Magneto-thermal stimulation enables researchers to use heated, magnetic nanoparticles to activate individual neurons inside the brain.
Here’s how it works: First, scientists use genetic engineering to introduce a special strand of DNA into targeted neurons, causing these cells to produce a heat-activated ion channel. Then, researchers inject specially crafted magnetic nanoparticles into the same area of the brain. These nanoparticles latch onto the surface of the targeted neurons, forming a thin covering like the skin of an onion.
When an alternating magnetic field is applied to the brain, it causes the nanoparticles’ magnetization to flip rapidly, generating heat that warms the targeted cells. This forces the temperature-sensitive ion channels to open, spurring the neurons to fire.
The particles the researchers used in the new eLife study consisted of a cobalt-ferrite core surrounded by a manganese-ferrite shell.
An advance over other methods, like optogenetics
Pralle has been working to advance magneto-thermal stimulation for about a decade. He previously demonstrated the technique’s utility in activating neurons in a petri dish, and then in controlling the behaviour of C. elegans, a tiny nematode.
Pralle says magneto-thermal stimulation has some benefits over other methods of deep-brain stimulation.
One of the best-known techniques, optogenetics, uses light instead of magnetism and heat to activate cells. But optogenetics typically requires implantation of tiny fibre optic cables in the brain, whereas magneto-thermal stimulation is done remotely, which is less invasive, Pralle says. He adds that even after the brains of mice were stimulated several times, targeted neurons showed no signs of damage.
The next step in the research is to use magneto-thermal stimulation to activate — and silence — multiple regions of the brain at the same time in mice. Pralle is working on this project with Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Dr. Polina Anikeeva, and Harvard Medical School.
Battery overinvestment
Over investment is part of capitalism. Remember global Crossing? Remember when they were laying fiber everywhere? The boom-bust cycle of capitalism is inevitable and ultimately accures benefit to the middle class
An estimate by Bloomberg Intelligence says that battery factories on the drawing boards and under construction by in China could have a production capacity of more than 120 GWh annually by 2021 — enough to power 1.5-2 million electric vehicles.
Elon Musk has estimated that the world will require the equivalent battery production capacity of 100 Gigafactories.
In Euorpe a consortium of companies headed by the German company TerraE Holding GmbH has plans to build a 34 GWh lithium-ion battery factory in response to Tesla’s Gigafactory.
“There’s a kind of arms race on batteries around the world. We know that Elon Musk with Tesla has got this Gigafactory. The Chinese are racing to overtake him; they’ll have three times the capacity.” Giles Keating, chairman of the Werthstein Institute, told CNBC.
Giles Keating believes that the major automakers have been “in denial” about the future of electric cars.
“I think Tesla was always all about electric cars, whereas I think the conventional auto manufacturers, they were in denial. They just kind of almost wanted batteries to be weak so that they wouldn’t have to go that route so that their existing route of business can continue, if I’m brutal about it,” Keating told CNBC.
https://www.singularityarchive.com/tesla-faces-gigafactory-competition-asia-europe/
Hydrogen on demand? The possibilities leave us swooning…
The accidental discovery of a novel aluminium alloy that reacts with water in a highly unusual way may be the first step to reviving the struggling hydrogen economy. It could offer a convenient and portable source of hydrogen for fuel cells and other applications, potentially transforming the energy market and providing an alternative to batteries and liquid fuels.
“The important aspect of the approach is that it lets you make very compact systems,” says Anthony Kucernak, who studies fuel cells at Imperial College London and wasn’t involved with the research. “That would be very useful for systems which need to be very light or operate for long periods on hydrogen, where the use of hydrogen stored in a cylinder is prohibitive.”
The discovery came in January, when researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, were working on a new, high-strength alloy, says physicist Anit Giri. When they poured water on it during routine testing, it started bubbling as it gave off hydrogen.
That doesn’t normally happen to aluminium. Usually, when exposed to water, it quickly oxidises, forming a protective barrier that puts a stop to any further reaction. But this alloy just kept reacting. The team had stumbled across the solution to a decades-old problem.
Hydrogen has long been touted as a clean, green fuel, but it is difficult to store and move around because of its bulk. “The problem with hydrogen is always transportation and pressurisation,” says Giri.
Slow reaction
If aluminium could be made to effectively react with water, it would mean hydrogen on demand. Unlike hydrogen, aluminium and water are easy to carry – and both are stable. But previous attempts to drive the reaction required high temperatures or catalysts, and were slow: obtaining the hydrogen took hours and was around 50 per cent efficient.
The new alloy, which the team is in the process of patenting, is made of a dense powder of micron-scale grains of aluminum and one or more other metals arranged in a particular nanostructure. Adding water to the mix produces aluminium oxide or hydroxide and hydrogen – lots of it. “Ours does it to nearly 100 per cent efficiency in less than 3 minutes,” says team leader Scott Grendahl. Moreover, the new material offers at least an order of magnitude more energy than lithium batteries of the same weight. And unlike batteries, it can remain stable and ready for use indefinitely.
The army team has used the material to power a small, radio-controlled tank. Grendahl doesn’t see any practical issues with scaling up production to produce hundreds of tonnes of the stuff as it can be made from scrap aluminium, which is relatively cheap. The new material could power everything from laptops to buses and cars.
“In principle, the process should work,” says Robert Steinberger-Wilckens, who directs a fuel cell programme at the University of Birmingham, UK.
But he cautions that a repeat experiment is needed to show that the reaction works the way it should. “There’s a lot of stuff that works in the laboratory but not in the field.”
If it does pan out, the powder could also be used as the raw material for 3D printing. The researchers have put forward proposals – now being considered by the army – for small air or ground robots that use their own structure as fuel. These self-cannibalising machines would be useful for one-way intelligence-gathering missions, burning themselves up at the end to leave no trace.
neuro-lance cometh…
Neuroprostheses show promise in the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury and for the creation of brain-machine interfaces such as the neural lace, but a major stumbling block for researchers has been the propensity of these implants to induce an immune response, inflammation and scaring in the brain, severely limiting their potential use.
The Harvard team’s new neuromorphic mesh is delivered to specific brain regions via syringe injection and overcomes the problem of immune response in the brain. Their observations of the brain’s of the injected mice showed little to no immune response and they found the neuromorphic mesh had merged with the brain tissue.
9 things CRISPR has given us lately (revolution isn’t too strong a word)
…someday a book will be written about what it felt like to have lived in a scientific revolution like the one we are all of us living in right now. Do not let the freak show off our current politics blind you to history…
There’s a good reason why the powerful CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool has earned the moniker of being ‘revolutionary’.
The relatively easy technique for cutting and pasting genes has exploded onto the scientific scene, and over the past years there’s been no shortage of spectacular results delivered thanks to this amazing tool. Just this year alone, researchers have made advances in fighting diseases, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, mosquitoes and much more.
1. For the first time, scientists have used gene editing to successfully remove HIV from a living organism, and they did this in three different animal models. Using CRISPR, the team got rid of the virus DNA and cleared up both acute and latent infections.
2. The first ever semi-synthetic organisms have been developed by breeding E. coli bacteria with an unusual six-letter genetic code instead of the typical one with just four bases. The researchers used gene editing to make sure bacteria would not register the new DNA molecules as invaders.
3. CRISPR has been used to successfully target the ‘command centre’ of cancer – the hybrid fusion genes that often trigger abnormal tumour growths. By cutting and pasting, researchers created a cancer-busting gene that actually shrunk tumours in mice carrying human prostate and liver cancer cells.
4. With the help of CRISPR, scientists also recently managed to slow the growth of cancer cells. They targeted a protein called Tudor-SN that helps cell division, and think this technique could help inhibit fast-growing cancer cells.
5. Gene editing has been used to make viruses force superbugs to kill themselves. By arming bacteriophage viruses with genetic sequences that contain antibiotic resistance genes, researchers have been able to trigger self-destructing mechanisms in bacteria that naturally try to protect themselves from phages.
6. Mosquito-borne diseases could become a thing of the past thanks to gene editing. Scientists have found a new way to limit the spread of mosquitoes by hacking their fertility genes, and they attribute the success to the efficient way CRISPR can make several genetic code changes at once.
7. Researchers have managed to edit out Huntington’s disease genes in mice, efficiently reversing signs of the fatal condition. It’s entirely likely that this brilliant technique could one day be used on humans as well, after demonstrating this promising first step.
8. Apart from medical breakthroughs, CRISPR could also give us the gift of more abundant, sustainable biofuels. Scientists recently used a combination of gene editing tools to engineer algae that produce twice as much biofuel material as their wild counterparts.
9. If you’ve watched the first-ever movie encoded in DNA code, you have CRISPR to thank for this advance, too. Just recently, scientists finally managed to turn cells into a ‘molecular recorder’ as they used gene editing to embed sequences of information into the genome of E. coli.
As all amazing technology, CRISPR has also sparked concerns, especially as we’re getting ever-so closer to routinely using it in humans. But scientists have also discovered an ‘off switch’ for the process, which allows to stop the mechanism in its tracks.
And if you’ve heard that CRISPR can cause hundreds of unwanted mutations, that study was probably wrong anyway. We can’t wait to see what incredible advances this tool will bring next.
brain mapping at the neuronal level…
The results the team has achieved are the most in-depth neural map of fruit fly behavior yet. The project involved studying 2,204 populations of flies to find the neurons involved with 14 different behaviors, ranging from wing-flicking to attempted copulation. Were humans to have had to do the project’s “behavior labeling” work instead of machine learning algorithms, the task would apparently have taken 3,800 years. Even in the field of long-term research projects, that’s considered excessive!
“We have mapped the regions of the fly brain that are involved in a variety of locomotion and social behaviors,” Branson continued. “We have done this at the resolution of individual neurons across the entire brain. We hope that the behavior-anatomy maps resulting from our study will enable other biologists to understand the precise computations that the brain performs to produce these behaviors.”
The researcher’s work isn’t just limited to fruit flies, however. “As we start to decipher the ways that the fruit fly brain implements behavior, we hope to find common principles and motifs of neural computation that generalize beyond fruit flies,” she noted. “Understanding circuit computations does involve simulating our models of those circuits in the computer to prove to ourselves that we understand the system, and may enable us to understand why that particular implementation of behavior is advantageous.”
While currently artificial neural networks are only an approximation of how the brain works, hopefully research like what has been conducted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will help brain-inspired computation advance to the next level. A paper on the research was published in the journal Cell.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/fruit-fly-brain-map-neuron/
sodium batteries would change everything…
Scientists have designed a new type of cathode that could make the mass production of sodium batteries more feasible. Batteries based on plentiful and low-cost sodium are of great interest to both scientists and industry as they could facilitate a more cost-efficient production process for grid-scale energy storage systems, consumer electronics and electric vehicles. The discovery was a collaborative effort between researchers at the Institute of Chemistry (IOC) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-scientists-cathode-sodium-based-batteries.html#jCp
AI worth your time…
Kurtoglu making sense on future of AI
“What we’re talking about here is more of a symbiotic team between an AI agent and a human,” he said. “They solve the problems together, it’s not that one of them tells the other what to do; they go back and forth. They can formulate the problem, they can build on each other’s ideas. It’s really important because we’re seeing significant advancements and penetration of AI technologies in almost all industries.”
You can listen to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
Kurtoglu believes that both in our personal lives and in the office, every individual will be surrounded by virtual helpers that can process data and make recommendations. But before artificial intelligence reaches that level of omnipresence, it will need to get a lot better at explaining itself.
“At some point, there is going to be a huge issue with people really taking the answers that the computers are suggesting to them without questioning them,” he said. “So this notion of trust between the AI agents and humans is at the heart of the technology we’re working on. We’re trying to build trustable AI systems.”
“So, imagine an AI system that explains itself,” he added. “If you’re using an AI to do medical diagnostics and it comes up with a seemingly unintuitive answer, then the doctor might want to know, ‘Why? Why did you come up with that answer as opposed to something else?’ And today, these systems are pretty much black boxes: You put in the input, it just spits out what the answer is.”
So, rather than just spitting out an answer, Kurtoglu says virtual agents will explain what assumptions they made and how they used those assumptions to reach a conclusion: “Here are the paths I’ve considered, here are the paths I’ve ruled out and here’s why.”
$7 trillion taas
Intel released a report last month in collaboration with research firm Strategy Analytics that made some big predictions for the coming driverless car market. Among them was the estimate that self-driving cars would be at the heart of a $7 trillion market by 2050.
The company calls this new market the “Passenger Economy” and said that about 43% of it will be created from businesses using self-driving services, and the rest by consumers. Intel’s focus on driverless cars has spiked ever since it purchased Mobileye N.V. earlier this year for about $15 billion. Mobileye makes computer vision technology and Intel is using the acquisition to propel itself toward the front of the driverless car pack.
But Intel’s estimate of a $7 trillion passenger economy is just one prediction the company’s making about the future of autonomous vehicles. Here are a few more.
1. Automakers will adapt to a mobility-as-a-service model as car ownership is disrupted
The report says that in the coming decade’s consumers will mainly be riding around in vehicles that they don’t own and that this will completely disrupt car ownership as we know it. The company notes that most cars sit idle about 92% of the time, and asserts that a growing share of consumers will prefer to “order mobility” rather than owning vehicles outright.
Intel believes that automakers will still be able to benefit in this new economy: “Carmakers will be in the throes of replacing vehicle sales with Mobility-as-a-Service models,” the report said.
That prediction may be closer to becoming reality than many realize. Ford has already said that it will have a fleet of self-driving cars capable of Level 4 automation (able to drive pre-set, mapped areas and on some highways) by 2021 and that these vehicles will be specifically for commercial use. Ford also says that by the end of this year, it will have about 90 self-driving cars on the road.
2. Trucking will see huge changes, including a loss of jobs
“The emergence of pilotless vehicle options will first appear in developed markets and will reinvent the package delivery and long-haul transportation sectors. This will relieve driver shortages around the world and account for two-thirds of initial projected revenues,” the Intel report says of the B2B transportation-as-a-service market.
Unfortunately for the drivers who currently hold these types of jobs and those who would have succeeded them, the report notes that they are “likely to be displaced in significant numbers.” As the American Trucking Associations recently noted in an open letter to the president, 7.3 million people work in trucking and trucking-related industries in the U.S. — 1 in 16 people in the country.
3. New businesses will emerge as a result of driverless cars
Intel is optimistic that self-driving technologies will spur new innovations and new business as the vehicles become more widespread.
One such example is Alphabet’s smart city subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs. The company is applying machine vision technology to street signs and parking to create better solutions for real-time parking. Intel believes coupling technology like this to autonomous vehicles will “lead to a dramatic decline in surface parking, which would, in turn, free up land for higher-density redevelopment in urban cores around the world.”
Intel thinks about $200 billion in revenue will be created from consumers using such new innovations and services. One example the company gave was the idea of “experience pods” that not only cart passengers to their destination but also offer services like a beauty salon, mobile healthcare clinic, or fast-casual dining.
4. More than half a million lives will be saved over the span of a decade
It’s a well-known conclusion that driverless cars will eventually save many lives, but Intel offered up its own estimates about just how many in the report: “Conservatively, 585,000 lives can be saved due to self-driving vehicles in the era of the Passenger Economy from 2035 to 2045.”
And not only with the roads be safer with driverless cars, but they’ll also help drive down public safety costs because there will be fewer collisions. Those costs could fall by a total of more than $234 billion over that period, according to the report.
5. Commuting times will drop
Driverless cars won’t just make driving safer though, it’ll likely cut down our commute times as well. Self-driving vehicles are expected to save people more than 250 million hours of commuting time a year in the world’s 50 most congested cities, the report said.
The benefits will come from driverless cars’ ability to access the most current traffic data and change their routes based on congestion, accidents, and construction. The vehicles will constantly be searching for the fastest routes and making changes in real-time to reduce trip times.
How Intel plans to benefit from all of this
Intel is looking to its purchase of Mobileye to spur new growth for the company. Mobileye’s computer vision technology — which essentially allows driverless cars to see — has leapfrogged Intel to the head of the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) pack. The company knows that ADAS systems like automatic braking, adaptive cruise control, and lane change warnings are the stepping stones to fully driverless vehicles, which makes Mobileye a solid bet.
The thing investors need to remember is that Intel’s purchase of Mobileye wasn’t a bet on the company’s revenue streams. The driverless car tech company brought in just $358 million in revenue in 2016, a figure that’s dwarfed by the $59 billion Intel earned.
Instead, Intel will take Mobileye’s technology and likely use it to sell driverless car systems to other companies, pairing it with the company’s processors. The company’s been pursuing new avenues of chip growth as PC sales continue to decline and the company is betting that selling chips into the $7 trillion passenger economy may be the right play.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told Bloomberg in March that, “If you look at where autonomous vehicles are going, you have to make a deal in order to be there in 2021 when models hit the road.”
In 2016, Intel earned 55% of its revenue from its client computing group (CCG), which includes all of its chips for notebooks, tablets, desktops. Meanwhile, the company’s Internet of Things group (IOTG) — which includes chips for the transportation market — accounted for just 5% of revenue. So even though Intel is making a serious play on a potentially massive market, it will still be a long time before its Mobileye purchase and driverless car tech plans have a major impact on the company’s top line.
Intel thinks driverless cars will be a $7 trillion market that will completely reshape transportation – Business Insider UK
https://apple.news/AqUkiWeQCOoWDSN7KD3I2og