“After training and MRI-scanning a dozen dogs, my one inescapable conclusion is this: dogs are people, too,” says Gregory Berns, a professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University and the author of How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain at The New York Times.
“Many of the same things that activate the human caudate [part of the brain], which are associated… read more
A new multi-university study shows that research to delay aging and the infirmities of old age would have better population health and economic returns than advances in individual fatal diseases such as cancer or heart disease.
With even modest gains in our scientific understanding of how to slow the aging process, an additional 5 percent of adults over the age of 65 would be healthy rather than… read more
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Micron Technology Inc. have developed a new technique in silicon photonics that could allow for exponential improvement in microprocessors to continue well into the future.
The technique allows microprocessors to use light instead of electrical wires to communicate with transistors on a single chip, a system that could also lead to energy-efficient… read more
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 has been awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has decided to award The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman, and Thomas C. Südhof, for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.
The three scientists have solved the mystery of how the cell organizes its transport system. Each cell is a factory… read more
It’s the year 2054, where “PreCrime,” a specialized police department, apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge provided by three psychics called “precogs.”
That’s the premise of the Minority Report film. Now University of Twente (UT) mathematics student Marijn ten Thij* has developed a mathematical model that he says could achieve a similar result (but not limited to crimes) by analyzing… read more
Christian Enz, head of the EPFL Integrated Circuits Laboratory (ICLAB), says we should build future devices with unreliable circuits, and adopt the “good enough engineering” trend to reduce energy consumption and continue to reduce transistor size.
The problem: We are beginning to hit a wall on miniaturization. As transistors get smaller, they produce more mistakes, so hardware must be added and performance must be decreased, which… read more
On Monday, October 7, 2013, scientists from the 135 partner institutions of the Human Brain Project — “the world’s most ambitious neuroscience project”— met at EPFL (Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), the coordinating institution, in Switzerland.
Over the course of the coming week, neuroscientists, doctors, computer scientists, and roboticists will fine-tune the project’s details.
Six months after its selection by the EU as one… read more
Romain Testuz. a student of the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Geometrics (LGG) at EPFL, has developed software that automatically transforms a three-dimensional image into bricks and simplifies the challenge of construction by proposing a comprehensive plan of the parts to be used at each level.
To overcome structural weaknesses, Testuz used graph theory, representing each piece by a node and each connection by… read more
The left and right hemispheres of Albert Einstein’s brain were unusually well connected to each other and this may have contributed to his brilliance, according to a new study [1], the first to detail Einstein’s corpus callosum.
The corpus callosum is the brain’s largest bundle of fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres and facilitates interhemispheric communication.
The study was published in the journal Brain. Lead… read more
Boston Dynamics has unleashed Cheetah as “WildCat” — a four-legged robot being developed to run fast on all types of terrain.
So far, WildCat has run at about 16 mph on flat terrain using bounding and galloping gaits — still slower than tethered Cheetah, with a top speed of 28.3 mph. Boston Dynamics is developing WildCat with funding from DARPA’s M3 program. (To… read more
Making things at home on a 3D printer uses less energy — and therefore releases less carbon dioxide — than producing it in a factory and shipping it to a warehouse.
That’s according to a study led by Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering/electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Technological University.
The team conducted life-cycle impact analyses on three products:… read more
Scientists at the University of Western Ontario in Canada enrolled patients with Parkinson’s disease who were scheduled to have deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery and removed small biopsies near the surface of the brain.
They then multiplied the cells in culture to generate millions of patient-specific cells that were then subjected to genetic analysis.
These cells exhibited regeneration and characteristics of a fundamental class of brain… read more
The experts said it couldn’t be done. But research scientist John Romanishin of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has created M-Blocks — cube robots with no external moving parts.
Despite that, they can magically climb over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground, snap together into different shapes, and even move while suspended upside down from metallic… read more
Scientists have controlled the duration of REM (rapid eye movements, associated with dreaming) sleep in mice by activating melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH)-expressing neurons in the lateral hypothalamus, using optogenetics (controlling neuronal activity with light).
“These research findings could help us better grasp how the brain controls sleep and better understand the role of sleep in humans. These results could also lead to new therapeutic strategies to treat sleep disorders along with… read more