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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detecting pulse and blood pressure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noninvasive continuous monitoring

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

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

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

Brain wiring (credit: eyewire.org)

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

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

Learning after brain damage — a surprising finding

(Credit: The University of Melbourne)

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

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

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

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

Compensating for damage from Alzheimer’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analog advantages 

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

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

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

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

Doing the math

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hybrid solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thousands of times faster for specific problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Masahito Tachibana et al./Cell)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(credit: César A. González)

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

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

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

(credit: César A. González)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diagnostics for the Aging brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Google)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How medical implants fail

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

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

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

Improved hydrogel

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

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

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

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

Human tests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: National Cancer Institute/Wikimedia Commons)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’ll have what she’s having’

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Editor

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

(Credit: iStockphoto)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(more)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE 5/14/2013: slanted wording removed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would you like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hand-held device for extracting DNA (credit: UW/NanoFacture/KNR)

University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods.

The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.

Separating DNA from bodily fluids is a cumbersome process that’s become a bottleneck as scientists make advances in genome sequencing, particularly for disease prevention and treatment. The market for DNA preparation alone is about $3 billion each year.

Conventional methods use a centrifuge to spin and separate DNA molecules or strain them from a fluid sample with a micro-filter, but these processes take 20 to 30 minutes to complete and can require excessive toxic chemicals.

A close-up view of the portable device (credit: UW/NanoFacture/KNR)

UW engineers designed microscopic probes that dip into a fluid sample – saliva, sputum or blood – and apply an electric field within the liquid. That draws particles to concentrate around the surface of the tiny probe. Larger particles hit the tip and swerve away, but DNA-sized molecules stick to the probe and are trapped on the surface. It takes two or three minutes to separate and purify DNA using this technology.

“This simple process removes all the steps of conventional methods,” said Jae-Hyun Chung, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering who led the research.

The hand-held device can clean four separate human fluid samples at once, but the technology can be scaled up to prepare 96 samples at a time, which is standard for large-scale handling.

The tiny probes, called microtips and nanotips, were designed and built at the UW in a micro-fabrication facility where a technician can make up to 1 million tips in a year, which is key in proving that large-scale production is feasible, Chung said.

Engineers in Chung’s lab also have designed a pencil-sized device using the same probe technology that could be sent home with patients or distributed to those serving in the military overseas. Patients could swab their cheeks, collect a saliva sample, then process their DNA on the spot to send back to hospitals and labs for analysis.

This could be useful as efforts ramp up toward sequencing each person’s genome for disease prevention and treatment, Chung said.

The market for this device isn’t developed yet, but Chung’s team will be ready when it is. Meanwhile, the larger device is ready for commercialization, and its creators have started working with distributors.

A UW Center for Commercialization grant of $50,000 seeded initial research in 2008, and since then researchers have received about $2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Neurons created in the hippocampal dentate gyrus for control group (left) and for enriched-environment group (right), which showed increased explorative behavior and individuality (credit: CRTD/DZNE/Freund)

How do people and other organisms evolve into individuals that are distinguished from others by their own personal brain structure and behavior?

Why do identical twins not resemble each other perfectly even when they grew up together?

To shed light on these questions, the scientists observed 40 genetically identical mice that were kept in an enclosure that offered a rich shared environment with a large variety of activity and exploration options.

They showed that individual experiences influence the development of new neurons in mice, leading to measurable changes in the brain.

“The animals were not only genetically identical, they were also living in the same environment,” explained principal investigator Gerd Kempermann, Professor for Genomics of Regeneration, CRTD, and Site Speaker of the DZNE in Dresden. “However, this environment was so rich that each mouse gathered its own individual experiences in it. Over time, the animals therefore increasingly differed in their realm of experience and behavior.”

New neurons for individualized brains

Enrichment enclosure housing (credit: CRTD/DZNE/Freund)

Each of the mice was equipped with a special microchip emitting electromagnetic signals. This allowed the scientists to construct the mice movement profiles and quantify their exploratory behavior.

The result: despite a common environment and identical genes, the mice showed highly individualized behavioral patterns. In the course of the three-month experiment, these differences increased in size.

“These differences were associated with differences in the generation of new neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that supports learning and memory,” said Kempermann “Animals that explored the environment to a greater degree also grew more new neurons than animals that were more passive.”

Adult neurogenesis [generation of new neurons] in the hippocampus allows the brain to react to new information flexibly. With this study, the authors show for the first time that personal experiences and ensuing behavior contribute to the “individualization of the brain.” The individualization they observed cannot be reduced to differences in environment or genetic makeup.

“Adult neurogenesis also occurs in the hippocampus of humans,” said Kempermann. “Hence we assume that we have tracked down a neurobiological foundation for individuality that also applies to humans.”

Implications

“The finding that behavior and experience contribute to differences between individuals has implications for debates in psychology, education, biology, and medicine,” said Ulman Lindenberger, Director of the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB) in Berlin.

“Our findings show that development itself contributes to differences in adult behavior. This is what many have assumed, but now there is direct neurobiological evidence in support of this claim. Our results suggest that experience influences the aging of the human mind.”

In the study, a control group of animals housed in a relatively unattractive enclosure was also examined; on average, neurogenesis in these animals was lower than in the experimental mice. “When viewed from educational and psychological perspectives, the results of our experiment suggest that an enriched environment fosters the development of individuality,” said Lindenberger.

Chinese cloud services provider 3Tcloud is deploying the country’s biggest education cloud project to optimize resource allocation and cut maintenance cost, ZDNET reports.

Samsung Electronics Co. said Sunday that it has successfully developed fifth-generation network (5G) core technology for the first time, allowing users to access faster data services expected to be available by 2020, Yonhap News Agency reports.

Under the new platform, users will be able to download and upload data at speeds of up to tens of gigabits per second (Gbps), compared to 75 megabits per second (Mbps) posted by the fourth-generation long-term evolution (LTE) service.

The mining speed of the bitcoin network on bitcoinwatch.com passed 1 exaFLOPS (1,000 petaFLOPS) this week — more than 8 times the combined speed of the Top 500 supercomputers, The Genesis Block reports.

(FLOPS stands for FLoating-point Operations Per Second, and is frequently used as a standard to measure computer speed. Bitcoin mining uses an integer calculation and almost no floating-point operations, so converting bitcoin network speed to this standard is somewhat clumsy.)

The FLOPS estimate is based on the opportunity cost of computers using their hardware for mining instead of other applications.  Miners are using their graphics cards to perform hashes instead of other FLOPS-based distributed computing. Therefore, a conversion rate of 1 hash = 12.7K FLOP is used to estimate what this hardware could be doing.

The combined speed of the Top 500 supercomputers is 48 petaFLOPS, roughly equivalent to 5% of the bitcoin network.

Note: the estimate was created in 2011, so the speed data for supercomputers may be low. We are checking the numbers. — Editor

A quadriplegic patient brings a chocolate bar to her mouth, using a robot arm she is guiding with her thoughts (via the implant in her head). But what if the robot had sensors so she could also control its grip? (Credit: UPMC)

Scientists have made tremendous advances toward building lifelike prosthetic limbs that move and function like the real thing.

But what’s missing is a sense of touch, so a patient knows how hard he or she is actually squeezing something, or exactly where the object is positioned relative to his or her hand.

“If you lose your somatosensory [body senses] system, it almost looks like your motor system is impaired,” he said.

“If you really want to create an arm that can actually be used dexterously without the enormous amount of concentration it takes without sensory feedback, you need to restore the somatosensory feedback.”

This is the related to a similar problem with robots (see “Related” below), where researchers have built better sensors into their the robots’ limbs and hands, along with better processing systems and control systems.

How to make a monkey believe a robotic hand is its own

Somatosensory prosthesis. (1) Mechanical device presses against the modular prosthetic limb (MPL). Its sensor (2) sends digitized force and vibration data to a (3) computer console, which computes the necessary corresponding stimulation level and programs pulses to (4) a neurostimulator, which (like a Parkinson’s neurostimulator) delivers electrical stimuli to (5) an electrode array (UEA) in the monkey’s brain, causing it to perceive the pressure applied to the prosthetic limb (credit: J.A. Berg et al./IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering)

So a team of University of Chicago neurobiologists, headed by Sliman Bensmaia, assistant professor of organismal biology and anatomy, came up with an idea: why not try the same thing, starting with a monkey?

To restore the somatosensory feedback, they equipped a robotic hand with pressure sensors.

These send electrical signals for processing, and from there to electrodes implanted in the brain to recreate the same response to touch as a real hand.

The researchers used rhesus macaques that were trained to respond to stimulation of the hand.

Their hands were hidden so they wouldn’t see that they weren’t actually being touched, and were given electrical pulses to simulate the sensation of touch.

The animals had electrodes implanted into the area of the brain that responds to touch to check the animals’ responses to each type of stimulus.

By combining the poking and brain-response data, the researchers were able to create a mathematical function that described the level of electrical pulses in the brain corresponding to different levels of physical pokes of the hand.

Top: Photograph of the fully integrated finger of a highly dexterous prosthetic hand (Modular Prosthetic Limb, MPL). Middle: Photograph of the MPL’s fingertip sensor node (FTSN). Bottom: Block diagram of FTSN. (Credit: J. Berg et al./IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering)

Then,switched to a prosthetic hand that was wired to the brain implants. They touched the prosthetic hand with the physical probe, which in turn sent similar electrical signals to the brain.

Bensmaia said that the animals performed identically whether poked on their own hand or on the prosthetic one.

“This is the first time as far as I know where an animal or organism actually perceives a tactile stimulus through an artificial transducer,” Bensmaia said.

“It’s an engineering milestone. But from a neuroengineering standpoint, this validates this function. You can use this function to have an animal perform this very precise task, precisely identically.”

Human trials

The FDA is in the process of approving similar devices for human trials, and Bensmaia said he hopes such a system is implemented within the next year. Producing a lifelike sense of touch would go a long way toward improving the dexterity and performance of prosthetic hands (or robot hands, for quadriplegics).

He said it would also help bridge a mental divide for amputees or people who have lost the use of a limb. Until now, prosthetics and robotic arms feel more like tools than real replacements, because they don’t produce the expected touch sensations .

“If every time you see your robotic arm touching something, you get a sensation that is projected to it, I think it’s very possible that in fact, you will consider this new thing as being part of your body,” he said.

Game avatar with a backpack (credit: S. Shyam Sundar, Penn State)

If you create and modify your own virtual reality avatars, could what happens to these alter egos influence how you perceive virtual environments?

Penn State researchers found this question relevant to designing more realistic and immersive virtual reality exercises and games. They assigned random avatars to one group of participants, but allowed another group to customize their own avatars.

When placed in a virtual environment with three hills of different heights and angles of incline, participants who customized their avatars perceived those hills as higher and steeper than participants who were assigned avatars by the researchers.

Half of the participants had avatars with backpacks. Those who had customized their avatar overestimated the amount of calories it would take to hike up the hill if their custom avatar.

“You exert more of your agency through an avatar when you design it yourself,” said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, Penn State. “Your identity mixes in with the identity of that avatar and, as a result, your visual perception of the virtual environment is colored by the physical resources of your avatar.”

Sundar said people with disabilities may feel more empowered designing their own avatars to have physical aids to navigate a virtual environment. And soldiers may want to create their own avatars to better simulate their perceptions of actual conditions in virtual reality exercises.

“Because building avatar identity is critical, it’s important to let users customize it,” Sundar said. “You are your avatar when it is customized.”

Future research will look at whether altering more elements of the users’ avatar will lead to more extensive changes in how people perceive virtual environments.

The Korea Science and Engineering Foundation supported this work.

Using retina-tracking technology, images on the smartphone would seem to float above the screen like a hologram and appear three-dimensional at all angles, and users may be able to navigate through content using just their eyes, according to sources,

With smartphones, Amazon could collect new data on its users through maps, phone calls and app downloads, and offer them shopping recommendations. There is also the potential for new services like mobile payments.

Remnants of a similar supernova explosion in the constellation Cassiopeia, about 11,000 light-years away.  (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SAO)

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have found a radioactive iron isotope in bacteria microfossils.that they trace back to a supernova in our cosmic neighborhood.

This is the first proven biological signature of a starburst on our earth. The age determination of the deep-drill core from the Pacific Ocean showed that the supernova explosion must have occurred about 2.2 million years ago, roughly around the time when the modern human developed.

Magnetotactic bacteria live within the sediments of the Earth’s oceans, close to the water-sediment interface. They make within their cells hundreds of tiny crystals of magnetite (Fe₃O₄), each approximately 80 nanometers in diameter.

The bacteria obtain the iron from atmospheric dust that enters the ocean. So nuclear astrophysicist Shawn Bishop from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen conjectured that Fe-60 should also reside within those magnetite crystals produced by magnetotactic bacteria that existed at the time of the supernova interaction with our planet. These bacterially produced crystals, when found in sediments long after their host bacteria have died, are called “magnetofossils.”

(Credit: Defense Distributed)

The U.S. State Department has demanded designs by Defense Distributed for a 3D-printed gun be taken offline because publishing them online may breach arms-control regulations, Forbes reports.

The order to remove the blueprints for the plastic gun comes after they were downloaded more than 100,000 times.

However, the files were actually being served by Mega, the New Zealand-based storage service created by ex-hacker entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, an outspoken U.S. government critic. It’s not clear whether the file will be taken off Mega’s servers,

The files have also been uploaded several times to the Pirate Bay filesharing site.

This image from the study shows changes in degree of connectivity in the feedback group. Increases are shown in red/yellow and decreases in blue/purple. Decreases in connectivity are seen in limbic areas, and increases are seen in prefrontal regions. (Credit: D Scheinost et al./Yale University)

People provided with a real-time readout of activity in specific regions of their brains can learn to control that activity and lessen their anxiety, say Yale researchers.

They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to display the activity of the orbitofrontal cortex (a brain region just above the eyes) to subjects while they lay in a brain scanner.

Through a process of trial and error, these subjects were gradually able to learn to control their brain activity. This led both to changes in brain connectivity and to increased control over anxiety. These changes were still present several days after the training.

Extreme anxiety associated with worries about dirt and germs is characteristic of many patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Hyperactivity in the orbitofrontal cortex is seen in many of these individuals.

fMRI-driven neurofeedback has been used before in a few contexts, but not for the treatment of anxiety, the researchers say. The findings raise the possibility that real-time fMRI feedback may provide a novel and effective form of treatment for OCD.

Most applications come from the U.S. (17324), followed by China (10241), United Kingdom (3581), Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Argentina and India.

The most popular candidate (for site visitors) so far is Anders from Sweden, a science-fiction fan (“I’m single, nothing holding me back”), and the highest-rated by visitors are Rickard (also from Sweden) and Arteum (from Russia).

“With 78,000 applications in two weeks, this is turning out to be the most desired job in history, said Bas Lansdorp, Mars One Co-Founder and CEO. “These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants.”

As part of the application every applicant is required to explain his/her motivation behind their decision go to Mars in a one-minute video. Many applicants are choosing to publish this video on the Mars One website.

“Applicants we have received come from a very wide range of personalities, professions and ages,” said Dr. Norbert Kraft, Mars One Chief Medical Officer. “This is significant because what we are looking for is not restricted to a particular background. From Round 1 we will take forward the most committed, creative, resilient and motivated applicants.”

Mars One will continue to receive online applications until August 31, 2013. From all the applicants in Round 1, regional reviewers will select around 50–100 candidates for Round 2 in each of the 300 geographic regions in the world that Mars One has identified.

After four rounds, ending in 2015; Mars One will employ 28–40 candidates, who will train for around 7 years. Finally an audience vote will elect one of groups in training to be the envoys of humanity to Mars.

With the new control method, Kemp’s robots have performed numerous tasks, such as reaching through dense artificial foliage and a cinder block representative of environments that search-and-rescue robots can encounter (credit: Georgia Tech)

For safety reasons, robot makers have avoided contact between the robot’s arm and the world.

Now Georgia Tech and Meka Robotics researchers have developed a control method that enables a robot’s arm to make contact with objects, people, and the rest of the robot while keeping forces low.

The method  works with compliant robotic joints and whole-arm tactile sensing, and keeps the robot’s arm flexible, giving the robot a sense of touch across its entire arm.

With their control method, Kemp’s robots have performed numerous tasks, such as reaching through dense artificial foliage and a cinder block representative of environments that search-and-rescue robots can encounter, said Charlie Kemp, lead researcher and associate professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Kemp’s lab also has promising results that could impact the future of assistive robotics. They have developed tactile sensors made out of stretchable fabric that covers the entire arm of a robot.

A kinder, gentler robot

In a preliminary trial with the new control method and sensors, Henry Evans, a person with quadriplegia, used the robot to perform tasks for himself. He was able to pull a blanket over himself and grab a cloth to wipe his face, all while he was in bed at his home.

This trial was conducted as part of the Robots for Humanity project with Willow Garage. To ensure safety, researchers from Kemp’s lab closely monitored the activities.

“I think it’s a good safety feature because it hardly presses against me even when I tell it to,” Evans said after the trial. “It really feels safe to be close to the robot.” He was also impressed by how the robot’s arm “just wriggles around obstacles.”

‘The way of the future for robots’

Kemp’s research team has also released the designs and code for the sensors and controller as open source hardware and software so that researchers and hobbyists can build on the work.

The research is part of an ongoing effort to create a new foundation for robotics, where contact between the robot’s arm and the world is encouraged.

“Our belief is that this approach is the way of the future for robots,” said Kemp, who is director of Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics Lab and a member of Georgia Tech’s Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. “It is going to allow robots to better operate in our homes, our workplaces and other complex environments.”

This research is funded by the DARPA Maximum Mobility and Manipulation  and funded in part by NSF and Willow Garage.

Interplanetary Internet (credit: NASA/JPL)

In his role as Google’s chief internet evangelist, Cerf has spent much of his time thinking about the future of the computer networks that connect us all.

Working with NASA and JPL, Cerf has helped develop a new set of protocols that can stand up to the unique environment of space, where orbital mechanics and the speed of light make traditional networking extremely difficult. Though this space-based network is still in its early stages and has few nodes, he said that we are now at “the front end of what could be an evolving and expanding interplanetary backbone.”

Wired.talked to Cerf about the interplanetary internet’s role in space exploration, the frustrations of network management on the final frontier, and the future headline he never wants to see. [...]

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Artificial intelligence (credit: Alejandro Zorrilal Cruz/Wikimedia Commons)

There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.

The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.

About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI, Wired reports.

“For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.” [...]

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Mindo headsets at NeuroGaming 2013 (credit: Mindo)

Neuro Gadget has compiled a summary of the recent NeuroGaming 2013 Conference, featuring applications of brain-computer-interface devices, for example. such as making a toy helicopter fly, composing a brain-wave inspired piece of music, and training attention.

The event also included games and software for biofeedback training, physical and psychological rehabilitation (for example, a noninvasive device that enables the wearer to open and close their hand using only EEG signals), and a device that allows paraplegics to walk using a highly intuitive EEG interface.

Robotic insect (credit: Harvard University)

Harvard roboticists have created a robotic insect the size of a paper clip and successfully test-flown it.

Inspired by the biology of a fly, the intricate design is the culmination of 12 years of painstaking work by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

The device represents the cutting edge of micromanufacturing and control systems, says Robert J. Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, Wyss core faculty member, and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported RoboBee project.

Inventing microscale aeronautics

An ingenious design. Eight infrared, motion tracking cameras observe the positions of retroreflective markers attached to the robot to estimate its position and orientation in space with low latency. Position estimates are transmitted to the controller computer, which computes the control signals and sends them to the robot via a wire tether. Each wing can be controlled independently. The 3 rotational degrees of freedom of the fly are simplified in the robotic fly to a reciprocating flapping motion. (Credit: Kevin Y. Ma et al./Science)

At those insect-size dimensions and weight, the researchers had to thrown out the book and reinvent the science of flight at the microscale.

The microrobot has submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly at 120 Hz (times per second) — close to the fly’s 130 Hz. It weighs just 80 milligrams. The tiny robot flaps its wings with piezoelectric actuators — strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied.

At these tiny scales, small changes in airflow can have an outsized effect on flight dynamics, and the control system has to react that much faster to remain stable. Thin hinges of plastic embedded within the carbon fiber body frame serve as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational motions in the flapping-wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real time.

The robotic insects also take advantage of an ingenious pop-up manufacturing technique that was developed by Wood’s team in 2011. Sheets of various laser-cut materials are layered and sandwiched together into a thin, flat plate that folds up like a child’s pop-up book into the complete electromechanical structure.

Applications

The robotic insect could be useful in distributed environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue operations, and assistance with crop pollination, for example, but the materials, fabrication techniques, and components that emerge along the way might prove to be even more significant.

For example, the pop-up manufacturing process could enable a new class of complex medical devices. Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, in collaboration with Harvard SEAS and the Wyss Institute, is already in the process of commercializing some of the underlying technologies.

Next steps will include developing the brain, the colony coordination behavior, the power source, and  other subsystems required to make the robotic insects fully autonomous and wireless.

The prototypes are still tethered by a very thin power cable because there are no off-the-shelf solutions for energy storage that are small enough to be mounted on the robot’s body. High-energy-density fuel cells must be developed before the RoboBees will be able to fly with much independence.

“This project provides a common motivation for scientists and engineers across the University to build smaller batteries, to design more efficient control systems, and to create stronger, more lightweight materials,” says Wood.

HERB can use its arms to gain information that it can use to discover objects and determine how it can pick up or manipulate that object. By using all of the information available to it, visual or otherwise, HERB is able to continually discover objects on its own and refine its understanding of those objects as it gains experience. (Credit: Carnegie Mellon University)

HERB (Home-Exploring Robot Butler) is new class of  robot developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University‘s Robotics Institute that can discover objects in its surroundings by using more than just computer vision.

The Lifelong Robotic Object Discovery (LROD) process developed by the research team enabled HERB, a two-armed, mobile robot, to use color video, a Kinect depth camera, and non-visual information to discover more than 100 objects in a home-like laboratory.

That allow for finding an objects such as computer monitors, plants and food items, and identifying the objects’ location, size, shape, and even whether they can be lifted.

A robot with initiative

Normally, the CMU researchers build digital models and images of objects and load them into the memory of so the robot can recognize objects that it needs to manipulate. With the team’s implementation of LROD, called HerbDisc, the robot now can discover these objects on its own.

With more time and experience, HerbDisc gradually refines its models of the objects and begins to focus its attention on those that are most relevant to its goal: helping people accomplish tasks of daily living.

The robot’s ability to discover objects on its own sometimes takes even the researchers by surprise, said Siddhartha Srinivasa, associate professor of robotics and head of the Personal Robotics Lab, where HERB is being developed. In one case, some students left the remains of lunch — a pineapple and a bag of bagels — in the lab when they went home for the evening. The next morning, they returned to find that HERB had built digital models of both the pineapple and the bag and had figured out how it could pick up each one.

“We didn’t even know that these objects existed, but HERB did,” said Srinivasa, who jointly supervised the research with Martial Hebert, professor of robotics.

Discovering and understanding objects in places filled with hundreds or thousands of things will be a crucial capability once robots begin working in the home and expanding their role in the workplace. Manually loading digital models of every object of possible relevance simply isn’t feasible, Srinivasa said. “You can’t expect Grandma to do all this,” he added.

Not Object recognition has long been a challenging area of inquiry for computer vision researchers. Recognizing objects based on vision alone quickly becomes an intractable computational problem in a cluttered environment, Srinivasa said. But humans don’t rely on sight alone to understand objects; babies will squeeze a rubber ducky, beat it against the tub, dunk itm even stick it in their mouth. Robots, too, have a lot of “domain knowledge” about their environment that they can use to discover objects.

Depth measurements from HERB’s Kinect sensors proved to be particularly important, Hebert said, providing three-dimensional shape data that is highly discriminative for household items.

Other domain knowledge available to HERB includes location: whether something is on a table, on the floor or in a cupboard. The robot can see whether a potential object moves on its own, or is moveable at all. It can note whether something is in a particular place at a particular time. And it can use its arms to see if it can lift the object, the ultimate test of its “objectness.”

“The first time HERB looks at the video, everything ‘lights up’ as a possible object,” Srinivasa said. But as the robot uses its domain knowledge, it becomes clearer what is and isn’t an object. The team found that adding domain knowledge to the video input almost tripled the number of objects HERB could discover and reduced computer processing time by a factor of 190.

Basic mission: helping people

HERB’s definition of an object — something it can lift — is oriented toward its function as an assistive device for people, doing things such as fetching items or microwaving meals. “It’s a very natural, robot-driven process,” Srinivasa said. “As capabilities and situations change, different things become important.” For instance, HERB can’t yet pick up a sheet of paper, so it ignores paper. But once HERB has hands capable of manipulating paper, it will learn to recognize sheets of paper as objects.

Though not yet implemented, HERB and other robots could use the Internet to create an even richer understanding of objects. Earlier work by Srinivasa showed that robots can use crowdsourcing via Amazon Mechanical Turk to help understand objects. Likewise, a robot might access image sites, such as RoboEarth, ImageNet or 3D Warehouse, to find the name of an object, or to get images of parts of the object it can’t see.

HERB is a project of the Quality of Life Technology Center, a National Science Foundation engineering research center operated by Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. The center is focused on the development of intelligent systems that improve quality of life for everyone while enabling older adults and people with disabilities.

The Robotics Institute is part of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. Follow the school on Twitter @SCSatCMU.

Actual image of the bone after it was in vivo (credit: Giuseppe Maria de Peppo/The New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute)

Patient-specific bone substitutes from skin cells for repair of large bone defects are now possible, thanks to research by a team of New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute scientists.

The study represents a major advance in personalized reconstructive treatments for patients with bone defects resulting from disease or trauma. It promises to lead to customizable, three-dimensional bone grafts on-demand, matched to fit the exact needs and immune profile of a patient.

Induced pluripotent stem cells

The NYSCF scientists used “reprogramming” to revert adult cells into embryonic-like induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which carry the same genetic information as the patient and they can become any of the body’s cell types.

The team guided these iPS cells to become bone-forming progenitors and seeded the cells onto a scaffold for three-dimensional bone formation. They then placed the constructs into a bioreactor, which provides nutrients, removes waste, and stimulates maturation, mimicking a natural developmental environment.

“Bone is more than a hard mineral composite, it is an active organ that constantly remodels. Blood vessels shuttle important nutrients to healthy cells and remove waste; nerves provide connection to the brain; and, bone marrow cells form new blood and immune cells,” said NYSCF-Helmsley Investigator Dr. Darja Marolt.

Previous studies have demonstrated the bone-forming potential from other cell sources, yet serious caveats for clinical translation remain. A patient’s own bone marrow stem cells can form bone and cartilaginous tissue, not the underlying vasculature and nerve compartments. Embryonic stem-cell-derived bone may also prompt an immune rejection. The NYSCF scientists chose to work with iPS cells to overcome these limitations, comparing iPS sources with embryonic stem cells and bone-marrow-derived cells.

While severity varies, bone defects and injuries are currently treated with bone grafts, taken either from another part of the patient’s body or a donor bone bank, or with synthetic substitutes. None of these permit complex reconstruction, and they may elicit immune rejection or fail to integrate with surrounding connective tissues.

For trauma patients, suffering from shrapnel wounds or vehicular injury, these traditional treatments provide limited functional and cosmetic improvement.

Successful bone grafts

After a comprehensive in vitro analysis of the generated bone, the NYSCF team assessed stability when transplanted in an animal model to address a major concern for iPS-based cell therapies. Undifferentiated iPS cells can form teratomas, a type of tumor. The iPS cell-derived bone substitutes were implanted under the skin of immunocompromised mice. After 12 weeks, the explanted constructs matured and showed no malignancies but complete maturation of bone tissue, while blood vessel cells began to integrate along the grafts. These results indicate the stability of the bone substitutes.

The scientists caution that although these results represent a major advance, further research is necessary before skin cell-derived bone grafts reach patients. Next steps include protocol optimization and the successful growth of blood vessels within the bone.

“Following from these findings, we will be able to create tailored bone grafts, on demand, for patients without any immune rejection issues,” said Susan L. Solomon, CEO of NYSCF. “This is the best approach to repair devastating damage or defects.”

Beyond potential therapeutic relevance, these adaptive bone substitutes may be implemented to model bone development and different pathologies. Analysis could enrich current understanding and identify potential drug targets.

Model showing a single water molecule captured inside a fullerene C60 molecular structure  (credit: F. L. Bowles/Univ. of California, Davis)

Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a technique to encapsulate a single water molecule inside a buckyball (C₆₀) molecular structure.

Using computer modeling, they discovered that the resulting structure responds in a surprising way to an electric field: the whole structure can be driven in either direction through a narrow channel, with adjustable transport velocity

The researchers believe their discovery could have practical applications, such as more effective ways to control drug delivery.

Buckyballs (more formally known as Buckminsterfullerenes, or fullerenes), are spherical, hollow molecular structures made of 60 carbon atoms. They have a diameter of about 1 nm — 6,000–8,000 times smaller than a red blood cell.

Because of their relative non-toxicity to the human body, their hydrophobic core (which keeps water-soluble substances trapped), and  their covalent nonpolar bonds (don’t interact electrically with other molecules), buckyballs are a perfect container for delivering drug molecules, explains Xi Chen, associate professor of earth and environmental engineering, who led the research. They could also have other nanotech and biotech applications.

Since the discovery of C60 in the 1980s, scientists have been trying to solve the challenge of controlling a single C₆₀ molecule. Several mechanical strategies involving AFM (atomic force microscopy) have been developed, but these are costly and time-intensive. The ability to drive a single C₆₀ through a simple external force field, such as an electrical or magnetic field, would be a major step forward.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Protein aggregates (green) accumulate in the aged fly brain (left), but are significantly reduced (right) when the gene parkin is overexpressed (credit: Anil Rana/UCLA Life Sciences)

UCLA life scientists have identified a gene previously implicated in Parkinson’s disease that can delay the onset of aging and extend the healthy life span of fruit flies. The research, they say, could have important implications for aging and disease in humans.

The gene, called parkin, serves at least two vital functions: it marks damaged proteins so that cells can discard them before they become toxic, and it is believed to play a key role in the removal of damaged mitochondria from cells.

“Aging is a major risk factor for the development and progression of many neurodegenerative diseases,” said David Walker, an associate professor of integrative biology and physiology at UCLA and senior author of the research. “We think that our findings shed light on the molecular mechanisms that connect these processes.”

In the research, Walker and his colleagues show that parkin can modulate (control) the aging process in fruit flies, which typically live less than two months. The researchers increased parkin levels in the cells of the flies and found that this extended their life span by more than 25 percent, compared with a control group that did not receive additional parkin.

In the control group, the flies are all dead by Day 50,” Walker said. “In the group with parkin overexpressed, almost half of the population is still alive after 50 days. We have manipulated only one of their roughly 15,000 genes, and yet the consequences for the organism are profound.”

“Just by increasing the levels of parkin, they live substantially longer while remaining healthy, active and fertile,” said Anil Rana, a postdoctoral scholar in Walker’s laboratory and lead author of the research. “That is what we want to achieve in aging research — not only to increase their life span but to increase their health span as well.”

Treatments to increase parkin expression may delay the onset and progression of Parkinson’s disease and other age-related diseases, the biologists believe. (If parkin sounds related to Parkinson’s, it is. While the vast majority of people with the disease get it in older age, some who are born with a mutation in the parkin gene develop early-onset, Parkinson’s-like symptoms.)

“Our research may be telling us that parkin could be an important therapeutic target for neurodegenerative diseases and perhaps other diseases of aging,” Walker said. “Instead of studying the diseases of aging one by one — Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, diabetes — we believe it may be possible to intervene in the aging process and delay the onset of many of these diseases. We are not there yet, and it can, of course, take many years, but that is our goal.”

‘The garbage men in our cells go on strike’

To function properly, proteins must fold correctly, and they fold in complex ways. As we age, our cells accumulate damaged or misfolded proteins. When proteins fold incorrectly, the cellular machinery can sometimes repair them. When it cannot, parkin enables cells to discard the damaged proteins, said Walker, a member of UCLA’s Molecular Biology Institute.

“If a protein is damaged beyond repair, the cell can recognize that and eliminate the protein before it becomes toxic,” he said. “Think of it like a cellular garbage disposal. Parkin helps to mark damaged proteins for disposal. It’s like parkin places a sticker on the damaged protein that says ‘Degrade Me,’ and then the cell gets rid of this protein. That process seems to decline with age. As we get older, the garbage men in our cells go on strike. Overexpressed parkin seems to tell them to get back to work.”

Rana focused on the effects of increased parkin activity at the cellular and tissue levels. Do flies with increased parkin show fewer damaged proteins at an advanced age? “The remarkable finding is yes, indeed,” Walker said.

Parkin has recently been shown to perform a similarly important function with regard to mitochondria, the tiny power generators in cells that control cell growth and tell cells when to live and die. Mitochandria become less efficient and less active as we age, and the loss of mitochondrial activity has been implicated in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, as well as in the aging process, Walker said.

Parkin appears to degrade the damaged mitochondria, perhaps by marking or changing their outer membrane structure, in effect telling the cell, “This is damaged and potentially toxic. Get rid of it.”

Dosage for humans?

Scientists have found that this kind of protein aggregation occurs in mammals as well, including humans, Rana said, but Walker and Rana do not know what the optimal amount of parkin would be in humans.

While the researchers found that increased parkin can extend the life of fruit flies, Rana also discovered that too much parkin can have the opposite effect — it becomes toxic to the flies and eliminates healthy proteins. When he quadrupled the normal amount of parkin, the fruit flies lived substantially longer, but when he increased the amount by a factor of 30, the flies died sooner.

In the lower doses, however, the scientists found no adverse effects. Walker believes the fruit fly is a good model for studying aging in humans — who also have the parkin gene — because scientists know all of the fruit fly’s genes and can switch individual genes on and off.

The biologists increased parkin activity in every cell in the fruit fly, but Rana also conducted an experiment in which he increased parkin expression only in the nervous system. That, too, was sufficient to make the flies live longer.

“This tells us that parkin is neuroprotective during aging,” Walker said. “However, the beneficial effects of parkin are greater — twice as large — when we increased its expression everywhere.”

Walker’s research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging and the Ellison Medical Foundation. Rana was supported by a Rubicon fellowship from the Organization for Scientific Research in the Netherlands, where he earned his doctorate (University of Groningen).

The nano-network releases insulin in response to changes in blood sugar (credit: Zhen Gu/NC State University)

In a promising development for type 1 diabetes treatment, researchers have developed a network of nanoscale particles that can be injected into the body and release insulin when blood-sugar levels rise, maintaining normal blood sugar levels for more than a week in animal-based laboratory tests.

The work was done by researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children’s Hospital Boston.

“We’ve created a ‘smart’ system that is injected into the body and responds to changes in blood sugar by releasing insulin, effectively controlling blood-sugar levels,” says Dr. Zhen Gu, lead author of a paper describing the work and an assistant professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at NC State and UNC Chapel Hill.

“We’ve tested the technology in mice, and one injection was able to maintain blood sugar levels in the normal range for up to 10 days.”

When a patient has type 1 diabetes, his or her body does not produce sufficient insulin, a hormone that transports glucose — or blood sugar — from the bloodstream into the body’s cells. This can cause a host of health effects. Currently, diabetes patients must take frequent blood samples to monitor their blood-sugar levels and inject insulin as needed to ensure their blood sugar levels are in the “normal” range. However, these injections can be painful, and it can be difficult to determine the accurate dose level of insulin. Administering too much or too little insulin poses its own health risks.

How the closed-loop system works

The new injectable nano-network is composed of a mixture containing nanoparticles with a solid core of insulin, modified dextran, and glucose oxidase enzymes. When the enzymes are exposed to high glucose levels they effectively convert glucose into gluconic acid, which breaks down the modified dextran and releases the insulin. The insulin then brings the glucose levels under control. The gluconic acid and dextran are fully biocompatible and dissolve in the body.

Each of these nanoparticle cores is given either a positively charged or negatively charged biocompatible coating. The positively charged coatings are made of chitosan (a material normally found in shrimp shells), while the negatively charged coatings are made of alginate (a material normally found in seaweed).

When the solution of coated nanoparticles is mixed together, the positively and negatively charged coatings are attracted to each other to form a “nano-network.” Once injected into the subcutaneous layer of the skin, the nano-network holds the nanoparticles together and prevents them from dispersing throughout the body. Both the nano-network and the coatings are porous, allowing blood — and blood sugar — to reach the nanoparticle cores.

“This technology effectively creates a ‘closed-loop’ system that mimics the activity of the pancreas in a healthy person, releasing insulin in response to glucose level changes,” Gu says. “This has the potential to improve the health and quality of life of diabetes patients.”

Clinical trials

Gu’s research team is currently in discussions to move the technology into clinical trials for use in humans.

The paper was co-authored by a team led by Dr. Robert Langer, MIT’s David H. Koch Institute Professor, and Dr. Daniel Anderson, the Samuel A. Goldblith Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Children’s Hospital Boston.

The research was supported by a grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust Foundation, and a gift from the Tayebati Family Foundation.

(Credit: North Dakota State University)

North Dakota State University. researchers have developed a new way of embedding traceable chips within “smart” paper — raising the possibility of banks and governments guarding against counterfeiting and even tracking the usage of paper money, IEEE Spectrum reports.

The new method of embedding radio frequency identification chips (RFID) in paper uses a patent-pending technology called Laser Enabled Advanced Packaging (LEAP) to transfer and assemble the traceable RFID chips on paper. Such “smart” paper could lead to new types of banknotes, legal documents, tickets and smart labels.

The European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan to launch separate projects based on that possibility,a and Saudi Arabian researchers have begun their own efforts to embed RFID chips in Saudi Arabian currency.

LEAP can quickly and precisely place ultra-thin semiconductor chips at specific locations and orientations on both rigid and flexible materials — an approach that could enable other chip-embedded devices such as smart clothing.That could enable the spread of RFID chips in applications as diverse as public transit smart cards and product labels and help make RFID chips cheaper overall.

Such cheap, widely-deployed RFID technology could transform everything about doing business — all the way down to the cash changing hands. Law enforcement agencies could also track smart money as part of its efforts to fight drug trafficking or other organized crime schemes.

But the applied RFID technology could also herald a future world where trackable banknotes further diminish the privacy of how people use money. For instance, the government might track the flow of money in the so-called “gray economy” that relies on mostly untraceable cash exchanges.

Jaron Lanier’s new tech manifesto, Who owns the future? “delivers “Olympian, contrarian fighting words about the Internet’s exploitative powers” and big Web entities and their business models, The New York Times reports.

The book reiteraties ideas from Lanier’s previous book — Web businesses exploit a peasant class, users of social media may not realize how entrapped they are, a thriving middle class is essential to keeping the Internet sustainable. It also overlaps with The New Digital Age, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s Web analysis.

Their book focuses more on global issues, but disagrees with specific points. “The New Digital Age looks forward to self-driving trucks that can ease the strain on Teamsters; Mr. Lanier rambunctiously writes of “Napstering the Teamsters” out of work, and of how such technology could go terribly wrong. The books also disagree on whether surgeons’ work will be enhanced or diminished by robotics.”

Who Owns the Future? “takes some of it biggest swipes at those who do presume to own the future: fans of the Singularity (the hypothetical imminent merger of biology and technology), Silicon Valley pioneers seeking “methusalization” (i.e., immortality), techie utopians of every stripe.”

On this 2.5- by 7.5-cm cartridge, DNA extracted from sputum samples is amplified in the chambers on the left. TB-specific sequences are magnetically labeled in the microfluidic mixing channels in the center and detected by passage through the micro-NMR coil on the right. (Credit: Center for Systems Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital)

Two new portable diagnostic devices for rapid, accurate diagnosis of tuberculosis and other bacterial infections have been developed by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH),  Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and the Broad Institute.

A microfluidic device for diagnosing TB, other infectious bacteria

A handheld diagnostic device that MGH investigators first developed to diagnose cancer has been adapted to rapidly diagnose tuberculosis (TB) and other important infectious bacteria.

The portable device — about the size of a standard laboratory slide — combines microfluidic technology with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to diagnose these important infections, and also to determine the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains.

“Rapidly identifying the pathogen responsible for an infection and testing for the presence of resistance are critical not only for diagnosis but also for deciding which antibiotics to give a patient,” says Ralph Weissleder, MD, PhD, director of the MGH Center for Systems Biology (CSB), a professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School, and co-senior author of two papers in Nature Communications and Nature Nanotechnology.

“These described methods allow us to do this in two to three hours — a vast improvement over standard culturing practice, which can take as much as two weeks to provide a diagnosis.”

Investigators at the MGH CSB previously developed portable devices capable of detecting cancer biomarkers in the blood or in very small tissue samples. Target cells or molecules are first labeled with magnetic nanoparticles, and the sample is then passed through a micro NMR system capable of detecting and quantifying levels of the target.

But initial efforts to adapt the system to bacterial diagnosis had trouble finding antibodies — the detection method used in the earlier studies — that would accurately detect the specific bacteria. So the team switched to targeting specific nucleic acid sequences instead.

Magnetic barcode assay for sensitive TB detection. Whole-genomic DNA extracted from expectorated samples, capture beads, and magnetic nanoparticlse are loaded into inlet chambers gated by screw valves. After on-chip PCR, magnetic labelling of the beads takes place along the mixing channel. The magnetically barcoded beads are then purified and concentrated into the mNMR probe (microcoil) by the membrane filter. Scale bar, 1 cm. (Credit: Monty Liong et al./Nature Communications)

The new system detects DNA from the tuberculosis bacteria in small sputum samples. After DNA is extracted from the sample, any of the target sequence that is present is amplified using a standard procedure, then captured by polymer beads containing complementary nucleic acid sequences and labeled with magnetic nanoparticles with sequences that bind to other portions of the target DNA. The miniature NMR coil incorporated into the device detects any TB bacterial DNA present in the sample.

Tests of the device on samples from patients known to have TB and from healthy controls identified all positive samples, with no false positives, in less than three hours.Existing diagnostic procedures can take weeks to provide results and can miss up to 40 percent of infected patients.

Results were even stronger for patients infected with both TB and HIV — probably because infection with both pathogens leads to high levels of the TB bacteria — and specialized nucleic acid probes developed by the research team were able to distinguish treatment-resistant bacterial strains.

Hypersensitive ribosomal RNA system for detecting 13 important pathogens

Schematic of magneto-DNA assay procedure for the detection of bacterial 16S rRNA. Total RNA is extracted from the specimen, and the 16S rRNA is amplified by asymmetric RT-PCR. Single-strand DNA of the amplified product is then captured by beads conjugated to capture probes, before hybridizing with magnetic nanoparticles to form a magnetic sandwich complex. Samples are subsequently analyzed using a microNMR system. (Credit: Hyun Jung Chung et al./Nature Nanotechnology)

The investigators also developed a similar system that uses ribrosomal RNA (rRNA) — already in use as a bacterial biomarker — as a target for nanoparticle labeling. The investigators developed both a universal nucleic acid probe that detects an rRNA region common to many bacterial species and a set of probes that target sequences specific to 13 clinically important pathogens, including Streptococcus pneumoniae, Escherichia coli and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

The device was sensitive enough to detect as few as one or two bacteria in a 10 ml blood sample and to accurately estimate bacterial load. Testing the system on blood samples from patients with known infections accurately identified the particular bacterial species in less than two hours and also detected two species that had not been identified with standard culture techniques.

Ideal for developing countries

While both systems require further development to incorporate all steps into sealed, stand-alone devices, reducing the risk of contamination, Weissleder notes that the small size and ease of use of these devices make them ideal for use in developing countries.

“The magnetic interactions that pathogen detection is based on are very reliable, regardless of the quality of the sample, meaning that extensive purification (which would be difficult in resource-limited setting) is not necessary. The ability to diagnose TB in a matter of hours could allow testing and treatment decisions within the same clinic visit, which can be crucial to controlling the spread of TB in developing countries.”

Hakho Lee, PhD, of the MGH Center for Systems Biology, an assistant professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and co-senior author of both papers, notes that the system will also have important applications in developed countries.

“The capacity of the system not only to identify bacterial species but also to differentiate factors such as antibiotic resistance will help clinicians treat patients with the ‘right’ drugs from the start, which also helps reduce the emergence of treatment-resistant strains. The fact that this device requires only a tiny drop of the sample to be tested will be helpful in instances when specimens can be hard to obtain, such as treating children or seniors.”

Support for both studies includes National Institutes of Health grants.

NASA’s X-Ray Telescope on the Swift satellite took this 0.1-second exposure of GRB 130427A at 3:50 a.m. EDT on April 27, just moments after Swift and Fermi triggered on the outburst. The image is 6.5 arcminutes across. (Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler)

A record-setting blast of gamma rays from a dying star in a galaxy about 3.6 billion light-years away has wowed astronomers around the world — the highest-energy light ever detected from such an event.

At 3:47 a.m. EDT, April 27, Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) triggered on an eruption, designated GRB 130427A, of high-energy light in the constellation Leo.

The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) recorded one gamma ray with an energy of at least 94 billion electron volts (GeV), or some 35 billion times the energy of visible light, and about three times greater than the telescope’s previous record.

The GeV emission from the burst lasted for hours, and it remained detectable by the LAT for the better part of a day, setting a new record for the longest gamma-ray emission from a GRB.

The burst subsequently was detected in optical, infrared and radio wavelengths by ground-based observatories.

The maps in this animation show how the sky looks at gamma-ray energies above 100 million electron volts (MeV) with a view centered on the north galactic pole. The first frame shows the sky during a three-hour interval prior to GRB 130427A. The second frame shows a three-hour interval starting 2.5 hours before the burst, and ending 30 minutes into the event. The Fermi team chose this interval to demonstrate how bright the burst was relative to the rest of the gamma-ray sky. This burst was bright enough that Fermi autonomously left its normal surveying mode to give the LAT instrument a better view, so the three-hour exposure following the burst does not cover the whole sky in the usual way. (Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration)

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe’s most luminous explosions. Astronomers think most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse under their own weight. As the core collapses into a black hole, jets of material shoot outward at nearly the speed of light.

The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time.

If the GRB is near enough, astronomers usually discover a supernova at the site a week or so after the outburst.

Ground-based observatories are monitoring the location of GRB 130427A and expect to find an underlying supernova by midmonth.

Related

Download additional graphics from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio
Archive of GRB notices from the Gamma-ray Coordination Network
“NASA’s Fermi Telescope Sees Most Extreme Gamma-ray Blast Yet” (02.19.09)
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
NASA’s Swift mission

Defense Distributed

The CAD file is downloadable* at DEFCAD, operated by Defense Distributed — a “makeshift response to Makerbot Industries’ decision to censor files uploaded in good faith at Thingiverse, specifically firearms-related files.”

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* “DEFCAD is experiencing heavy traffic at the moment.”

An artist’s rendering of all-optical control of an individual electronic spin within a diamond. This spin is associated with a naturally occurring defect in diamond known as the nitrogen-vacancy center, a promising quantum bit (qubit) for quantum information processing. In their recently published paper, Yale et al. develop techniques to initialize, manipulate, and read out the electronic spin of this qubit using only pulses of light. Image courtesy of Peter Allen. (Credit: UC Santa Barbara)

By using light, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have manipulated the quantum state of a single atomic-sized defect in diamond — the nitrogen-vacancy center — in a method that allows for more unified control than conventional processes.

The method is also more versatile, and opens up the possibility of exploring new solid-state quantum systems.

“In contrast to conventional electronics, we developed an all-optical scheme for controlling individual quantum bits in semiconductors using pulses of light,” said David Awschalom, director of UCSB’s Center for Spintronics & Quantum Computation, professor of physics and of electrical and computer engineering, and the Peter J. Clarke director of the California NanoSystems Institute.

“This finding offers an intriguing opportunity for processing and communicating quantum information with photonic chips.

“The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is a defect in the atomic structure of a diamond where one carbon atom in the diamond lattice is replaced by a nitrogen atom, and an adjacent site in the lattice is vacant. The resulting electronic spin around the defect forms a quantum bit — “qubit” — which is the basic unit of a quantum computer.

Current processes require this qubit be initialized into a well-defined energy state before interfacing with it. Unlike classical computers, where the basic unit of information, the bit, is either 0 or 1, qubits can be 0, 1, or any mathematical superposition of both, allowing for more complex operations.

“The initial problem we were trying to solve was to figure out a way that we could place our qubit into any possible superposition of its state in a single step,” said the paper’s first author, physics graduate student Christopher Yale. “It turns out that in addition to being able to do that just by adjusting the laser light interacting with our spin, we discovered that we could generate coherent rotations of that spin state and read out its state relative to any other state of our choosing using only optical processes.”

The all-optical control allows for greater versatility in manipulating the NV center over disparate conventional methods that use microwave fields and exploit defect-specific properties. While the NV center in diamond is a promising qubit that has been studied extensively for the past decade, diamonds are challenging to engineer and grow.

This all-optical methodology, say the researchers, may allow for the exploration of quantum systems in other materials that are more technologically mature. “Compared to how the NV center is usually studied, these techniques in some ways are more general and could potentially enable the study of unexplored quantum systems,” said UCSB physics graduate student Bob Buckley.

Additionally, the all-optical method also has the potential to be more scalable, noted physics graduate student David Christle. “If you have an array of these qubits in order, and if you’re applying conventional microwave fields, it becomes difficult to talk to one of them without talking to the others. In principle, with our technique in an idealized optical system, you would be able focus the light down onto a single qubit and only talk to it.”

While practical quantum computers are still years and years away, the research opens up new paths toward their eventual creation. According to the group, these devices would be capable of performing certain sophisticated calculations and functions far more efficiently than today’s computers can — leading to advances in fields as diverse as encryption and quantum simulation.