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Many billions of rocky planets in the habitable zones around red dwarfs in the Milky Way

March 29, 2012

Rocky Planet

There are tens of billions of these light planets around red dwarf stars in our galaxy alone, it has just been announced by an international team using observations with the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-meter telescope at ESO‘s La Silla Observatory in Chile [1].

A recent announcement [link], showing that planets are ubiquitous in our galaxy used a different method that was not sensitive to… read more

Topics: Physics/Cosmology | Space

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Carbon nanotube/buckyball-based solar cell harnesses infrared light

New type of photovoltaic device harnesses near-infrared radiation, which most solar cells ignore
June 22, 2012

Carbon Solar

A new kind of all-carbon solar cell developed by MIT researchers could tap into unused near-infrared energy, opening up the possibility of combination solar cells — incorporating both traditional silicon-based cells and the new all-carbon cells — that could make use of almost the entire range of sunlight’s energy.

“It’s a fundamentally new kind of photovoltaic cell,” says Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Professor of Chemical… read more

Topics: Energy | Nanotech/Materials Science

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Synaptic electronic circuits that learn and forget like neural processes

December 27, 2012

nanoionic device

Rui Yang, Kazuya Terabe and colleagues at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), and the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA) in Japan and at the California NanoSystems Institute/UCLA have developed “nanoionic” (processes connected with fast ion transport in all-solid-state nanoscale systems) devices capable of a broad range of neuromorphic and electrical functions.

Background

Such a device would allow for fabrication of on-demand configurable circuits,… read more

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | Electronics | Nanotech/Materials Science

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Does future hold ‘Avatar’-like bodies for us?

October 18, 2011

Dmitry Itskov introduced his “Project Immortality 2045: Russian Experience” at the Singularity Summit in New York, reports MSNBC’s Innovation blog.  His plans include creating a humanoid avatar body within five to seven years, transplanting a human brain into a new “body B” in 10 to 15 years, digitally uploading a human brain’s consciousness in 20 to 25 years, and moving human consciousness to hologram-like bodies… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | Innovation/Entrepreneurship | Social Networking/Web/Education

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U.S. launches three biodefense centers

June 19, 2012

Texas-AMCollege_Station_view_West_Campus3001

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today awarded contracts for the creation of three new centers tasked with responding to the threat of future pandemics and biological attacks, Nature News Blog reports.

Based in Maryland, North Carolina and Texas, the three “Centers for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing” are the first tangible result of a review concluded by HHS in 2010.

It… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Biotech | Survival/Defense

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Underground ocean on Titan, alien life on Phobos?

June 29, 2012

nasa_titan_art

Saturn’s moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell in a hidden ocean at depth, data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have revealed.

The evidence is tidal, according to Luciano Iess, the paper’s lead author and a Cassini team member at the Sapienza University in Rome. Saturn’s powerful gravity stretches and deforms Titan as the moon moves around the gas giant planet. If Titan were… read more

Topics: Space

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How Google plans to find the UnGoogleable

November 27, 2012

google_data_center

Google wants to improve its mobile search services by automatically delivering information you wouldn’t think to search for online in a research exercise known as the Daily Information Needs Study, MIT Technology Review reports.

For example, contextual information provided by mobile devices — via GPS chips and other sensors — can provide clues about a person and his situation, allowing Google to guess what that person wants.… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Internet/Telecom

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A free database of the entire Web may spawn the next Google

January 24, 2013

common_crawl_Logo

A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own Web crawler and making a giant copy of the Web that it makes accessible to anyone.

The organization offers up over five billion Web pages, available for free so that researchers and entrepreneurs can try things otherwise possible only for those with access to resources on the scale of Google’s, MIT Technology Review reports.… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Computers/Infotech/UI | Internet/Telecom

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First artificial enzyme created by evolution in a test tube

February 1, 2013

3-D structure of the evolved enzyme (an RNA ligase), using 10 overlaid snapshots. In the top region, the overlays show the range of bending and folding flexibility in the amino acid chain that forms the molecule. The two gray balls are zinc ions. (Credit: University of Minnesota)

There’s a wobbly new biochemical structure in Burckhard Seelig’s lab at the University of Minnesota that may resemble what enzymes looked like billions of years ago, when life on earth began to evolve.

Seelig created the fledgling enzyme by using directed evolution in the laboratory.

Working with team members, he subsequently determined its structure.. Lab tests show that the enzyme… read more

Topics: Biotech | Synthetic Biology

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Poison attacks against machine learning

Security and spam-detection programs could be affected
July 23, 2012

poisoning_attack_svm

New results indicate that it may be easier than we thought to provide data to a learning program that causes it to learn the wrong things by by feeding it wrong data — a “poison attack,”  I Programmer reports.

Three researchers, Battista Biggio (Italy) Blaine Nelson and Pavel Laskov (Germany), have found a way to feed a Support Vector Machine (SVM) with data specially designed to increase the error rate… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Survival/Defense

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‘Team Frankenstein’ launch bid to build a human brain within decade

May 18, 2011

markram

Dr. Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, has assembled a team of nine top European scientists to build a computer model of a human brain in 12 years.

The Human Brain Project is in discussion with the EU for a £1 billion grant. The project has already created an artificial neocortical column that is unique to mammals, digitally… read more

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | Computers/Infotech/UI

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Researchers bypass the blood-brain barrier, widening treatment options for neurodegenerative and central nervous system disease

April 26, 2013

murine_graft_model

The first known method to permanently bypass the blood-brain barrier*, using mucosa, or the lining of the nose, has been demonstrated by researchers in the department of Otology and Laryngology at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School and the Biomedical Engineering Department of Boston University.

The method opens the door to new treatment options for those with neurodegenerative and CNS disease.… read more

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience

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The world of wearable computers

May 20, 2013

watch

(Credit: Credit Suisse)

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

The wearables market is perhaps $3 billion to $5 billion today, rising to perhaps $30 billion to $50 billion over the next three to five years, the analysts forecast, adding that there may… read more

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI | Electronics

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World’s largest quantum computation uses 84 qubits

January 12, 2012

qubitsramsey

D-Wave Systems has carried out  a calculation involving 84 qubits on its D-Wave One quantum computing system, Technology Review Physics arXiv blog reports.

Their complex task was to calculate various  “two-color Ramsey numbers,” connected with the emergence of order in disordered systems.

Ref.: Zhengbing Bian et al., Experimental Determination Of Ramsey Numbers With Quantum Annealing, arxiv.org/abs/1201.1842

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI | Quantum

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New Society for Social Neuroscience to help guide emerging field

December 16, 2010

Scholars at the University of Chicago have played a central role in establishing a new professional organization, the Society for Social Neuroscience, helping to advance an emerging interdisciplinary field.

Research in social neuroscience is based on the use of new technologies, advanced understanding of genetics and other research, including studies on animal behavior. “We define social neuroscience broadly as the study of the neural, genetic, cellular and hormonal… read more

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience

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