University of Texas at Dallas researchers have created an atomic force microscope (AFM) on a chip, dramatically shrinking the size — and, hopefully, the price — of a microscope used to characterize material properties down to molecular dimensions.
“A standard atomic force microscope is a large, bulky instrument, with multiple control loops, electronics and amplifiers,” said Dr. Reza Moheimani, professor of mechanical engineering at UT Dallas. “We have… read more
Stanford chemical engineers have developed a soft, flexible plastic electrode that stretches like rubber but carries electricity like wires — ideal for brain interfaces and other implantable electronics, they report in an open-access March 10 paper in Science Advances.
Developed by Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering, and his team, the material is still a laboratory prototype, but the team hopes to develop it… read more
The brain has more than 100 times higher computational capacity than was previously thought, a UCLA team has discovered.
Obsoleting neuroscience textbooks, this finding suggests that our brains are both analog and digital computers and could lead to new approaches for treating neurological disorders and developing brain-like computers, according to the researchers.
Dendrites have been considered simple passive conduits of signals. But by working… read more
An international team led by IBM has created the world’s smallest magnet, using a single atom of rare-earth element holmium, and stored one bit of data on it over several hours.
The achievement represents the ultimate limit of the classical approach to high-density magnetic storage media, according to a paper published March 8 in the journal Nature.
Currently, hard disk drives use about 100,000 atoms to store a single… read more
Two research teams are developing new ways to communicate with robots and shape them one day into the kind of productive workers featured in the current AMC TV show HUMANS (now in second season).
Programming robots to function in a real-world environment is normally a complex process. But now a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University is creating a system… read more
Here’s a radical new idea for creating new GMO (genetically modified organism) plants that may appeal to staunch organic-food consumers/farmers and even #NonGMOProjectVerified advocates: don’t insert a foreign gene in today’s domestic plants — delete already existing genes in semi-domesticated or even wild plants to make those plants more domestic, and reducing pesticide use in the process.
“All of the plants we eat today are… read more
Japanese researchers have developed an amoeba-like shape-changing molecular robot — assembled from biomolecules such as DNA, proteins, and lipids — that could act as a programmable and controllable robot for treating live culturing cells or monitoring environmental pollution, for example.
This the first time a molecular robotic system can recognize signals and control its shape-changing function, and their molecular robots could in the near future function in a way similar… read more
A research team led by the University of Minnesota has discovered a way to rewarm large-scale animal heart valves and blood vessels preserved at very low (cryogenic) temperatures without damaging the tissue. The discovery could one day lead to saving millions of human lives by creating cryogenic tissue and organ banks of organs and tissues for transplantation.
Imagine a single flexible polymer fiber 200 micrometers across — about the width of a human hair — that can deliver a combination of optical, electrical, and chemical signals between different brain regions, with the softness and flexibility of brain tissue — allowing neuroscientists to leave implants in place and have them retain their functions over much longer periods than is currently possible with typical stiff, metallic fibers.
That’s what… read more
Futurists worldwide plan to celebrate March 1 as World Future Day with a 24-hour conversation about the world’s potential futures, challenges, and opportunities.
At 12 noon your local time on March 1, you can click on a Google hangout at goo.gl/4hCJq3 and join the conversation* (log in with a Google account). It starts at 12 noon (midnight in New York) in Auckland, New Zealand and moves across the world,… read more
Drexel University biomedical engineers and Princeton University psychologists have used a wearable brain-imaging device called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain synchronization when humans interact. fNIRS uses light to measure neural activity in the cortex of the brain (based on blood-oxygenation changes) during real-life situations and can be worn like a headband.
(KurzweilAI recently covered research with a fNIRS brain-computer interface that allows completely locked-in patients to… read more
Billionaire Softbank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son revealed Monday (Feb. 27) at Mobile World Congress his plan to invest in singularity. “In next 30 years [the singularity] will become a reality,” he said, Tech Crunch reports.
“If superintelligence goes inside the moving device then the world, our lifestyle dramatically changes,” he said. “There will be many kinds. Flying, swimming, big, micro, run, 2 legs,… read more
Swiss researchers are using neural networks to achieve the sharpest-ever images in optical astronomy. The work appears in an open-access paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The aperture (diameter) of any telescope is fundamentally limited by its lens or mirror. The bigger the mirror or lens, the more light it gathers, allowing astronomers to detect fainter objects, and to observe them… read more
Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories researchers have developed an organic artificial synapse based on a new memristor (resistive memory device) design that mimics the way synapses in the brain learn. The new artificial synapse could lead to computers that better recreate the way the human brain processes information. It could also one day directly interface with the human brain.
The new artificial synapse is an… read more
Eating 800 grams a day (about ten portions*) of fruit or vegetables could reduce your chance of heart attack, stroke, cancer, and early death, scientists from Imperial College London conclude from a meta-analysis of 95 studies on fruit and vegetable intake.
The study, published in an open-access paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology, included 2 million people worldwide and assessed up to 43,000 cases… read more