Micro stories - small news bits too small to have their own thread

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Watch The New Tesla Model X Doors In Action Outside Of The Showroom

Watch The New Tesla Model X Doors In Action Outside Of The Showroom

A couple of sneaky YouTube users recently caught footage of the opening and closing of the new Tesla Model X hot gullwing (or as Tesla calls them, “falcon”) doors. As our narrators instruct us, “Be jelly".

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Model X open its doors on video — it’s just one of the first instances outside of a concept on a show floor, with what looks to be a near-production-ready example. A project with a long-delayed completion, the official launch date for the new electric sports-utility vehicle is set for Sept. 29 at Tesla’s Fremont, California factory.

The video shows that Model X owners don’t have to have a crazy amount of room on each side of the car for the doors to swing out — something that’s been a concern revolving around the concept. That said, enjoy not only the first-hand views of the Model X doors in action, but also the “oh, I hope this person doesn’t see us filming” commentary and high-class creeping abilities displayed in the video.

The company began letting its customers with the first reservations choose specific details of their cars in early September, and if you see this video and decide that you have to have one of these for yourself, estimated delivery for the most recent reservations is in the second half of 2016.

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Hmm...this does not look good to me. Park in a tight spot near a truck and you may hit it.

 

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IBM engineers carbon nanotube transistors to replace silicon in computing | Jewocity.com

The success of the new method means that the ability to deliver current to carbon nanotube transistors is now independent of the length of the metal contacts, says Wilfried Haensch, who leads IBM Research’s nanotube project. “As silicon technology nears its physical limits, new materials, devices and circuit architectures must be ready to deliver the advanced technologies that will be required by the Cognitive Computing era”. Inside a chip, contacts are the valves that control the flow of electrons from metal into the channels of a semiconductor.


The chips are made from carbon nanotubes consist of single atomic sheets of carbon in rolled-up tubes.

“These chip innovations are necessary to meet the emerging demands of cloud computing, Internet of Things and Big Data systems”, said Dario Gil, vice president of science and technology at IBM Research, in a statement. The new result from IBM represents a “fantastic strategy” for addressing the contact problem, he says, though he points out that the researchers have so far only showed it works for one of the two types of transistors needed to perform complementary logic functions.

“The 1.2 nanometer wide carbon nanotube channel is already proven”, Shu-Jen Han, IBM manager of nanoscale science and technology at its T.J. Watson Research Center (Yorktown, Heights) told EE Times in an exclusive interview.

The MIT Technology Review notes that viable chips for future high-performance computers would need billions of transistors, and the contacts would have to be a lot smaller.

Silicon transistors have become dramatically smaller in the last decades following Moore’s Law – the observation that the number of transistors per unit area doubles every two tears.

“This is an important advance but there are many other challenges to be solved such as how to purify the nanotubes, how to place them properly, and we also made good progress there but when we are talking about new technology so many things have to be right”.

IBM Research group overcame the challenge with development of an end-bonded contact in which “the SWNT channel abruptly ends at the metal electrodes through a solid-state reaction between the nanotube and deposited Molybdenum (Mo) electrodes”. This “end-bonded contact scheme” allows the contacts to be shrunken down to below 10 nanometers without deteriorating performance of the carbon nanotube devices. Better transistors can offer higher speed while consume less power.

Carbon nanotubes contained in a solution are seen in an IBM laboratory.

As part of the world’s long search for technologies that can stave off The End of Moore’s Law, and carbon nano-tech is a multi-billion dollar research effort in IBM alone. However, as devices become smaller, increased contact resistance for carbon nanotubes has hindered performance gains until now. “This brings us a step closer to the goal of a carbon nanotube technology”.

False-colored SEM image showing a set of devices with different contact geometries fabricated on the same nanotube to verify that the contact size can shrink without reducing device performance. “They could be used in futuristic “more than Moore” applications, such as flexible and stretchable electronics or sensors embedded in wearables that actually attach to skin – and are not just bracelets, watches, or eyewear”.

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IBM Says Its Carbon&Nanotube&Based Chips Can Break Through Limits of Moore’s Law | or-politics.comor-politics.com

 

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With the most-edited genomes of all time, Harvard’s pigs could spark a transplant revolution | ExtremeTech

Researchers from Harvard University have announced the most extensively gene-edited organism ever, a line of pigs that have had more than 60 genes modified. It’s about more than just showing off, though; all these changes are aimed at creating a species compatible enough with human biology to allow transplantation of animal organs into human patients. It’s called “xenotransplantation,” and it could be a big part of the future of medicine. This study could represent a real step toward a solution for a huge proportion of the 125,000 people waiting for an organ transplant in the United States alone.

Contrary to what you may have heard from that kid who sat beside you in junior high, there are not a bunch of people out there running around with baboon hearts. The most famous semi-modern attempt at xenotransplantation of a major organ occurred in 1984, with the tragic case of “Baby Fae.” Fae was born with a congenital heart defect called hypo plastic left heart syndrome, and scientists put a baboon heart in her in a desperate attempt to preserve her life a little longer; the animal heart was only ever meant to sustain her until a human donor could be found. As with all other xenotransplantation events thus far, however, her body quickly rejected the alien tissue.


Baby Fae, who lived 20 days with the heart of baboon.

That trend has continued unbroken ever since, including several failed attempted at a xeno-liver transplant. Even much smaller things like single heart valves present problems of rejection by the immune system; immune rejection often stymies even intra-species transplantation from one human to another.

Still, clinicians have been outspoken about the need for non-human sources of organs — it’s unspeakably frustrating to watch people die while knowing just how to fix them, simply because you can’t get access to the parts needed to actually do the repair. Even the risk-averse FDA says that xenotransplantation needs to be a major priority for research. There have been some amazing breakthroughs with animal transplantation, such as a successful transplant of a pig organ into a baboon. We don’t need worry nearly as much about giving pig diseases to a baboon we’re probably going to dissect anyway, however, and in any case the organ was rejected as soon as the researchers discontinued their battery of immune-suppressing drugs.


A bladder grown from stem cells.

There are really only two foreseeable solutions to the overall problem of human organ failure: either we grow fully human organs from stem cells, or we take human-enough organs out of fully non-human animals. The latter solution seems like it really ought to be the easier of the two, but the immune rejection problem means the much more complex stem cell approach has actually made more overall progress so far.

That’s what this team may have achieved: pigs with organs that do not trigger the immune response when transplanted into a human. The lead researcher on this study recently started a biotech company called eGenesis for eventual sale of human-compatible porcine tissue. If successful, it has the potential to let humanity bring its expertise in farming livestock to bear on everything from diabetes to cancer.



OK… but does it really have to be pigs?
Yes. Why? Because pigs are simultaneously close enough and far enough from humanity to make them feasible organ donors.

Pigs have long been associated with human biology. It’s been suggested that the world’s numerous cultural and religious prohibitions against eating pork might partially stem from an alleged similarity in the tastes of pig and human meat — some cannibalistic tribes of Pacific Islanders used to refer to human flesh by a phrase that roughly translates to “long pig.”

More recently, pigs have seen extensive use as animal models for human biology; if a pig can take it, maybe a human can as well. Whether you want to test a new drug, take a stab at cryogenic suspension, or observe the effects of exposure to raw vacuum, pigs have long been the premiere, well, guinea pigs. They’re not as human-like as, say, chimpanzees, but they’re also infinitely less expensive to raise and keep. They’re also physically large enough to grow useful organs for humans, unlike baboons or similarly pint-sized species.

On the other hand, porcine evolution has not overlapped with human evolution in quite some time — much longer than for apes. This means that any latent viruses, especially retroviruses hiding in the animal’s genome, are far less likely to find purchase in the human body. Don’t forget that HIV started out as PIV — Primate Immunodeficiency Virus. That sort of species-jump is why many doctors are wary of using primate organs, since they might actually end up doing more harm than good in the long term. In its policy page on xenotransplantation, the FDA says that, “of public health concern is the potential for cross-species infection by retroviruses, which may be latent and lead to disease years after infection.”

What they’re talking about are PERVs: porcine endogenous retroviruses. In the 1990s, the discovery of these genetic maladies put a hard stop on xenotransplantation research, as studies showed that, in the lab, some piggie diseases can actually infect human cells. This Harvard study used the new but already venerable CRISPR system to make 62 inactivating changes — muck up a virus’s gene, or just cut it out entirely, and you no longer need to worry about it rearing its head after you’ve already put pig organs inside a few million of the world’s most important people.

Of course, 62 genes is a lot of genes, but until we have the results of a few decades of xenotransplantation to study, the question will always remain: did they really get them all?

The potential medical benefits of having readily available source of human-compatible organs is simply too big to reject out of such paranoia, however. The danger of someday developing a biology-hopping genetic disorder will likely be seen as very acceptable, to people facing the prospect of wide-ranging organ failure.

So. Pigs it is.



There’s still lots of work to be done
These (hopefully) PERV-less pigs are actually only half the equation, and the Harvard team is already working on the other half. It’s one thing to make pig organs safe, it’s quite another to make them compatible. Though it’s the inactivation of 62 PERV genes that has set an editing record, these are still pig organs at the end of the day, and they will need to be modified on the protein level if they’re to work properly in the human body. As we just discussed, getting to that point should be easier in pigs than just about any other candidate species.

In that spirit, the team has actually engineered two separate lines of pig embryos. The second has modifications made to more than 20 separate (and currently unpublished) genes, ones that affect cell behavior through things like cell surface proteins. These are the changes that could potentially be tailored to a particular patient’s genome, allowing us to grow highly compatible organs by mixing a small number of the patient’s own genes into defanged porcine genome.

The edited pig embryos should be perfectly viable as pigs in their own right, but we won’t know for sure until they’re actually implanted in pig mothers. Harvard has a facility all setup for their growth in isolation — they’ll breed each line separately to be able to study problems with as few confounding issues as possible. To produce a real organ transplant species, the researchers will need to combine the two groups of modifications in a single line of pigs — though since the PERV-line has theoretically lost only viral functions, that shouldn’t be the biggest obstacle in the world.

When this team eventually publishes their much more ambitious work in steering the pig genome closer to the human, you can expect a robust breakdown from ExtremeTech.



Where will this all take us?
From real-world congressional rows over the potential use of human tissue to literary projections like Never Let Me Go, the popular culture has made it clear that the idea of using humans to sustain humanity makes it squeamish. Yet if we go with animals for organ growth, what new challenges might arise? Will people actually accept animal parts into their bodies, or will they reject them on religious, philosophical, or purely squeamish grounds? Can a religious Jew accept a porcine heart transplant? Will your insurance plan one day include a fee for keeping you a little piggy organ factory somewhere, should it ever be needed? Will your local hospital have to build a pig pen to receive patients’ organs, still warm and safe in their original packaging?

On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine much widespread outrage over growing pigs for medical slaughter, when we already grow them for culinary slaughter. On the other hand, how eager will we be to go on consuming pork, if one of the organs involved in digesting it is made of the very same tissue?

Until we can use a person’s own adult cells to create stem cell lines from which all fully developed organs will be grown, xenotransplantation will be an important goal for the medical community.

 

[cnleio]

This thread full of the Beauty of Science ... very beautiful, thank you very much !

 

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A ‘memory foam’ approach to machine learning could reboot artificial intelligence | ExtremeTech

Many of us have been waiting for the rise of the machines ever since James Cameron’s action epic The Terminator stunned audiences with its apocalyptic visions of an Arnold-shaped artificial intelligence. The the truth is AI would need a sea change to even begin approaching the kind of crafty mechanical guile exhibited by the terminators in the movie. Though few experts have been willing to speculate about when such a singularity might occur, a recent publication titled “A ‘memory foam’ approach to unsupervised learning” suggests it could be sooner than most believe.

Great strides have been made in recent expert systems that have caused a stir in artificial intelligence of late, such as Google’s speech recognition algorithm and the Netflix recommendation system. But all of these systems are based on a model of artificial intelligence that’s unlikely to achieve the generalized intelligence humans exhibit. This is because they require large sets of training data in a labeled format. In some circumstances, this can produce results that allow the AI to far outclass its human counterparts — for instance, when provided a large database of labeled tumor CAT scans, the AI can quickly become better than humans at recognizing cancerous growths.

The trouble arises when it comes to gaining an understanding of an object or process as a whole and generalizing that knowledge across multiple domains. That kind of learning pertains to a field of AI that is still relatively undeveloped called unsupervised learning. This is the kind of learning humans excel at.


Musical note recognition in Memory Foam model

Towards the goal of creating a more robust system of unsupervised learning, a team at Loughborough University in the UK has been perfecting an artificial intelligence model based on “memory Foam.” The name hints at the nature of the model itself. Memory foam, which has become a popular component of mattresses, can take on an infinite variety of curvatures depending on the impression left on it by the person. In a similar vein, a computer employing the memory-foam approach learns to recognize stimuli by gaining an overall impression of sensory stimuli left upon it. Many believe this method more closely resembles the actual working of the human brain rather than algorithms used in supervised machine learning.

If early demonstrations are any indication, the model could represent the sea change the field of artificial intelligence has been waiting for. Like doting parents, the Loughborough team chose a nursery song as the first stimuli to expose their AI to. According to their study, the AI learned to recognize “Mary Had a little Lamb,” assimilating and remembering the musical model, likeliest frequencies, and other components of the song. This suggests the computer was able to gain a much more nuanced understanding of the song than it could have using supervised learning. But perhaps most importantly, their model could be combined with supervised learning algorithms, allowing the AI to benefit from the best of both methodologies. Such a combined approach might well lead to the kind of strong AI embodied by Arnold in The Terminator.

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New Nanowire Electrodes Make Long Lasting Brain Implants | Medgadget Medgadget

The electrodes of brain implants are seen by the body as foreign material. These electrodes over time are slowly surrounded by cellular material so that aquired signals become weaker and weaker. At Lund University in Sweden, researchers have developed a nanowire structure that seems to be interpreted as being native, and that promotes the growth of neurons on top of itself without the associated formation of glial cells that normally coat metal electrodes.

The small hairs in the image are actually nanowires. Each outgrowing thread has a diameter of 80 nanometres. The green objects climbing on the nanowires are neurons.

The structure is made out of a gallium phosphide semiconductor as the substrate with the nanowires sticking out, this pattern repeating so that the glial cells grow on the flat regions and the neurons along the nanowires. This allows the two types of cells to be nearby while staying distant enough to let the neurons have direct contact with the nanowires.

The researchers hope this technology will make brain implants stay considerably longer lasting and may also apply this technology for retinal implants in patients with damaged photoreceptors.

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AliveCor Previews Apple Watch ECG (VIDEO) | Medgadget Medgadget

This past week at the USC Body Computing Conference in Los Angeles, AliveCor founder Dr. David Albert and Dr. Leslie Saxon, a USC professor and founder of the USC Center for Body Computing, gave a brief demonstration of the first prototype 1-lead ECG for the Apple Watch. Few details were provided, as the device is not FDA cleared and still in development, but it traces your ECG across your body using two electrodes that slip onto the watch’s band: one electrode already makes contact with your wrist, and you touch the other with the fingers on your other hand to complete the circuit. The accompanying watch app also uses the microphone to record voice annotations for information such as symptoms, medication, etc. All the information is uploaded to AliveCor’s cloud system.

The release date of the Apple Watch ECG is unknown at this point, but we’ll update you with more information as we receive it!

 

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Drones autonomously build a walkable rope bridge


The researchers say this is the first time quadcopters have proven themselves capable of autonomously building load-bearing structures that can support a person (Credit: Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control and Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich)

Image Gallery (7 images)
As we learned earlier this year, researchers at ETH Zürich's institute for Dynamic Systems and Control are looking at ways in which flying construction robots can be programmed to autonomously build tensile structures. Now it appears they've taken a significant step forward. Literally. The team has demonstrated a rope bridge built by drones that can support the weight of an adult human as they walk across it.

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The ETH Zürich team is focused on leveraging the unique capabilities of drones to give rise to a new breed of architectural design. The researchers started making waves in this area in 2011, when they had drones use mathematical algorithms to translate digital design data into flight paths, neatly arranging 1,500 polystyrene bricks into a 6-meter (20-ft) tall tower. The work lies at the intersection of robotics and construction, but not construction as we have known it.

While overcoming their limited payload capacity is one factor that needs to be addressed, equally important is harnessing their agility and ability to zip in and out of hard to reach places and collaborate with one another on structures that cannot be built by a lone machine.

In this instance, a fleet of quadcopters equipped with motorized spools move autonomously between two scaffolds, laying out stretches of a light-but-strong rope made of Dyneema as they go. Dyneema is made from ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene and we've seen it used in everything from bulletproof blankets and whiteboards. The materials weighs just 7 g per meter (0.25 oz per 3.3 ft) and a rope 4 mm (0.15 in) in diameter can support 1,300 kg (2,866 lb), making it the ideal material for aerial construction.

The locations of the scaffold at either end of the bridge are measured manually prior to construction, but beyond this the quadcopters were responsible for constructing the entire structure without human intervention. This involved weaving knots, links and braids with 120 m of rope (394 ft) across nine segments for a total bridge length of 7.4 m (23 ft).

While a series of simulations were carried out before construction, a motion capture system allowed flight paths to be adjusted on-the-fly. This monitored vehicle position and, taking into account force applied to the quadcopters as the rope is deployed, computer algorithms then spat out commands and sent them to the drones over a wireless network. The researchers say this is the first time quadcopters have proven themselves capable of autonomously building load-bearing structures that can support a person.

You can see the drones work together to build their bridge to the future in the video below.

 

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Boeing to build airplanes using super-light metal which is 99.9% air - BT


Despite being as light as a feather, a new metal could make aeroplanes more fuel efficient and even help carry humans to Mars.

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  Engineers at Boeing have developed a revolutionary metal that could be used to make airplane components while being light enough to sit on top of a dandelion.
  
  Microlattice has what Boeing calls an ‘open 3D cellular structure’. It’s rigid on the outside, but with a mostly hollow cellular structure in the middle - much like human bones, which are lightweight yet strong.
  
  The material, which is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam, is 99.9% hollow as it’s made from made from a series of interconnected tubes, each 100 nanometers wide – that’s 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.
  
  Despite its light weight, the metal is exceptionally strong so can absorb energy and handle compression.
  
  Sophia Yang, research scientist at HRL Laboratories, which is working on the venture with Boeing, says microlattice could protect an egg from breaking if thrown off a 25-storey building. Check out the video below to find out more.
  
  
  
  Boeing believes microlattice could be used to make aeroplane components such as the side wall panel, overhead compartments or the floor panel.
  
  Using a lightweight material offers many advantages: “The material could help Boeing save a lot of weight, making aeroplanes more fuel efficient,” Yang said.
  
  It’s not just commercial aeroplanes that will benefit from this lightweight metal.
  
  HRL Laboratories is developing microlattice technology for use in space vehicles, as part of Nasa’s Game Changing Development Program, which looks for technologies that can be used in future space missions.
  
  The use of lightweight materials enables Nasa to reduce the mass of spacecraft by 40%. This will have a huge impact on missions according to associate administrator for Space Technology Mission Directorate, Steve Jurczyk.
  
  "These advanced technologies are necessary for us to be able to launch stronger, yet lighter, spacecraft and components as we look to explore an asteroid and eventually Mars," he said.

 

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Cure for cancer might accidentally have been found, and it could be malaria | Science | News | The Independent

Scientists might have accidentally made a huge step forward in the search for a cure for cancer — discovering unexpectedly that a malaria protein could be an effective weapon against the disease.

Danish researchers were hunting for a way of protecting pregnant women from malaria, which can cause huge problems because it attacks the placenta. But they found at the same time that armed malaria proteins can attack cancer, too — an approach which could be a step towards curing the disease.

Scientists have combined the bit of protein that the malaria vaccine uses to bury into cells and combined it with a toxin — that can then bury into cancer cells and release the toxin, killing them off.



The scientists have found that in both cases the malria protein attaches itself to the same carbohydrate. It is the similarities between those two things that the cure could exploit.

The carbohydrate ensures that the placenta grows quickly. But the team behind the new findings have detailed how it serves the same function in tumours — and the malaria parasite attaches itself to the cancerous cells in the same way, meaning that it can kill them off.

Scientists said that they had been searching for a long time for a way to exploit the similarities between the placenta and the tumour.

"For decades, scientists have been searching for similarities between the growth of a placenta and a tumor,” said Ali Salanti from University of Copenhagen. “The placenta is an organ, which within a few months grows from only few cells into an organ weighing approx. two pounds, and it provides the embryo with oxygen and nourishment in a relatively foreign environment. In a manner of speaking, tumors do much the same, they grow aggressively in a relatively foreign environment.”

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http://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/abstract/S1535-6108(15)00334-7

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Accidental discovery of quantum 'etch a sketch' amazes scientists

A new way of using light to 'etch a sketch' for quantum-mechanical circuits in a unique class of materials called topological insulators has been accidentally discovered

Chicago (University Press) – A new way of using light to draw and erase (etch a sketch) quantum-mechanical circuits in a unique class of materials called topological insulators has been accidentally discovered by a team of scientists from the University of Chicago and the Pennsylvania State University.


The study will be published on October 9, 2015 in Science Advances, the new online journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where it will be featured on the journal’s front page.

Oracle Recorder reports that the research was led by Nitin Samarth, Professor and Downsbrough Head of Physics at Penn State and David D. Awschalom, Liew Family Professor and deputy director in the Institute of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

In contrast to using advanced nanofabrication facilities based on chemical processing of materials, this flexible technique allows for rewritable ‘optical fabrication’ of devices. This finding is likely to spawn new developments in emerging technologies such as low-power electronics based on the spin of electrons or ultrafast quantum computers.

“This observation came as a complete surprise,” said David D. Awschalom, Liew Family Professor and deputy director in the Institute of Molecular Engineering at UChicago, and one of two lead researchers on the project.

“It’s one of those rare moments in experimental science where a seemingly random event — turning on the room lights — generated unexpected effects with potentially important impacts in science and technology.”


The electrons in topological insulators have unique quantum properties that many scientists believe will be useful for developing spin-based electronics and quantum computers.

Like many advances in science, the path to this discovery had an unexpected twist. “To be honest, we were trying to study something completely different,” said Andrew Yeats, a graduate student in Awschalom’s laboratory and the paper’s lead author.

Researchers report the discovery of an optical effect that allows them to “tune” the energy of electrons in these materials using light, and without ever having to touch the material itself. They have used this effect to draw and erase one of the central components of a transistor — the p-n junction — in a topological insulator for the first time.

 

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Zoll completes rollout of the sole CPR device indicated for sudden cardiac arrest - FierceMedicalDevices

Zoll has completed the rollout of its ResQCPR System to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on cardiac arrest patients. Seven months after the ResQCPR's FDA approval, it is now available nationwide, Zoll announced.
It is the first and only CPR device approved by the FDA to improve the chances of surviving cardiac arrest among adults experiencing nontraumatic sudden cardiac arrest, the company said in a release. Zoll and others sell automatic external defibrillators for sudden cardiac arrest, but that class of devices doesn't perform CPR.

A clinical trial showed that the ResQCPR improved one-year survival rates from out-of-hospital nontraumatic cardiac arrest by 49% over conventional CPR.

"The ResQCPR System provides intrathoracic pressure regulation (IPR) therapy, which non-invasively improves circulation to vital organs without the use of pharmaceutical or other agents during CPR by enhancing the negative pressure or vacuum in the chest," said Keith Lurie, MD, Chief Medical Officer of ZOLL Minneapolis and inventor of the ResQCPR System. "If implemented widely in the United States, the ResQCPR System could save thousands of additional lives from cardiac arrest every year."

According to a release, early adopters of the device included the municipalities of Memphis, TN, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Cleveland and Chesapeake, VA. Zoll hopes other localities adopt the device, which is now available nationwide.

The ResQCPR is expected to improve upon manual CPR and consists of two devices: the ResQPump Active Compression Decompression CPR Device, which has a handle that attaches to the patient's chest with a suction cup and has pressure gauge to assess compression depth and timing, and the ResQPod 16.0 Impedance Threshold Device, which fits onto a rescue face mask or breathing tube. The latter impedes airflow during chest compression in order to reduce chest compression and bring blood back to the heart.

The device was inspired by a toilet plunger. Inventor Dr. Keith Lurie in 1985 encountered a son who used the (nonmedical) device upon his father when manual CPR proved ineffective. "It occurred to me that not only did the plunger serve as an effective chest compressor, but the suction between the chest wall and the plunger generated significant negative pressure to enhance blood flow back to the heart," Lurie said in a statement. He is Zoll's chief medical officer.

The ResQCPR was developed by Advanced Circulatory Systems. Zoll acquired the company in January, a few months before the device's FDA approval.

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Using Augmented Reality to Guide Surgeries at a Distance > ENGINEERING.com

Researchers and engineers at Purdue University and the Indiana University School of Medicine are developing an “augmented reality telementoring” system to connect surgeons with specialists across the world.

Telementoring is already used to allow experts to guide surgeons remotely using telestrators, much like what you see when watching football commentary. Annotations are laid over video of a surgery, but this can potentially divert the doctor’s attention away from the patient.

The new System for Telementoring with Augmented Reality (STAR) uses modern technology like transparent displays and sensors to improve the quality of communication between surgeons and specialists.

The STAR system uses a tablet positioned between the surgeon and their patient, held in place with a robotic arm or surgical assistant. A video stream of the operation is sent to the expert who, with a pad of their own, can create annotations and communicate verbally through the device.

“The surgeon sees the operating field, the instruments and their hands as if the display were not there, yet the operating field is enhanced with the mentor’s graphical annotations,” states Juan Wachs, professor of industrial engineering at Purdue.

However, there is still plenty of room for error with this type of system. With all the motions involved in a surgery, doctors can easily lose track of annotation.

In response, the STAR system uses computer vision algorithms to keep annotations aligned. This is done by “anchoring” annotations so they remain in the same location relative to the patient no matter how the camera moves.

Voicu S. Popescu, professor of computer science at Purdue, points out that other limitations are still in the process of being solved.

A researcher tests the system using a manikin-like "synthetic patient simulator." (Purdue University image/ ISAT Lab)
“The video acquired by the tablet will be warped to the view of the surgeon, which will require acquiring the operating field with a depth camera similar to the Kinect camera, and will require tracking the surgeon’s head,” said Popescu.

Furthermore, because the surgeon’s hands are between the camera and the surgical field, they sometimes obstruct the specialist’s view. An algorithm may be able to detect the surgeon’s hands and render them semi-transparent for easier viewing.

Further research will also focus on improving the robustness of annotation anchoring with surgical field changes, the anchoring frame rate and the transparent display simulation fidelity.

So far, researchers have tested the system using commercially available tablets, robots and even Google Glass, while performing common operating room procedures on animals and synthetic patient simulators.

“The study provides preliminary indication that the system allows trainees to follow some mentor instructions more accurately than existing telementoring systems,” Wachs said. “Data suggests the system can provide meaningful improvements to the accuracy of surgical tasks.”

With this technology, experts could bring their skills to isolated rural and field hospitals or military front lines where specialists might not be available.

The researcher’s findings are detailed in an online paper appearing in The Visual Computer and will see print in the near future.

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Uber's Insanely Huge Vision of On-Demand Everything | Inc.com

To appreciate the scope of Uber's ambition, consider the name of the unit that spawned the company's newest service: Uber Everything.

The service, called UberRush, officially made its debut in New York, San Francisco and Chicago Wednesday. For a fee of about $5 to $7, bicycle couriers and drivers will shuttle food and other small packages around the city. The offering is marketed not directly to consumers like the ones that use its ride-hailing app, but rather to restaurants, retailers, and other businesses, including launch partner Delivery.com and a burrito chain called Blockheads. The tagline: "With UberRush, your packages travel like a VIP."

In the scheme of Uber, it seems like kind of a minor deal. "I don't understand why Uber is bothering with this business," tweeted New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo. While the heavily-regulated, capital-intensive taxi industry made an obvious target, bike-messenger-based delivery is not considered an extremely lucrative business to begin with, nor one exactly budding with inefficiencies ready to pluck away. Competition abounds: Any number of well-funded startups have food delivery covered, and one of them, Postmates, is making serious inroads in retail as well. Amazon and Google, meanwhile, are doing battle to create the delivery network for all e-commerce.

Going head-to-head with some of the world's biggest tech companies over 25 percent of a $4 burrito delivery sounds like insanity. It's exactly because Uber's ambition is so big, though, that it deems no opportunity too small. Just look what happened in its core business. Uber started out offering only black-car rides, for which it could charge a premium. Then it tweaked its model slightly and allowed a customer to hail not just a black sedan, but also, well, some underemployed guy's Prius--you know, its low-cost UberX ride service. Single-passenger rides gave way to UberPool, its even lower-cost carpooling option, which now accounts for a majority of rides in mature markets.

In other words, Uber has--excuse the phrase--disrupted itself. Making a profit on transactions in the near term is less important than building out the world's most efficient logistics network--meaning the most extensive one. Uber chief Travis Kalanick recently told Marc Benioff he looks forward to a day when every car in the world is an Uber.

To Kalanick, bicycles and Priuses and Town Cars may all be just nodes, but delivery and personal transportation are very different businesses. Uber is still on the steep part of the learning curve when it comes to the former. The Wall Street Journal noted that UberRush already lost a few deals with businesses to Postmates, which charges less per delivery--as little as $2.50. Most notably, Starbucks partnered with Postmates. Some fashion retailers who experimented with delivery via Uber reported having bad experiences. Deliv, another delivery startup, is already working with Macy's and Kohl's to power same-day deliveries.

In an interview with ReCode, Uber Everything head Jason Droege said the success of UberRush will be judged on traditional metrics of financial performance: "It's no longer an experiment...it's a business for us. When it's a business, you're worried about profit and loss."

That differentiates it from the whimsical test-runs the company always seems to be running, for "products" like Uber Ice Cream , Uber Kittens, and something we'll call "Uber Portlandia," or Uber artisanal-cocktails-via-an-old-timey-rickshaw. At Uber, these customization ideas are left to local Uber employees to dream up, and local general managers to approve, so they are still a little bit anything-goes. On-demand kitten cuddling probably isn't a big part of Uber's future--but if Kalanick could find a way to make the logistics of kitten-cuddling more efficient, he'd probably go all-in on that, too.

Uber Everything isn't just a name, it's a strategy. And maybe it's just the start.

 

[indiatester]

@Hamartia Antidote Can you please post each article individually instead of them clubbed together. Helps in reading.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

New Type of Shot Might Be Able to Stop Internal Bleeding

Researchers say a new mix of particles shows promise in producing blood clots that would halt internal bleeding.

The number of bleeding-related deaths is enormous, says Christian Kastrup.

Kastrup and his colleagues want to do something about it.

Current treatments don’t often work, due to their inability to penetrate deep wounds and stanch the bleeding from damaged blood vessels.

That happens because the rapid flow of blood pushes most drugs out of the wound, explained Kastrup, Ph.D. and assistant professor at Michael Smith Laboratories and the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Kastrup and his team conducted experiments to see if self-propelled particles could overcome this flow.

They found a combination of reagents, a calcium carbonate and an organic acid that resembles fizzing antacid tablets, that could both move through flowing blood and deliver cargo.

In this case, the package was thrombin and tranexamic acid, drugs that help blood clots form — the type that can coagulate blood deep in wounds.

These compounds could be delivered in something as easy as a shot.

A Different Kind of Particle
Many types of self-propelling particles have been previously developed, but they usually don't react by simply being put into blood.

The particles, loaded with the coagulant enzyme thrombin, were placed onto bleeding wounds by Kastrup’s team.

The particles worked, Kastrup told Healthline, by transporting the coagulant throughout the wound and into the nearby blood vessels, clotting the blood at the damaged vasculature.

However, Dr. Marc Leavey is somewhat dubious.

“I'm having trouble envisioning the mechanism described. How do the particles direct the CO2 in the right direction to move directly to the site in question, navigate branching vessels, [and] avoid being engulfed by macrophages?” Leavey, an internist at Mercy Medical Center in Maryland, told Healthline.

Macrophages engulf and digest debris such as dead cells and foreign particles.

"We're continuing to evaluate the risk of particles leading to unwanted blood clotting, but haven't observed this so far," answered Kastrup.

Is This Really Science Fiction?
Whatever the case, Leavey said the concept reminds him of the “nanoparticles” that were part of the “Star Trek” universe.

“Those little devices could carry medications or effect repair, deep within the body,” said Leavey. “Thirty or 40 years ago, many of the medications and interventional techniques we routinely use today would have seemed to be science fiction."

From imaging techniques to laparoscopic surgery to genetic therapy, these common procedures were not believable then.

“To suspend my disbelief now, and suppose that these particles could work as described, their possibilities only add to the excitement of medicine in the 21st century,” Leavey continued.

There have been other gas-powered medication delivery systems — some patented years ago — “so the basic concept proposed in this release may have some history,” he noted.

Is the Treatment Near?
Kastrup said due to the simplicity of the components in the particles, he and his colleagues believe they can be developed further and used by humans within two to three years.

The team has a bit of a head start in that the components of the particles have been used in therapies. That makes it easier to translate these findings toward application in the clinic, Kastrup said.

A two- to three-year implementation horizon sounds a bit ambitious to Leavey.

“(Given) my ignorance of the precise mechanism, anticipated testing, and evaluation, not to mention regulatory considerations, should this product gain approval and acceptance, potential applications may, indeed, be far-reaching,” he said.

“Again, allowing my mind to wander, stopping bleeding on the battlefield or [at a] street corner accident would be a huge advance,” Leavey added. “But beyond that, if these particles could, in fact, carry some active moiety or part of a molecule, one could conceive of chemotherapy, antibiotics, or other locally active medications being sent directly to the site of action. If it can be done in three years or 30 years, it would be a significant advance in medical care."

That would include people experiencing severe bleeding following childbirth, sinus bleeding, GI bleeds, or traumatic wounds untreatable with manual compression, noted Kastrup.

“In these cases, the particles themselves can do much of the work by transporting through the blood and wound and reaching the source of blood loss,” he said.

Added Leavey: “The question is understanding the proposed mechanism and purpose. Does it have a future? I have to wait and see with cautious curiosity.”

 

[Transhumanist]

This Spherical Robot Can Unfurl Its Four Legs After Being Tossed

Researchers in Japan have developed a remarkable new robot that bears a startling resemblance to the Droideka of Star Wars. Called QRoSS, this throwable, sphere-shaped robot can move around either by rolling or walking on all fours. Mercifully, it’s not capable of firing lasers or engaging force fields...at least not yet.

This robot was developed by Takeshi Aoki, Satoshi Ito, and Yosuke Sei from the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan. The team recently showed off their droid at the IROS 2015 conference in Germany, and they’ve got an accompanying paper that describes its features in detail.

The outer body of QRoSS consists of a durable, spherical shell. Hidden inside are four legs that can unfurl and provide for quadrupedal locomotion. For more straightforward maneuvers, QRoSS can just roll around.

QRoSS is similar to MorpHex MKII, a spherical robot that can retract its six legs and transform into a rolling ball.

But unlike MorpHex, QRoSS can be tossed around, a feature that could prove useful in any number of contexts, including emergency work in dangerous locations. Writing in IEEE Spectrum, Evan Ackerman explains:

As far as real robots go, the primary difference between QRoSS and MorpHex is that QRoSS uses a walking system that’s completely independent from the outer shell. The big advantage of this is that the shell acts as a passive shock absorber, allowing the robot to the rolled (or, hypothetically, thrown) without damaging it. In a disaster area, for example, a human could chuck the robot like a baseball into a dangerous area from a safe one, and after bouncing a few times, QRoSS simply sprouts legs and starts walking around. Legs are excellent at dealing with very rough terrain, and the design of QRoSS allows you to use legs when necessary without having to always worry about how fragile they are, since any slip and fall just turns into a bouncy roll.

The latest version of QRoSS weighs about 5.5 pounds (2.5 kg), and it measures 11.8 inches (30 cm) in diameter, so it’s not optimized for throwing. That said, the design appears to be scalable, which may eventually allow for both smaller and larger versions.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Researchers use engineered viruses to provide quantum-based enhancement of energy transport


Rendering of a virus used in the MIT experiments. The light-collecting centers, called chromophores, are in red, and chromophores that just absorbed a photon of light are glowing white. After the virus is modified to adjust the spacing between the chromophores, energy can jump from one set of chromophores to the next faster and more efficiently. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers and Lauren Alexa Kaye
Nature has had billions of years to perfect photosynthesis, which directly or indirectly supports virtually all life on Earth. In that time, the process has achieved almost 100 percent efficiency in transporting the energy of sunlight from receptors to reaction centers where it can be harnessed—a performance vastly better than even the best solar cells.


One way plants achieve this efficiency is by making use of the exotic effects of quantum mechanics—effects sometimes known as "quantum weirdness." These effects, which include the ability of a particle to exist in more than one place at a time, have now been used by engineers at MIT to achieve a significant efficiency boost in a light-harvesting system.

Surprisingly, the MIT researchers achieved this new approach to solar energy not with high-tech materials or microchips—but by using genetically engineered viruses.

This achievement in coupling quantum research and genetic manipulation, described this week in the journal Nature Materials, was the work of MIT professors Angela Belcher, an expert on engineering viruses to carry out energy-related tasks, and Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum theory and its potential applications; research associate Heechul Park; and 14 collaborators at MIT and in Italy.

Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering, explains that in photosynthesis, a photon hits a receptor called a chromophore, which in turn produces an exciton—a quantum particle of energy. This exciton jumps from one chromophore to another until it reaches a reaction center, where that energy is harnessed to build the molecules that support life.

But the hopping pathway is random and inefficient unless it takes advantage of quantum effects that allow it, in effect, to take multiple pathways at once and select the best ones, behaving more like a wave than a particle.

This efficient movement of excitons has one key requirement: The chromophores have to be arranged just right, with exactly the right amount of space between them. This, Lloyd explains, is known as the "Quantum Goldilocks Effect."

That's where the virus comes in. By engineering a virus that Belcher has worked with for years, the team was able to get it to bond with multiple synthetic chromophores—or, in this case, organic dyes. The researchers were then able to produce many varieties of the virus, with slightly different spacings between those synthetic chromophores, and select the ones that performed best.


In the end, they were able to more than double excitons' speed, increasing the distance they traveled before dissipating—a significant improvement in the efficiency of the process.

The project started from a chance meeting at a conference in Italy. Lloyd and Belcher, a professor of biological engineering, were reporting on different projects they had worked on, and began discussing the possibility of a project encompassing their very different expertise. Lloyd, whose work is mostly theoretical, pointed out that the viruses Belcher works with have the right length scales to potentially support quantum effects.

In 2008, Lloyd had published a paper demonstrating that photosynthetic organisms transmit light energy efficiently because of these quantum effects. When he saw Belcher's report on her work with engineered viruses, he wondered if that might provide a way to artificially induce a similar effect, in an effort to approach nature's efficiency.

"I had been talking about potential systems you could use to demonstrate this effect, and Angela said, 'We're already making those,'" Lloyd recalls. Eventually, after much analysis, "We came up with design principles to redesign how the virus is capturing light, and get it to this quantum regime."

Within two weeks, Belcher's team had created their first test version of the engineered virus. Many months of work then went into perfecting the receptors and the spacings.

Once the team engineered the viruses, they were able to use laser spectroscopy and dynamical modeling to watch the light-harvesting process in action, and to demonstrate that the new viruses were indeed making use of quantum coherence to enhance the transport of excitons.

"It was really fun," Belcher says. "A group of us who spoke different [scientific] languages worked closely together, to both make this class of organisms, and analyze the data. That's why I'm so excited by this."

While this initial result is essentially a proof of concept rather than a practical system, it points the way toward an approach that could lead to inexpensive and efficient solar cells or light-driven catalysis, the team says. So far, the engineered viruses collect and transport energy from incoming light, but do not yet harness it to produce power (as in solar cells) or molecules (as in photosynthesis). But this could be done by adding a reaction center, where such processing takes place, to the end of the virus where the excitons end up.

"This is exciting and high-quality research," says Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University who was not involved in this work. The research, he says, "combines the work of a leader in theory (Lloyd) and a leader in experiment (Belcher) in a truly multidisciplinary and exciting combination that spans biology to physics to potentially, future technology."

"Access to controllable excitonic systems is a goal shared by many researchers in the field," Aspuru-Guzik adds. "This work provides fundamental understanding that can allow for the development of devices with an increased control of exciton flow."

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Microsoft lab predicts a working quantum computer within 10 years | The Verge

The quantum speedup may be closer than we think. According to a new paper lead-authored by researchers at Microsoft's quantum lab, a working quantum device could arrive within the next 10 years. "Recent improvements in control of quantum systems make it seem feasible to finally build a quantum computer within a decade," reads the abstract, published this week in Arxiv. The paper goes on to detail how a combination of quantum algorithms and conventional computing could be employed to analyze electronic structures too large and complex for conventional computing alone.

The paper is particularly notable since some of the researchers have been skeptical of existing quantum architectures like those currently offered by D-Wave at Google's Quantum Lab. Two of the authors of this week's paper also contributed to a paper published last June that studied the D-Wave 2 and found no evidence of a computing advantage over conventional mainframe architectures, although D-Wave has since disputed those conclusions.

But the new paper suggests that quantum computing can still yield benefits in its current, imperfect form. Pairing with conventional architecture could solve many of the problems holding back current quantum computers. Making quantum architecture has become something of an arms race among tech companies, with Microsoft funding significant research through its Station Q group, and Google participating in an AI Lab venture with NASA and D-Wave, as well as a separate team drawn from UC Santa Barbara. Earlier this year, the AI Lab installed one of the first D-Wave 2X computers, which chains together more than 1000 qubits and operates at just 15 millikelvin above absolute zero

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Forgot to write up about "Back to the Future" day.