Michigan.

Green and his colleague, Scott Hollister, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering and associate professor of surgery at U-M, obtained emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to create and implant a tracheal splint for Kaiba made from a biopolymer called polycaprolactone.

On February 9, 2012, the specially-designed splint was placed in Kaiba at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. The splint was sewn around Kaiba’s airway to expand the bronchus and give it a skeleton to aid proper growth. Over about three years, the splint will be reabsorbed by the body. The case is featured in the New England Journal of Medicine (open access).

“It was amazing. As soon as the splint was put in, the lungs started going up and down for the first time and we knew he was going to be OK,” says Green.

Green and Hollister were able to make the custom-designed, custom-fabricated device using high-resolution imaging and computer-aided design. The device was created directly from a CT scan of Kaiba’s trachea/bronchus, integrating an image-based computer model with laser-based 3D printing to produce the splint.

Kaiba was off ventilator support 21 days after the procedure, and has not had breathing trouble since then.

“The material we used is a nice choice for this. It takes about two to three years for the trachea to remodel and grow into a healthy state, and that’s about how long this material will take to dissolve into the body,” says Hollister.

“Kaiba’s case is definitely the highlight of my career so far. To actually build something that a surgeon can use to save a person’s life? It’s a tremendous feeling.”

The image-based design and 3D biomaterial printing process can be adapted to build and reconstruct a number of tissue structures.  Green and Hollister have already utilized the process to build and test patient specific ear and nose structures in pre-clinical models.  In addition, the method has been used by Hollister with collaborators to rebuild bone structures (spine, craniofacial and long bone) in pre-clinical models.

Severe tracheobronchomalacia is rare. About 1 in 2,200 babies are born with tracheomalacia and most children grow out of it by age 2 or 3, although it often is misdiagnosed as asthma that doesn’t respond to treatment.

Severe cases, like Kaiba’s, are about 10 percent of that number. And they are frightening, says Green. A normal cold can cause a baby to stop breathing. In Kaiba’s case, the family was out at a restaurant when he was six weeks old and he turned blue.

“Severe tracheobronchomalacia has been a condition that has bothered me for years,” says Green. “I’ve seen children die from it. To see this device work, it’s a major accomplishment and offers hope for these children.”

Before the device was placed, Kaiba continued to stop breathing on a regular basis and required resuscitation daily.

“Even with the best treatments available, he continued to have these episodes. He was imminently going to die. The physician treating him in Ohio knew there was no other option, other than our device in development here,” Green says.

Kaiba is doing well and he and his family, including an older brother and sister, live in Ohio.

C. elegans movement (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Scientists from the University of Southampton have developed a microfluidic electrophysiological device called a NeuroChip that records the neural activity in the microscopic worm Caenorhadbitis elegans  (C. elegans) — the worm equivalent of an EEG —.to help test the effects of drugs.

How to record a worm EEG

With the NeuroChip,you feed the  worm into a narrow, fluid-filled channel that tapers at one end. That captures the worm by its “head,” so now it’s now immobilized — the correct orientation for recording the activity of the nervous system.  The metal electrodes are connected to an amplifier to make the recording.

C. elegans is a nematode (roundworm) that has been enormously important in providing insight into fundamental signaling processes in the nervous system. It’s small (about 1 mm in length), transparent for ease of manipulation and observation, feeds on bacteria such as E. coli, can be easily and cheaply housed and cultivated in large numbers (10,000 worms/petri dish) in the laboratory, and has a short life cycle (speeds up testing).

However, electrophysiological recordings of the activity of excitatory and inhibitory nerve cells in the nervous system of the worm previously required a high level of technical expertise. Single microscopic (1mm long) worms had to be carefully trapped on the end of a glass tube (microelectrode) to make the recording. The worms are very mobile and tiny, so  this can be a challenging procedure.

As the worm turns

Diagram of the NeuroChip (left). It is a two-layer structure: the blue layer is the microfluidic region, processing worms and delivery of drugs. Trapping region (red circled) is magnified (right), showing the trapped worm’s head. The red square is the micro-pillar region, which facilitates correct orientation of the worm. The white layer is the pneumatic control layer (V1, V2, V3 and V4 indicate Valve 1, 2, 3 and 4 respectively). The three black squares are the microelectrodes. (Credit: Chunxiao Hu et al./PLoS ONE)

The new design simplifies the process, making it more efficient, and improves the signal to noise (quality) of the recorded data.

The NeuroChip can detect the effects of drugs and allows for high-throughput screens; researchers can quickly conduct millions of chemical, genetic or pharmacological tests in neurotoxicology and generic screening for neuroactive drugs, the researchers say.

According to Lindy Holden-Dye, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southampton and lead author of the paper, “We are particularly interested in using this as a sensitive new tool for screening compounds for neurotoxicity. It will allow us to precisely quantify sub-lethal effects on neural network activity. It can also provide an information-rich platform by reporting the effects of compounds on a diverse array of neurotransmitter pathways, which are implicated in mammalian toxicology. ”

The research is a joint project between the University’s Centre for Biological Sciences and the Hybrid Biodevices Group.

The electron spins in a magnetic vortex all point in parallel, either clockwise or counterclockwise. Spins in the crowded core of the vortex must point out of the plane, either up or down. The four orientations of circularity and polarity could form the cells of multibit magnetic storage and processing systems. (Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers have used the unique capabilities of the Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) to advance a new concept in magnetic memory.

“What we’re working on now could make these gadgets perform hundreds of times better and also be a hundred times more energy efficient,” says the Lab’s Peter Fischer.

Four memory states

Magnetic memories store bits of information in discrete units whose electron spins all line up in parallel, pointing one way or the opposite to signify a one or a zero. What Fischer and his colleagues propose is multibit storage in which each unit has four states instead of two and can store twice the information.

The key is magnetic vortices — whirlpools of magnetic field — confined to tiny metal disks a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter. The electron spins are seeking the lowest possible energy; spins that point in opposing directions (antiparallel) cost energy. Thus the electrons line up with all their spins pointing in a circle, either clockwise or counterclockwise around the disk.

In the core of the vortex, however, where the circles get smaller and smaller and neighboring spins would inevitably align antiparallel, they tend to tilt out of the plane, pointing either up or down.

“So each disk has four bits instead of two — left or right circularity and up or down polarity of the core — but you must be able to control the orientation of each independently,” says Fischer.

Up, down, and around — taking control

Applying a strong, steady external magnetic field can reverse core polarity, but practical devices can’t tolerate strong fields, and they need faster switches. Previous researchers at the ALS had found that with weak oscillating magnetic fields in the plane of the nanodisk they could quickly nudge the core out of its central position and get the same result.

“Instead of a static field, you wiggle it,” Fischer explains. As the core is pushed away from the center of the disk, successive magnetic waves — changes in spin orientation — move the core faster and faster until its polarity flips to the opposite orientation.

The team used the ALS beamline 6.1.2 to demonstrate, for the first time, that similar methods can control the circularity of the magnetic vortices.

In this case, the “wiggle” drives the core right off the edge of the disk. Once it’s expelled, the vortex collapses and reforms, with spins pointing in the opposite direction: clockwise instead of counterclockwise, or vice versa.

Magnetic transmission soft x-ray microscopy shows the reverse of spin circularity in magnetic vortices in a row of nanodisks, after applying a 1.5 nanosecond pulse of magnetic field. The change from left to right is not a change in lighting, as it may appear, but is instead due to changing magnetic contrast (credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Beamline 6.1.2 specializes in soft x-ray transmission microscopy of magnetic states, which allowed the researchers to make direct images of how the strength and duration of the trains of electric and magnetic pulses affected the circularity of the vortex. They found that control depends on the disk’s geometry.

The disks were all tapered, with diagonal slices off their top surfaces that served to accelerate the core, once it started moving. But thickness and diameter were the important factors: the smaller the disk, the better.

“Thick” disks (30 nanometers) over a thousand nanometers in diameter were sluggards, taking more than three nanoseconds to switch circularity. But disks only 20 nanometers thick and 100 nanometers across could switch orientation in less than half a nanosecond.

Much remains to be done before the four-value multibit becomes practical, Polarity can be controlled, and circularity can be controlled, but so far they can’t be controlled at the same time. Plans for doing this are in the works.

“This is the scientific basis for possible applications to come,” says Fischer. “We are already looking at ways to control spin with temperature and voltage, at how to completely decouple spin from charge currents, and even at ways to couple chains of nanodisks together to build logic devices — not just for memory, but for computation.”

In Fischer’s opinion, the ALS’s soft x-ray microscopes tools are in the pole position for the race in magnetism research. “No method besides x-ray microscopy can provide similarly comprehensive information, both to identify the magnetic materials and to image the fastest dynamics of magnetic states on the nanoscale. The instruments we have are unique and serve the whole vortex community, world-wide.”

DOE’s Office of Science supports the ALS and, with the European Regional Development Fund and the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, supported this research.

Bitcoin is gaining traction outside its existing community of enthusiastic early adopters.

An estimated 1,100 people attended Bitcoin 2013, the first large conference dedicated to Bitcoin, MIT Technology Review reports. The conference also showed that Bitcoin has begun to attract the backing of conventional technology industry investors, who have sunk millions of dollars into a handful of Bitcoin startups.

In the Bitcoin system, cryptographic operations and oversight from a peer-to-peer network of people running Bitcoin software process transactions and protect against counterfeiting without the need for a central authority.

OpenCoin is backed by Silicon Valley venture funds Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google Ventures.

CoinBase, the media sponsor of the San Jose event, received the largest venture investment in a Bitcoin business to date, earlier this month:.$5 million from Union Square Ventures, a fund better known for backing Tumblr and Zynga.

BitPay, which enables online stores — including those hosted by Amazon — to take Bitcoin payment, recently received $3 million from Founders Fund, led by Facebook’s first major investor, Peter Thiel.

Artist’s impression of a rotation-powered pulsar. The neutron star appears as a pulsating source of radiation if the rotating emission beam crosses the observer’s line of sight. Averaging these periodic pulses of intensity over many rotation cycles results in a stable pulse profile. Because of the timing stability of most pulsars, the arrival time of pulses can be predicted with very high precision, which is an essential requirement for a navigation system based on pulsar observations. (Credit: Werner Becker, Mike G. Bernhardt, Axel Jessner)

Researchers have worked out the practical details for an autonomous spacecraft navigation system using signals from pulsars in essentially the same way that we use GPS satellites to navigate on Earth, MIT Technology Review reports.

A pulsar is a rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation at a very precise interval between pulses that ranges from milliseconds to seconds.

By measuring the arrival time of pulses from at least three different pulsars and comparing this with their predicted arrival time, it is possible to work out a position in three-dimensional space.

The researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany say that technology being developed now would allow spacecraft to work out their position to within five kilometers anywhere in the solar system.

The researchers calculate that for 21-centimeter waves, the spacecraft would require an antenna with a collecting area of 150 square meters.

But a better idea, they say, is to use pulsars that emit x-rays, since the technology for collecting and focusing x-rays has improved dramatically in recent years.

However, given the fact that humanity continues to live longer, spends billions of dollars on extending life, and brilliant scientists such as Ray Kurzweil are actively pursuing a sort-of human-technological immortality through the singularity, I am going to go out on a limb and predict that Logan’s Run will always be wrong.[...]

I do not mean to be overly optimistic in thinking about the potential of Google Glass. It will have positive benefits and negative consequences, as with all new technologies. But the cumulative effects, both good and bad, will be transformative.[...]

That’s the core criterion for admission to SU Labs. “We’re not going to take a company that might make a nice return but has no value in terms of what we call humanity’s grand challenges,” explains Gabriel Baldinucci, SU Labs’ VP of strategy.

SU Labs is an outgrowth of Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, created in 2009 by X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and artificial intelligence guru and Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil. The school specializes in teaching how to build businesses in a world where technology is changing at an exponential rate. [...]

Singularity University was founded by Chancellor Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, chairman, in 2009.

The nanoparticles as designed by Lewis and Robertson. The green interior depicts the radioactive lutetium surrounded by a gold shell. (Credit: Michael Lewis/University of Missouri and Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital)

Researchers at the University of Missouri have found a way to create radioactive nanoparticles that target lymphoma tumor cells wherever they may be in the body.

Michael Lewis, an associate professor of oncology in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, says being able to target secondary tumors is vital to successfully treating patients with progressive cancers.

“Depending on the type of cancer, primary tumors usually are not the cause of death for cancer patients,” Lewis said. “If a cancer metastasizes, or spreads creating hard-to-find tumors, it often becomes fatal. Having a way to identify and shrink these secondary tumors is of utmost importance when fighting to save people with these diseases.”

In an effort to find a way to locate and kill secondary tumors, Lewis, in collaboration with J. David Robertson, director of research at the MU Research Reactor and professor of chemistry in the College of Arts and Science, have successfully created nanoparticles made of a radioactive form of the element lutetium. The MU scientists then covered the lutetium nanoparticles with gold shells and attached targeting agents.

In previous research, Lewis has already proven the effectiveness of similar targeting agents in mice and dogs suffering from tumors. In that research, the targeting agents were attached to single radioactive atoms that were introduced into the bodies of animals with cancer. The targeting agents were able to seek out the tumors existing within the animals, which were then revealed through radio-imaging of those animals.

In their current research, the MU scientists have shown the targeting agents can deliver the new radioactive lutetium nanoparticles to lymphoma tumor cells without attaching to and damaging healthy cells in the process. Robertson says this is an important step toward developing therapies for lymphoma and other advanced-stage cancers.

“The ability to deliver multiple radioactive atoms to individual cancer cells should greatly increase our ability to selectively kill these cells,” Robertson said. “We are very optimistic about the synergy of combining the targeting strategy developed in Dr. Lewis’s lab with our work on new radioactive nanoparticles.”

If additional studies, including animal studies, are successful within the next few years, the researchers will request permission from the federal government to begin human drug development. After this status has been granted, Lewis and Robertson may conduct human clinical trials with the hope of developing new treatments.

Lewis also is a principal investigator in the Research Service at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital. This research was supported by awards from the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as resources made available by Department of Veterans Affairs through use of facilities at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital in Columbia, Mo.

At ISTE 2013:

• Choose from hundreds of sessions, including BYOD and hands-on learning environments
• Try out emerging ed tech solutions in the expansive expo hall
• Attend powerful keynotes and panels
• Meet f2f with rock stars in the field
• Extend your personal learning networks for year-round growth
• Collaborate with like-minded educators passionate about using technology to engage students

ISTE’s 34th Annual Conference and Exposition features an amazing array of professional learning and collaborative networking opportunities. Search for sessions by Category or Presenter, or use our custom Program Search to find content that meets your specific criteria. For a more personal and in-depth learning experience, consider adding a Workshop. Use the Conference Planner to keep track of your onsite schedule.

• Arrive early Sunday afternoon and attend the Conference Welcome and ISTE Member Networking Fair.
• See all three outstanding keynote speakers—Jane McGonigal, Steven Johnson and Adam Bellow.
• Look for new content in the coming weeks, including interactive Playgrounds and networking Lounges.
• Not able to travel to San Antonio this year? Join us virtually through Access ISTE.

ISTE 2013 hosts one of the largest and most interactive ed tech expos in the world! With more than 500 exhibits and 4,500 industry representatives on hand, you’ll be surrounded by innovative tech solutions that can help you prepare students for success in the digital age.

NeuroStar TMS System (credit: NeuroStar)

New data show that the NeuroStar TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) Therapy System induced statistically and clinically meaningful response and remission in patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) during the acute phase of therapy, and the effects were maintained through one year of treatment.

At the end of acute treatment, 62 percent of patients achieved symptomatic improvement while 41 percent reported complete remission. At 12 months, 68 percent of patients achieved symptomatic improvement while 45 percent reported complete remission.

Maintenance of benefit was observed under a pragmatic regimen of continuation antidepressant medication and access to TMS reintroduction for symptom recurrence.

Numerical simulation of the density of matter when the universe was one billion years old. Galaxies formation follows the gravitational wells produced by dark matter, where hydrogen gas coalesces, and the first stars ignite. CIBER studies the total sky brightness, to probe the component from first stars and galaxies using spectral signatures, and searches for the distinctive spatial pattern seen in this image, produced by large-scale structures from dark matter. (Credit: Jamie Bock/Caltech)

When did the first stars and galaxies form in the universe? How brightly did they burn their nuclear fuel?

Scientists will seek to gain answers to these questions with the launch of the Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRIment (CIBER) on a Black Brant XII suborbital sounding rocket between 11 and 11:59 p.m. EDT, June 4 from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Jamie Bock, CIBER principal investigator from the California Institute of Technology, said, “The first massive stars to form in the universe produced copious ultraviolet light that ionized gas from neutral hydrogen. CIBER observes in the near infrared, as the expansion of the universe stretched the original short ultraviolet wavelengths to long near-infrared wavelengths today.

“CIBER investigates two telltale signatures of first star formation: the total brightness of the sky after subtracting all foregrounds, and a distinctive pattern of spatial variations.”

“The objectives of the experiment are of fundamental importance for astrophysics, to probe the process of first galaxy formation, but the measurement is also extremely difficult technically,” he noted.

This will be the fourth flight for CIBER on a NASA sounding rocket. The previous launches were in 2009, 2010, and 2012 from the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. After each flight the experiment or payload was recovered for post-calibrations and re-flight.

The entrance of the CIBER optics, showing two near-infrared wide-field cameras (top), an absolute spectrometer (lower left) and a Fraunhofer line spectrometer (lower right) (credit: Jamie Bock/Caltech)

CIBER is a cooperative instrument designed and built by the California Institute of Technology, University of California Irvine, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). The same team is also developing an improved follow-on experiment, with more capable optics and detector arrays, that will be completed next year.

(A) Low resolution structures of HAMLET in brown spheres and (B) its 180° view. (C–D) Superposition of HAMLET with human α-lactalbumin (PDB id: 1B9O [21]). The C-terminal residues from L105 to L123 of the crystal structure of the human α-lactalbumin, which form a flexible loop in the crystal structure of human α-lactalbumin, are colored red. We suggest that this region L105 to L123 takes up an extended conformation in HAMLET by forming a tail. (Credit: James Ho CS et al./PLoS ONE)

This molecule is based on a natural protein present in human breast milk, which has been found to have strong and wide-ranging tumor killing properties when bound to certain lipids. Lipids are organic molecules like amino acids and carbohydrates, made up of carbon and hydrogen, and help to store energy and to form biological membranes.

The protein-lipid molecule complex is known as HAMLET, which stands for Human Alpha-lactabumin Made Lethal to Tumor cells. It has been proven to be safe and effective, as it only targets tumor cells, leaving healthy human cells intact.

HAMLET has most recently been shown to successfully suppress colon cancer in laboratory mice.

The scientists have also successfully identified and isolated specific components of HAMLET called peptide-oleate bound forms, which have the tumor-killing effect. Peptides are short chain amino acids commonly found in the human body.

These latest breakthroughs are led by Professor Catharina Svanborg and Dr Manoj Puthia from Lund University, Sweden, and Professor Gerhard Grüber from NTU’s School of Biological Sciences. The HAMLET complex was first discovered by Professor Svanborg’s research group.

The researchers found that laboratory mice genetically modified to develop colon cancer were protected to a large extent when fed with HAMLET-laced water. This suggested that HAMLET was killing emerging tumor cells faster than these cells could grow and proliferate.

The ability to recreate HAMLET in synthetic form opens up possibilities of turning it into a drug to kill tumors.

Professor Catharina Svanborg, a medical doctor and scientist, said she had seen promising results from the human trials using HAMLET in Sweden. “We are now ready to test HAMLET as a therapeutic and preventive agent in colon cancer, especially in families with the genetic predisposition, where preventive options are limited,” Svanborg said.

“After completing the various clinical trials, we hope to develop a commercially available product for doctors’ use for cancer treatment in the next five to ten years,” she added.

TEM image of a gold/iron oxide catalyst as-prepared (left) and used (right) (credit: Titilayo Shodiya et al./Journal of Catalysis)

Duke University engineers have developed a novel method for producing clean hydrogen, which could prove essential to weaning society off of fossil fuels and their environmental implications.

While hydrogen is ubiquitous in the environment, producing and collecting molecular hydrogen for transportation and industrial uses is expensive and complicated. Just as importantly, a byproduct of most current methods of producing hydrogen is carbon monoxide, which is toxic to humans and animals.

The Duke engineers, using a new catalytic approach, have shown in the laboratory that they can reduce carbon monoxide levels to nearly zero in the presence of hydrogen and the harmless byproducts of carbon dioxide and water. They also demonstrated that they could produce hydrogen by reforming fuel at much lower temperatures than conventional methods, which makes it a more practical option.

Catalysts are agents added to promote chemical reactions. In this case, the catalysts were nanoparticle combinations of gold and iron oxide (rust), but not in the traditional sense. Current methods depend on gold nanoparticles’ ability to drive the process as the sole catalyst, while the Duke researchers made both the iron oxide and the gold the focus of the catalytic process.

“Our ultimate goal is to be able to produce hydrogen for use in fuel cells,” said Titilayo “Titi” Shodiya, a graduate student working in the laboratory of senior researcher Nico Hotz, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. “Everyone is interested in sustainable and non-polluting ways of producing useful energy without fossil fuels,” said Shodiya, the paper’s first author.

Fuel cells produce electricity through chemical reactions, most commonly involving hydrogen. Also, many industrial processes require hydrogen as a chemical reagent and vehicles are beginning to use hydrogen as a primary fuel source.

“We were able through our system to consistently produce hydrogen with less than 0.002 percent (20 parts per million) of carbon monoxide,” Shodiya said.

The Duke researchers achieved these levels by switching the recipe for the nanoparticles used as catalysts for the reactions to oxidize carbon monoxide in hydrogen-rich gases. Traditional methods of cleaning hydrogen, which are not nearly as efficient as this new approach, also involve gold-iron oxide nanoparticles as the catalyst, the researchers said.

“It had been assumed that the iron oxide nanoparticles were only ‘scaffolds’ holding the gold nanoparticles together, and that the gold was responsible for the chemical reactions,” Sodiya said. “However, we found that increasing the surface area of the iron oxide dramatically increased the catalytic activity of the gold.”

One of the newest approaches to producing renewable energy is the use of biomass-derived alcohol-based sources, such as methanol. When methanol is treated with steam, or reformed, it creates a hydrogen-rich mixture that can be used in fuel cells.

“The main problem with this approach is that it also produces carbon monoxide, which is not only toxic to life, but also quickly damages the catalyst on fuel cell membranes that are crucial to the functioning of a fuel cell,” Hotz said. “It doesn’t take much carbon monoxide to ruin these membranes.”

The researchers ran the reaction for more than 200 hours and found no reduction in the ability of the catalyst to reduce the amount of carbon monoxide in the hydrogen gas.

“The mechanism for this is not exactly understood yet. However, while current thinking is that the size of the gold particles is key, we believe the emphasis of further research should focus on iron oxide’s role in the process,” Shodiya said.

The Duke team’s research was supported by the California Energy Commission and the Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

Scanadu Scout (credit: Scanadu)

Scanadu has announced updates to its Scanadu Scout, the “first medical Tricorder,” a prototype device designed to measure vital signs; and the launch of an indiegogo campaign.

A first-edition Scout can be reserved on indiegogo and will be available in March 2014.

The Scout is sold as an exploratory tool. “By helping us collect data, we can file our application to the FDA for market approval as an over-the-counter consumer-grade diagnostic tool,” the company said.

How it works

Dr. Martin Zizi, Scanadu Director for Health, Science & Integration, explained to KurzweilAI that the device includes a visible and near-IR LED and sensor (for pulse oximetry, to measure oxygen saturation and other parameters), ECG sensor for electrical heart signals, far-IR sensor for temperature, and a microphone (for heart and respiratory sounds. The device is held briefly on the forehead and chest.

Using data fusion, algorithms on the included microprocessor can then derive pulse wave transit time, blood pressure, heart rte, respiratory rate, emotional stress, and other parameters. Data is displayed to the patient via Bluetooth 4.0 Smart Low Energy on Android and iOS devices

Scanadu display app (credit: Scanadu)

The new device is built on Micrium, NASA’s real-time operation system for SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) on the Rover Curiosity.

The company also announced updates today to ScanaFlo, a low-cost tool that uses the smartphone as a urine analysis reader, and unveiled the first design of the product. The small white, disposable paddle with multi-colored test strips and a QR code built into the device tests for levels of glucose, protein, leukocytes, nitrates, blood, bilirubin, urobilinogen, specific gravity, and pH in urine. It will also test for pregnancy.

Singularity, for those mere mortals who are unaware, is the theoretical emergence of a super-intelligence through technological means. First proposed by mathematician John von Neumann, it is the time when “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” [...]

“The most surprising thing about Stephen Hawking is his razor wire wit that is sometimes withering and other times matched with a puckish sense of humor. He maintains a child’s delight in discovery and credits his disability for allowing him to focus his mind.

“Our favorite quote from Hawking: ‘I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road,’” said writers Michael Lent and Brian McCarthy

It’s available exclusively at Comic Flea Market in print for $3.99. Digital copies will also be available for $1.99.

Robots at the Robofest-2013 youth festival in Moscow (credit: RIA Novosti, Artem Zhitenev)

Russian experts are developing robots designed to minimize casualties in terrorist attacks and neutralize terrorists, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on May 17, RIA Novosti reports.

Robots could also help evacuate injured servicemen and civilians from the scene of a terrorist attack, said Rogozin, who oversees the defense industry.

Other anti-terror equipment Russia is developing includes systems that can see terrorists through obstacles and effectively engage them in a standoff mode at a long distance without injuring their hostages, he said.

Human Rights Watch has criticized fully autonomous weapons, known as “killer robots,” which would be able to select and engage targets without human intervention and called for the preemptive prohibition on such weapons, RIA Novosti said.

“Fully autonomous weapons do not exist yet, but they are being developed by several countries and precursors to fully autonomous weapons have already been deployed by high-tech militaries,” HRW said in a statement on its website. “Some experts predict that fully autonomous weapons could be operational in 20 to 30 years.”

The Northrop Grumman-built Triton unmanned aircraft system completed its first flight on May 22, 2013. Could a future version be 3D-printed? (Credit: Northrop Grumman by Bob Brown)

Instead a carrying spare parts, space-constrained U.S. Navy ships in the future might carry 3-D printers and bags of various powdered ingredients, and simply download the design files needed to print items as necessary, according to the Armed Forces Journal,

“Perhaps closer at hand is a distributed global production network in which sailors and Marines send an email with a digital scan or design for a part they need and have it created at the nearest certified printer. Thinking bigger, the fleet might convert some Military Sealift Command ships into floating factories that can take print-on-demand orders from the battlegroup.”

But it could go beyond replacement parts. Several university labs and at least one defense contractor have turned out unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) comprised entirely of printed parts, excepting the motor and electronics, the journal reports.

A 3D-printed aircraft?

A Virginia Tech lab printed an aircraft that could be folded up and stored in a backpack, and a UAV controlled by a relatively cheap Android phone whose camera was used to shoot aerial imagery. Designed for a top speed of 45 mph, it crashed on its first flight. The students just went back to the lab and printed out a replacement nose cone. The eventual goal is a drone that flies right out of the printer with electronics and motive power already in place.

Taking 3D-printed guns a step further, how about printed ammunition? The Virginia Tech researchers believe that 3-D printing might be able to produce propellants with geometries that provide better and more efficient burn rates.

What about replacement parts for aircraft? Boeing has 22,000 printed parts flying on various jets and Lockheed has printed parts flying on the F-35, when it’s flying, the journal says.

The dark side

However, once a digital design is in the ether, anyone with a printer capable of producing the part can re-create it. This has implications not just for corporate intellectual property but national security. “U.S. companies and government agencies have lost control of terabytes of documents and data. What happens when the files being stolen include not just the design specifications of a top-secret weapon but the digital recipes that make it trivial to produce?

“Or imagine attacks along a different vector: a hand-held computed tomography scanner peers through containers and casings, assimilates a weapon’s inner workings, and automatically generates the digital blueprints to print it.

“Or take it a step further. If your enemy can steal and create files for proprietary designs, what’s to stop him from hacking into your system and modifying them? Suddenly, your printed UAVs are mysteriously collapsing upon launch. Three-dimensional printing’s emerging ability to integrate multiple materials also raises the specter of a new generation of improvised explosive devices. Imagine a fire hydrant that looks and works exactly like a fire hydrant, until a detonator touches off the explosives layered within.”

The Polish writer Stanisław Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel 

Throughout his writings, comprising dozens of science fiction novels and short stories, Lem offered deeply philosophical and bitingly satirical reflections on the limitations of both science and humanity.

In Summa Technologiae—his major work of nonfiction, first published in 1964 and now available in English for the first time—Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms.

After five decades Summa Technologiae has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance. Indeed, many of Lem’s conjectures about future technologies have now come true: from artificial intelligence, bionics, and nanotechnology to the dangers of information overload, the concept underlying Internet search engines, and the idea of virtual reality. More important for its continued relevance, however, is Lem’s rigorous investigation into the parallel development of biological and technical evolution and his conclusion that technology will outlive humanity.

Preceding Richard Dawkins’s understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker by more than two decades, Lem posits evolution as opportunistic, shortsighted, extravagant, and illogical. Strikingly original and still timely, Summa Technologiae resonates with a wide range of contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.

Kindle edition not available

Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived by acclaimed science journalist Chip Walter tells the intriguing tale of how against all odds and despite nature’s brutal and capricious ways we stand here today, the only surviving humans, and the planet’s most dominant species.

Drawing on a wide variety of scientific disciplines, Walter reveals how a rare evolutionary phenomenon led to the uniquely long childhoods that make us so resourceful and emotionally complex. He looks at why we developed a new kind of mind and how our highly social nature has shaped our moral (and immoral) behavior. And in exploring the traits that enabled our success, he plumbs the roots of our creativity and investigates why we became self-aware in ways that no other animal is. Along the way, Last Ape Standing profiles other human species who evolved with us and who have also shaped our kind in startling ways – the Neanderthals of Europe, the “Hobbits” of Indonesia, the Denisovans of Siberia, and the recently discovered Red Deer Cave people of China, who died off just as we stood at the brink of civilizations eleven thousand years ago.

Last Ape Standing is an engaging and accessible story that explores the forces that molded us into the peculiar and astonishing creature that we are.

Kindle edition also available at this link

When Temple Grandin was born in 1947, autism had only just been named. Today it is more prevalent than ever, with one in 88 children diagnosed on the spectrum. And our thinking about it has undergone a transformation in her lifetime: Autism studies have moved from the realm of psychology to neurology and genetics, and there is far more hope today than ever before thanks to groundbreaking new research into causes and treatments. Now Temple Grandin reports from the forefront of autism science, bringing her singular perspective to a thrilling journey into the heart of the autism revolution.

Weaving her own experience with remarkable new discoveries, Grandin introduces the neuroimaging advances and genetic research that link brain science to behavior, even sharing her own brain scan to show us which anomalies might explain common symptoms. We meet the scientists and self-advocates who are exploring innovative theories of what causes autism and how we can diagnose and best treat it. Grandin also highlights long-ignored sensory problems and the transformative effects we can have by treating autism symptom by symptom, rather than with an umbrella diagnosis. Most exciting, she argues that raising and educating kids on the spectrum isn’t just a matter of focusing on their weaknesses; in the science that reveals their long-overlooked strengths she shows us new ways to foster their unique contributions.

From the “aspies” in Silicon Valley to the five-year-old without language, Grandin understands the true meaning of the word spectrum. The Autistic Brain is essential reading from the most respected and beloved voices in the field.

Kindle edition also available at this link

The hydrophobic fabric repels water except where stitched with channels (credit: UC Davis)

Waterproof fabrics that whisk away sweat could be the latest application of microfluidic technology developed by bioengineers at the University of California, Davis.

The new fabric works like human skin, forming excess sweat into droplets that drain away by themselves, said inventor Tingrui Pan, professor of biomedical engineering.

One area of research in Pan’s Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory at UC Davis is a field known as microfluidics, which focuses on making “lab on a chip” devices that use tiny channels to manipulate fluids. Pan and his colleagues are developing such systems for applications like medical diagnostic tests.

Graduate students Siyuan Xing and Jia Jiang developed a new textile microfluidic platform using hydrophilic (water-attracting) threads stitched into a highly water-repellent fabric. They were able to create patterns of threads that suck droplets of water from one side of the fabric, propel them along the threads and expel them from the other side.

“We intentionally did not use any fancy microfabrication techniques so it is compatible with the textile manufacturing process and very easy to scale up,” said Xing, lead graduate student on the project.

Bio-inspired sweat-removal fabrics (credit: Siyuan Xing and Tingrui Pan/UC Davis)

It’s not just that the threads conduct water through capillary action. The water-repellent properties of the surrounding fabric also help drive water down the channels.

Unlike conventional fabrics, the water-pumping effect keeps working even when the water-conducting fibers are completely saturated, because of the sustaining pressure gradient generated by the surface tension of droplets.

The rest of the fabric stays completely dry and breathable. By adjusting the pattern of water-conducting fibers and how they are stitched on each side of the fabric, the researchers can control where sweat is collected and where it drains away on the outside.

Workout enthusiasts, athletes and clothing manufacturers are all interested in fabrics that remove sweat and let the skin breathe. Cotton fibers, for example, wick away sweat — but during heavy exercise, cotton can get soaked, making it clingy and uncomfortable.

The work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

Salamander (credit: Scott Camazine/Wikimedia Commons)

Salamanders’ immune systems are key to their remarkable ability to regrow limbs, and could also underpin their ability to regenerate spinal cords, brain tissue and even parts of their hearts, scientists have found.

In research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access), researchers from the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) at Monash University found that when immune cells known as macrophages were systemically removed, salamanders lost their ability to regenerate a limb and instead formed scar tissue.

Lead researcher, Dr James Godwin, a Fellow in the laboratory of ARMI Director Professor Nadia Rosenthal, said the findings brought researchers a step closer to understanding what conditions were needed for regeneration.

“Previously, we thought that macrophages were negative for regeneration, and this research shows that that’s not the case. If the macrophages are not present in the early phases of healing, regeneration does not occur,” Dr Godwin said.

“Now, we need to find out exactly how these macrophages are contributing to regeneration. Down the road, this could lead to therapies that tweak the human immune system down a more regenerative pathway.”

Perfect regeneration

Salamanders deal with injury in a remarkable way. The end result is the complete functional restoration of any tissue, on any part of the body including organs. The regenerated tissue is scar free and almost perfectly replicates the injury site before damage occurred.

“We can look to salamanders as a template of what perfect regeneration looks like,” Godwin said.

Aside from “holy grail” applications, such as healing spinal cord and brain injuries, Godwin believes that studying the healing processes of salamanders could lead to new treatments for a number of common conditions, such as heart and liver diseases, which are linked to fibrosis or scarring. Promotion of scar-free healing would also dramatically improve patients’ recovery following surgery.

There are indications that there is the capacity for regeneration in a range of animal species, but it has, in most cases been turned off by evolution. “Some of these regenerative pathways may still be open to us. We may be able to turn up the volume on some of these processes,” Dr Godwin said.

“We need to know exactly what salamanders do and how they do it well, so we can reverse-engineer that into human therapies.”

This is a rebroadcast of a webinar that tracks the evolution of next-generation sequencing and explores what the future holds in terms of the technology and its medical applications.

Panelists:

1. George Church, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

2. George Weinstock, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics and Molecular Microbiology, Washington University

3. Joel Dudley, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Director of Biomedical Informatics, Mount Sinai School of Medicine

— Gerontology Research Group

(Credit: iStockphoto)

Activating an enzyme known to play a role in the anti-aging benefits of calorie restriction delays the loss of brain cells and preserves cognitive function in mice, according to a study published in the May 22 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

The findings could one day guide researchers to discover drug alternatives that slow the progress of age-associated impairments in the brain.

Li-Huei Tsai — director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT — along with postdoc Johannes Gräff and others at MIT have confirmed that caloric restriction delays nerve cell loss and they found that a drug that activates SIRT1 produces the same effects.

Previous studies have shown that reducing calorie consumption extends the lifespan of a variety of species and decreases the brain changes that often accompany aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. There is also evidence that caloric restriction activates an enzyme called Sirtuin 1 (SIRT1), which studies suggest offers some protection against age-associated impairments in the brain.

“There has been great interest in finding compounds that mimic the benefits of caloric restriction that could be used to delay the onset of age-associated problems and/or diseases,” says Dr. Luigi Puglielli, who studies aging at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was not involved in this study. “If proven safe for humans, this study suggests such a drug could be used as a preventive tool to delay the onset of neurodegeneration associated with several diseases that affect the aging brain.”

In the study, Tsai’s team first decreased the normal diets of mice genetically engineered to rapidly undergo changes in the brain associated with neurodegeneration by 30 percent. Following three months on the diet, the mice completed several learning and memory tests. “We not only observed a delay in the onset of neurodegeneration in the calorie-restricted mice, but the animals were spared the learning and memory deficits of mice that did not consume reduced-calorie diets,” Tsai says.

Curious if they could recreate the benefits of caloric restriction without changing the animals’ diets, the scientists gave a separate group of mice a drug that activates SIRT1. Similar to what the researchers found in the mice exposed to reduced-calorie diets, the mice that received the drug had less cell loss and better cellular connectivity than the mice that did not receive the drug. Additionally, the mice that received the drug treatment performed as well as normal mice in learning and memory tests.

“The question now is whether this type of treatment will work in other animal models, whether it’s safe for use over time, and whether it only temporarily slows down the progression of neurodegeneration or stops it altogether,” Tsai says.

The research was supported by the National Institute on Aging and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

IBM Watson Solutions VP Stephen Gold interacts with the new IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, which uses cloud-delivered mobile and online chat technology to assist businesses’ customers, anytime and anywhere (credit: Jon Simon/Feature Photo Service for IBM)

Now customers can access Watson’s question-answering power directly.

IBM has unveiled the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a cognitive computing assistant that “learns, adapts and understands a company’s data quickly and easily,” according to IBM.

The IBM Watson Engagement Advisor‘s “Ask Watson” feature can quickly help address customers’ questions, offer feedback to guide their purchase decisions, and troubleshoot their problems.

No more “dial one for….”

The “Ask Watson” feature greets customers and offers help via any channel — through a website chat window or a mobile push alert, etc., saving consumers the hassle of performing searches, combing through websites and forums, or waiting endlessly for a response about the information they need.

Calling upon IBM’s Big Data Analytics technologies, IBM Watson retrieves data about customers to help ensure interactions are tailored to their needs, and search its corpus of stored information for the best solutions.

Leading brands trying it out include ANZ, Celcom, IHS, Nielsen and Royal Bank of Canada.

IBM Watson can now “proactively engage with a business’ customers, and continuously learn from interactions, anytime and anywhere, providing fast, more accurate and personalized interactions,” the announcement says.

Consider these findings:

• Millennial consumers will comprise nearly half of the workforce by 2020 — using paychecks for major purchases that require top-flight customer service — from cars to insurance policies.
• There will be more than 10 billion mobile devices by 2016, outpacing the human population.
• An IBM study of 1,700 chief marketing officers (CMOs) reveals that 65 percent of CMOs feel under-prepared for the growth of choices that today’s empowered consumers have for communications channels, such as smart phones and tablets.

IBM says that since its television debut, IBM Watson is smarter, faster and smaller — having gained a 240 percent improvement in system performance, and a reduction in physical requirements by 75 percent. The cognitive computing system can now be run on a single Power 750 server using Linux, transitioning from its original size of a master bedroom to that of four pizza boxes. Businesses that use IBM Watson can have the solution up and running quickly using a cloud computing environment, or deploy the technology on-premise.

How IBM Watson transforms the customer-disservice experience

The state of today’s customer engagement leaves much room for improvement. 270 billion customer service calls are handled annually, with roughly 50 percent unresolved, which for businesses means an increase in cost per escalated call by three times. In hindsight, 61 percent of those calls could have been resolved with better access to information.

Forrester’s 2012 Customer Experience Index revealed only 37 percent of brands received good or excellent customer experience index scores, while 64 percent received a rating of “OK,” “poor” or “very poor” from their customers.

Making matters more urgent for brands is the imminent spike in Millennial consumers who are expanding their footprint in today’s economy, using paychecks for insurance, bank accounts and telecom plans. Their expectations for brands: fast and personalized service on the go, via mobile device.

The IBM Watson Engagement Advisor will also help brands manage their existing customer engagement functions, by reducing burdens faced by call and e-service centers that struggle to keep up with skyrocketing demand.

Part of Alice’s optical parametric amplifier receiver. This receiver enables her to obtain the quantum-illumination performance advantage that ensures Bob’s communication to her is immune to Eve’s passive eavesdropping. (Credit: Zheshen Zhang et al./MIT)

Researchers in the Optical and Quantum Communications Group at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) have experimentally demonstrated a new quantum communication protocol that solves two basic problems with achieving practical quantum encryption.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) requires the inefficient transmission of a huge number of bits for each one that’s successfully received. And QKD depends on the properties of individual photons, so it’s very vulnerable to signal loss, which is inevitable over large enough distances — they generally work across distances of only 100 miles or so.

The new protocol is much more resilient to signal loss than QKD, and it sends only one bit for every one received.

At present, the protocol does have one major caveat: It’s secure only against so-called passive eavesdroppers, who simply siphon light from an optical transmission, and not against active eavesdroppers, who maliciously inject their own light into a communication channel. Security against passive eavesdropping is probably adequate for some optical communication systems, but if the researchers can figure out how to thwart active eavesdroppers, too, their protocol could be used to secure optical data transmission over long distances.

Cascading correlations

Like all quantum information schemes, the new protocol exploits the central mystery of quantum physics: the ability of tiny particles of matter to inhabit mutually exclusive states at the same time. Electrons, for instance, have a property called spin, which describes how they act in a magnetic field. Spin can be either up or down, but it can also be in a strange quantum state known as superposition, in which it’s up and down simultaneously.

According to Jeffrey Shapiro, the Julius A. Stratton Professor of Electrical Engineering and one of the co-directors of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group, quantum particles are capable of a greater degree of correlation than objects described by classical physics. A coin, for instance, can be either face-up or face-down. If you glue a second coin to it, face-to-face, the states of the two coins are correlated: If one is up, the other is down, and vice versa.

In the same way, if two electrons are orbiting the nucleus of an atom at the same distance, their spins are correlated: If one is up, the other must be down. But there’s a third possibility: If one is up and down at the same time, so is the other.

This kind of mutual dependency, even in particles separated by great distances, is known as entanglement. But entanglement is very fragile: It begins to break down as soon as particles start interacting with their immediate environments. The key to the new protocol, Shapiro explains, is that even if the entanglement between two light beams breaks down, and their degree of correlation falls back within classical limits, it can still remain much higher than it would be if the beams had a merely classical correlation to begin with.

Bring the noise

Following cryptographic convention, the RLE researchers describe their protocol in terms of a secure communication between Alice and Bob, with an eavesdropper, named Eve, trying to listen in. Alice creates two entangled light beams and sends one of them to Bob, keeping the other one circulating locally.

“In classical physics, there’s a maximum amount of correlation you can get between two events,” Shapiro says. In the new protocol, however, the entangled beams “have a correlation that exceeds — by orders of magnitude — the classical limit.”

As one of those beams travels toward Bob, interactions with the environment begin to break the entanglement, introducing degradations of signal quality that engineers call “noise.” Bob then adds information to the beam, amplifies it — which adds much more noise — and sends it back. Alice uses the beam she kept circulating locally to decode Bob’s transmission.

Eve, on the other hand, extracts some of the signal that Alice sends Bob and uses that to decode Bob’s transmission. Because Bob’s transmission is so noisy, its correlation with Eve’s sample signal is much lower than it is with the signal Alice kept.

“My experiment can show for the communication between Alice and Bob, if Bob sends one megabit of information, about one bit gets flipped,” says Zheshen Zhang, a postdoc at RLE and first author on the new paper. “For the eavesdropper, about half of the bits get flipped.”

“The first distinction between this and what other people have done in the past is that Jeff’s protocol is a direct secure-communication protocol,” says Saikat Guha, a senior scientist at Raytheon subsidiary BBN Technologies who works on quantum optical communications and imaging. “This is not a key distribution protocol.”

As for whether the system will work over long distances, “we don’t have all the answers yet, but this does seem to have better promise than some of the standard QKD protocols,” Guha says. “In the standard QKD protocols, one big requirement is to have quantum repeaters, which are devices that are not yet available. People are working on it, but there aren’t any quantum repeaters. So you can’t do standard QKD over standard fiber for more than a couple hundred kilometers at the most.”

A robotic-manufactured space colony

Artist’s concept of jig factory in space (credit: Anna Nesterova and John Strickland)

John Strickland, National Space Society board member, will present a plan for the “biggest construction system in history,” capable of building space colonies with as much as 500 square miles of ‘land,’ with forests, farms, and whole towns.

It’s a “jig-construction” device — a free-floating factory in space that holds on to the structure that it is making and anchors it, keeping the structure motionless while it is being assembled. At intervals, it extrudes the finished structure at one end.

It also has docks for space tugs, to receive shipments of fresh materials, like metal components created from asteroids and moon dust. The construction system would be automated and heavily roboticized — 3D printing in space with a vengeance.

Artist’s concept of space colony (credit: Don Davis/NASA Ames Research Center)

Says Strickland, “If the ancient Egyptians had had these jig construction systems and a few million years, they could have built pyramids the size of the moon.  Of course they would have been required to build them in space.”

Strickland’s ISDC talk is at 2 pm on May 24 in San Diego, California, at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla at Aventine Hotel. It will be a part of a series of talks that will unveil the National Space Society’s new Roadmap to Space Settlement, a document 12 years in the making.

Cubesats to Mars

(Credit: Busek Inc.)

Aerospace engineer Gary Stephenson will present (10:40 am Friday, Delphi Room) a new concept called “Cubesats to Mars” — a private, not-for-profit venture using tiny cubesats to create a low-cost satellite system for Mars. The cubesats could be used for communication, atmospheric and weather observation, and GPS-like navigation, for example.

The cubesats could be developed by students and would allow small countries to mount their own Mars missions at very low cost. The cubsats could also support future government missions with crucial data and infrastructure.

Transhumanism in space

The ISCD Transhumanist Track will be held on Saturday, May 25, 2013. organized by Dr. Natasha Vita-More and Karen Mermel. It will feature two of my favorite science-fiction writers, Dr. David Brin and Dr. Vernor Vinge; David Orban on what Maori culture can teach a future starfaring civilization; Vita-More on biotech innovations in space, and Howard Bloom in a new illustrated talk presenting his imaginative vision of “Gardening Space: Retooling Mind, Rewiring Reality.”

 Transhumanist Track

Nelumbo nucifera from China, more commonly known as the “sacred lotus” (credit: Jane Shen-Miller/UCLA)

A team of 70 scientists from the U.S., China, Australia and Japan reports having sequenced and annotated more than 86 percent of the genome of the “sacred lotus,” which is believed to have a powerful genetic system that repairs genetic defects, and may hold secrets about aging successfully.

The Nelumbo nucifera plant is revered in China and elsewhere as a symbol of spiritual purity and longevity.

“Molecular biologists can now more easily study how its genes are turned on and off during times of stress and why this plant’s seeds can live for 1,300 years,” said Jane Shen-Miller, one of three corresponding authors of the research and a senior scientist with UCLA‘s Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. This is a step toward learning what anti-aging secrets the sacred lotus plant may offer.”

The research was just published in the journal Genome Biology (open access).

Shen-Miller said the lotus’ genetic repair mechanisms could be very useful if they could be transferred to humans or to crops — such as rice, corn and wheat — whose seeds have life spans of only a few years. “If our genes could repair disease as well as the lotus’ genes, we would have healthier aging. We need to learn about its repair mechanisms, and about its biochemical, physiological and molecular properties, but the lotus genome is now open to everybody.”

How the lotus repair mechanism works

In the early 1990s, Shen-Miller led a UCLA research team that recovered a viable lotus seed that was almost 1,300 years old from a lake bed in northeastern China. It was a remarkable discovery, given that many other plant seeds are known to remain viable for just 20 years or less.

In 1996, Shen-Miller led another visit to China. Working in Liaoning province, her team collected about 100 lotus seeds — most were approximately 450 to 500 years old — with help from local farmers. To the researchers’ surprise, more than 80 percent of the lotus seeds that were tested for viability germinated. That indicated that the plant must have a powerful genetic system capable of repairing germination defects arising from hundreds of years of aging, Shen-Miller said.

Understanding how the lotus repair mechanism works — and its possible implications for human health — is essentially a three-step process, said Crysten Blaby-Haas, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in chemistry and biochemistry and co-author of the research. “Knowing the genome sequence was step one. Step two would be identifying which of these genes contributes to longevity and repairing genetic damage. Step three would be potential applications for human health, if we find and characterize those genes. The genome sequence will aid in future analysis.

“The next question is what are these genes doing, and the biggest question is how they contribute to the longevity of the lotus plant and its other interesting attributes,” Blaby-Haas said. “Before this, when scientists studied the lotus, it’s almost as if they were blind; now they can see. Once you know the repertoire of genes, you have a foundation to study their functions.”

Whole-genome duplications — the doubling or tripling of an organism’s entire genetic endowment — are important events in plant evolution, Ming said. Some of the duplicated genes retain their original structure and function, and others gradually adapt and take on new functions. If those changes are beneficial, the genes persist; if they’re harmful, they disappear from the genome.

Shen-Miller said experts in aging and stress will be eager to study the lotus genes because of the plant’s extraordinary longevity. “The lotus can age for 1,000 years, and even survives freezing weather,” she said. “Its genetic makeup can combat stress. Most crops don’t have a very long shelf life. But starches and proteins in lotus seeds remain palatable and actively promote seed germination, even after centuries of aging.”

The lotus’ unusual genetics give it some unique survival skills. Its leaves repel grime and water, its flowers generate heat to attract pollinators and the coating of lotus fruit is covered with antibiotics and wax that ensure the viability of the seed it contains.

Blaby-Haas studied lotus gene families potentially involved in how plants metabolize metals. One family, in particular, caught her attention. “We found that the lotus has 16 of these genes, while most plants have only one or two,” Blaby-Haas said. “Either this is an extremely important protein in the lotus, which is why it needs so many copies, or the duplication allows a novel function to arise; we don’t know which is correct.”

These genes may be related to the unique environment of the lotus, which grows with its roots submerged in water, she said. (Lotus was a land plant that adapted to the water.)

The sacred lotus is known from the geologic record as early as 135 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Shen-Miller said. It has been grown for at least 4,000 years in China, where every part of the plant has long been used in food and medicine.

Inventions & Nanotech Middle East 2013 is the region’s foremost & only forum to develop emerging technologies & inventions, as well as the launch of the groundbreaking field of nanotechnology in the Arabian Peninsula. By introducing Innovation to enterprise, inventors to Investors & designers to manufacturers, the possibilities are Limitless!

Inventions & Nanotech Middle East 2013 is focused to provide the highest quality networking experience possible for invention, research & exhibiting.  It is expected over 3000 attendees from 50 countries & 400 exhibitors, & 300 investors participating in the Inventions, Nanotech Middle East Expo & Conference to be held in November 2013 in Doha, Qatar.

It will be the First Nanotechnology Conference & Expo in the Middle East & largest multi-disciplinary gathering of research, invention, investment, & development & commercialization experts from across the Nanotech Highlighting:

*Water
*Energy & Oil Field
*Environment
*Health
*Consumer Products

Meet with the global leadership from industry, academia, and investment communities developing and commercializing the next generation of Cutting-edge technologies.

Inventions & Nanotech Middle East 2013 is largest multi-disciplinary multi-sector conference & marketplace of vetted innovations, innovators and technology business developers and funders. Showcase your pre-commercial technologies to corporate, investment & commercialization partners. Gain access to the world’s largest pooling of top-quality innovations. This important conference helps partners find new licensing and business opportunities, and matches corporate and investment partners to top vetted technologies from around the world.

Date: Wed., May 22, 2013
Time: 12:00 PM ET
Duration: 45 minutes
Where: Online!

Speaker
Anthony Moschella
Director of Product
MakerBot

Moderator
Jennifer Campbell
Executive Editor
Design News

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• A step-by-step walk through of the 3D printing process, from CAD file to printed part
• An intro to PLA filament, a high-detail, durable bioplastic
• The impressive array of prototypes, parts, and models that a desktop 3D printer can produce

Thousands of companies and entrepreneurs are saving tens of thousands of dollars in prototyping costs with MakerBot, not to mention cutting out weeks of development time. Let us show you how you can be one of them.

Register for our 45-minute webinar on Wednesday, May 22 at 12:00 PM to learn how MakerBot Desktop 3D Printers can dramatically reduce product design and development costs.

(Credit: iStockphoto)

There are many neurons, especially in brain regions that perform sophisticated functions such as thinking and planning, that react in different ways to a wide variety of things.

MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller first noticed these unusual activity patterns about 20 years ago, while recording the electrical activity of neurons in animals that were trained to perform complex tasks.

“We started noticing early on that there are a whole bunch of neurons in the prefrontal cortex that can’t be classified in the traditional way of one message per neuron,” recalls Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

In a paper appearing in Nature on May 19, Miller and colleagues at Columbia University report that these neurons are essential for complex cognitive tasks, such as learning new behavior. The Columbia team, led by the study’s senior author, Stefano Fusi, developed a computer model showing that without these neurons, the brain can learn only a handful of behavioral tasks.

“You need a significant proportion of these neurons,” says Fusi, an associate professor of neuroscience at Columbia. “That gives the brain a huge computational advantage.”

Miller and other neuroscientists who first identified this neuronal activity observed that while the patterns were difficult to predict, they were not random. “In the same context, the neurons always behave the same way. It’s just that they may convey one message in one task, and a totally different message in another task,” Miller says.

For example, a neuron might distinguish between colors during one task, but issue a motor command under different conditions.

Miller and colleagues proposed that this type of neuronal flexibility is key to cognitive flexibility, including the brain’s ability to learn so many new things on the fly. “You have a bunch of neurons that can be recruited for a whole bunch of different things, and what they do just changes depending on the task demands,” he says.

At first, that theory encountered resistance “because it runs against the traditional idea that you can figure out the clockwork of the brain by figuring out the one thing each neuron does,” Miller says.

For the new Nature study, Fusi and colleagues at Columbia created a computer model to determine more precisely what role these flexible neurons play in cognition, using experimental data gathered by Miller and his former grad student, Melissa Warden. That data came from one of the most complex tasks that Miller has ever trained a monkey to perform: The animals looked at a sequence of two pictures and had to remember the pictures and the order in which they appeared.

During this task, the flexible neurons, known as “mixed selectivity neurons,” exhibited a great deal of nonlinear activity — meaning that their responses to a combination of factors cannot be predicted based on their response to each individual factor (such as one image).

Expanding capacity

Fusi’s computer model revealed that these mixed selectivity neurons are critical to building a brain that can perform many complex tasks. When the computer model includes only neurons that perform one function, the brain can only learn very simple tasks. However, when the flexible neurons are added to the model, “everything becomes so much easier and you can create a neural system that can perform very complex tasks,” Fusi says.

The flexible neurons also greatly expand the brain’s capacity to perform tasks. In the computer model, neural networks without mixed selectivity neurons could learn about 100 tasks before running out of capacity. That capacity greatly expanded to tens of millions of tasks as mixed selectivity neurons were added to the model. When mixed selectivity neurons reached about 30 percent of the total, the network’s capacity became “virtually unlimited,” Miller says — just like a human brain.

Mixed selectivity neurons are especially dominant in the prefrontal cortex, where most thought, learning and planning takes place. This study demonstrates how these mixed selectivity neurons greatly increase the number of tasks that this kind of neural network can perform, says John Duncan, a professor of neuroscience at Cambridge University.

“Especially for higher-order regions, the data that have often been taken as a complicating nuisance may be critical in allowing the system actually to work,” says Duncan, who was not part of the research team.

Miller is now trying to figure out how the brain sorts through all of this activity to create coherent messages. There is some evidence suggesting that these neurons communicate with the correct targets by synchronizing their activity with oscillations of a particular brainwave frequency.

“The idea is that neurons can send different messages to different targets by virtue of which other neurons they are synchronized with,” Miller says. “It provides a way of essentially opening up these special channels of communications so the preferred message gets to the preferred neurons and doesn’t go to neurons that don’t need to hear it.”

The research was funded by the Gatsby Foundation, the Swartz Foundation and the Kavli Foundation.

Intermediate age-related macular degeneration (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (ACT) has confirmed that the vision of a patient enrolled in a clinical investigation of the company’s retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) has improved from 20/400 to 20/40 following treatment.

ACT is currently enrolling patients in three clinical trials in the U.S. and Europe for treatment of Stargardt’s macular dystrophy (SMD) and dry age-related macular degeneration (dry AMD) with hESC-derived RPE cells. These trials are prospective, open-label studies, designed to determine the safety and tolerability of hESC-derived RPE cells following sub-retinal transplantation into patients with dry AMD or SMD at 12 months, the study’s primary endpoint.

Philip Rosedale, founder of once-popular virtual world Second Life, has created a new company called High Fidelity. As suggested by the video above and the blog, the company is developing more natural ways for avatars to communicate (with heads and hand movements, for example) and with low latency (faster response time).

“Imagine holding your phone and being able to twist and move your avatar’s hand. Kinda like turning any phone (with sensors) into a Wii controller,” says cofouinder Ryan Downe. “Low and behold when we plugged our Glass in and tried to run the Android app from our IDE, Glass showed up as a device and it “just worked.” They are also experimenting with Oculus Rift.

As Downe notes, “the most immersive virtual worlds fall flat when trying to deliver the emotional data from real world facial expressions and body language.”

Developing….

“The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope was a seminal moment in the history of science and information technology,” said Dr. John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president and director of Research. “This invention gave scientists the ability to image, measure and manipulate atoms for the first time, and opened new avenues for information technology that we are still pursuing today.” [...]

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— IBM Research

Non-invasive, neuron-specific localized stimulation by near-IR fiber optic beam (red) vs. invasive, non-localized stimulation by blue light (credit: S. Mohanty/UT Arlington)

A new tool that could help map and track the interactions between neurons in different areas of the brain is being developed by University of Texas Arlington assistant professor of physics Samarendra Mohanty.

The technology would be useful in the BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) mapping initiative.

This new method, which uses a fiber-optic, two-photon, optogenetic stimulator, has been used on human cells in a laboratory, but is also expected to work in vivo. Optogenetic stimulation avoids damage to living tissue by using light to stimulate neurons instead of the electric pulses used in past research.

“Scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the physical connections between different regions of the brain. But that information is not sufficient unless we examine how those connections function,” Mohanty said. “That’s where two-photon optogenetics comes into play. This is a tool not only to control the neuronal activity but to understand how the brain works.”

How it works

(a) Schematic of conventional two-photon stimulation scanning pattern of targeted cell with laser beam delivered by microscope. (b) Schematic of fiber-optic two-photon activation. (Credit: S. Mohanty et al./Optics Letters)

The tiny tool builds on Mohanty’s previous discovery that near-infrared light can be used to stimulate an opsin (a light-sensitive protein) introduced into neurons in the brain. Most opsins are currently activated in the visible spectrum, where significant absorption and scattering of stimulating light occurs, leading to low penetration depth. This new method could also show how different parts of the brain react when a linked area is stimulated, Mohanty said.

The two-photon optogenetic stimulation involves introducing the gene for an opsin called ChR2 into a sample of excitable cells (neurons in this case). A fiber-optic infrared beam of light can then be used to precisely excite the neurons in a tissue circuit. Researchers can then observe responses in the excited area as well as other parts of the neural circuit. In living subjects, scientists could also observe the behavioral outcome, Mohanty said.

Mohanty’s method of using low-energy near-infrared light (which penetrates tissue better) also enables more precision and a deeper penetration than the blue or green light beams often used in optogenetic stimulation, according to the Optics Letters paper.

Using fiber optics to deliver the two-photon optogenetic beam is another advance. Previous methods required bulky microscopes or complex scanning beams.

Mohanty’s group is collaborating with UT Arlington Department of Psychology assistant professor Linda Perrotti to apply this technology in living animals.

Kindle version also available at this link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kindle version also available at this link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuning for different electronic properties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fractal properties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

(Credit: Ulrich Lewark/KIT)

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

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

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

(Credit: Credit Suisse)

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

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

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

(Credit: Credit Suisse)

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

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

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

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

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

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

— TED Talks

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

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

— IMRSV