Research ⯀  

Growing a business is a fundamental part of a business. With business, there’s never optimality. There will always arise different factors such as new market trends, emerging markets and a new variety of products that consumers are interested in that will need your business to improve or run out of the market.

Graphene  

Researchers have developed a laser-treatment process that allows them to use printed graphene for electric circuits and electrodes -- even on paper and other fragile surfaces. The technology could lead to many real-world, low-cost applications for printed graphene electronics, including sensors, fuel cells and medical devices.

Researchers at Iowa State University have been looking for ways to use graphene and its amazing properties in their sensors and other technologies. Now, in research published in the journal Nanoscale, they have demonstrated a laser-treatment process that allows them to use printed graphene for electric circuits and electrodes.

Graphene is great at conducting electricity and heat; it’s strong and stable. But researchers have struggled to move beyond tiny lab samples for studying its material properties to larger pieces for real-world applications.

Recent projects that used inkjet printers to print multi-layer graphene circuits and electrodes had the engineers thinking about using it for flexible, wearable and low-cost electronics. For example, “Could we make graphene at scales large enough for glucose sensors?” asked Suprem Das, an Iowa State postdoctoral research associate in mechanical engineering and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory.

But there were problems with the existing technology. Once printed, the graphene had to be treated to improve electrical conductivity and device performance. That usually meant high temperatures or chemicals – both could degrade flexible or disposable printing surfaces such as plastic films or even paper.

Das and Jonathan Claussen came up with the idea of using lasers to treat the graphene. Claussen, an Iowa State assistant professor of mechanical engineering and an Ames Laboratory associate, worked with Gary Cheng, an associate professor at Purdue University’s School of Industrial Engineering, to develop and test the idea.

The idea worked: They found treating inkjet-printed, multi-layer graphene electric circuits and electrodes with a pulsed-laser process improves electrical conductivity without damaging paper, polymers or other fragile printing surfaces.

Related articles

•  Research Leads to the 3D Printing of Pure Graphene Nanostructures
• Nanoshaping Technique Points to Future Manufacturing Method 
• Researchers Produce Magnetic Graphene 

“This creates a way to commercialize and scale-up the manufacturing of graphene,” Claussen said.

The findings are featured on the front cover of the journal Nanoscale’s issue 35. Claussen and Cheng are lead authors and Das is first author. Additional Iowa State co-authors are Allison Cargill, John Hondred and Shaowei Ding, graduate students in mechanical engineering. Additional Purdue co-authors are Qiong Nian and Mojib Saei, graduate students in industrial engineering.

"This creates a way to commercialize and scale-up the manufacturing of graphene."

Two major grants are supporting the project and related research: a three-year grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under award number 11901762 and a three-year grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust. Iowa State’s College of Engineering and department of mechanical engineering are also supporting the research.

The Iowa State Research Foundation Inc. has filed for a patent on the technology.

“The breakthrough of this project is transforming the inkjet-printed graphene into a conductive material capable of being used in new applications,” Claussen said.

Those applications could include sensors with biological applications, energy storage systems, electrical conducting components and even paper-based electronics.

To make all that possible, the engineers developed computer-controlled laser technology that selectively irradiates inkjet-printed graphene oxide. The treatment removes ink binders and reduces graphene oxide to graphene – physically stitching together millions of tiny graphene flakes. The process makes electrical conductivity more than a thousand times better.

“The laser works with a rapid pulse of high-energy photons that do not destroy the graphene or the substrate,” Das said. “They heat locally. They bombard locally. They process locally.”

That localized, laser processing also changes the shape and structure of the printed graphene from a flat surface to one with raised, 3D nanostructures. The engineers say the 3D structures are like tiny petals rising from the surface. The rough and ridged structure increases the electrochemical reactivity of the graphene, making it useful for chemical and biological sensors.

All of that, according to Claussen’s team of nanoengineers, could move graphene to commercial applications.

“This work paves the way for not only paper-based electronics with graphene circuits,” the researchers wrote in their paper, “it enables the creation of low-cost and disposable graphene-based electrochemical electrodes for myriad applications including sensors, biosensors, fuel cells and (medical) devices.”

SOURCE  Iowa State University

By 33rd Square

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 Economics  

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects occupations in the field of engineering and architecture are expected to add approximately 252, 800 jobs by 2020. This represents a 10 percent growth rate.

According to the US, Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in the country will go up by an estimated 20.5 million jobs between 2010 and 2020. The handbook states that jobs that require applicants to have a Master's degree will grow the fastest.

Also, according to the handbook, occupations in the field of engineering and architecture are expected to add approximately 252, 800 jobs. This represents a 10 percent growth rate. Most of the growth in these two sectors will be a result of the economy recovering from the recession that lead to a loss of 149,800 in these fields between 2006 and 2010.

Engineer Guide USA shares the same positive outlook for growth in openings for engineers. The organization projects that opportunities for engineers will increase about as fast as the average growth for other occupations in the next decade. However, growth will differ in the various branches of engineering. Both the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Engineering Guide USA concur that civil engineers will see the greatest growth in job opportunities.

Image Source - US Bureau of Labor Statistics

Another projection of Engineering Guide USA is that most of the opportunities in engineering will move from the traditional jobs related to slow growing manufacturing industries where the jobs involve designing, building, testing and improving manufactured products.

Related articles Jobs Outlook For Nanotechnology Looks Bright  Robin Hanson Envisions a Future Robot Society  New Study Points To Dramatic Technological Unemployment in Next 20 Years

More Research and Consulting Jobs

A lot more opportunities will open up in jobs related to research and development and consultancy. This will be in response to competition and technological developments that will pressure companies into better their product designs and performance. The research isn’t limited though. More and more people in other engineering professions are able to contribute to research. Howard Blair, Ph.D., for example, is an associate professor for the computer engineering program at Syracuse University, and concentrates his research mostly on the topics of Quantum Computing, Logic in Computer Science and Computational Topology, among others.

There will be a heavier reliance on engineers to optimize productivity and output of goods and services. They will be called upon to achieve this by coming up with new technological advancements that will improve the design process. They'll also be expected to better performance monitoring so that delays that would slow down the production process or reduced quality are anticipated and evaded.

Trends in the Different Specializations of Engineering

The job growth outlook for different branches of engineering is positive. Civil engineering has the most promising outlook. There is expected to be 51,100 openings by 2020. This is related to the aging infrastructure that will require that attention is paid to design and to implement new water systems, road and rail transport networks and pollution control systems.

Long Term Engagement

Another factor that makes prospects for engineers in the present and near future good is that engineers are typically engaged in long-term research or field jobs. They, therefore, enjoy good job security thanks to the specialized and involving nature of their work that makes it impossible for them to be retrenched or let go. Slow-downs are, therefore, not a very serious threat as compared to other fields.

Higher Education, More Opportunities 

While engineers may have good job prospects, there is always competition for the jobs available. The starting point for employers is academic qualifications. A few years in the field will provide valuable experience. Anyone wishing to climb the ladder to better positions and better pay has to better their chances with higher qualifications. The engineers at the top calling the shots are those with masters and doctoral degrees.

By Dee Fletcher

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 Apple

Since last year, Apple has dramatically spent more on research and development.  Speculation is that they are moving to start producing their own chips as CEO Tim Cook pushes for integration across the company's value chain.

Last year in their financial quarter ending June 2011, Apple spent less than $1 billion on property, plants, and equipment. By March 2012, the number had spiked beyond $2 billion, beyond $3 billion, and approached $4 billion.

Horace Dediu thinks that number will zoom past $4 billion in 2013.  According to him this represents an "extraordinary evidence of an extraordinary shift in strategy."  Apple is now spending along the lines of Samsung for research.

According tot the Business Insider, the interesting part about all this massive spending is that no one outside of Apple knows where it's going.

"The capital is being deployed almost silently and, though vast in scale, barely gets a mention from analysts," writes Dediu. "Not even a single question has been raised at any earnings call about this spending."

His theory is that Apple, which prefers an "integrated" approach in everything it does, will soon make more of the components inside its gadgets, like chips.  This falls in line with the company's CEO, Tim Cook.

That would explain why Apple has been so busy hiring former Texas Instruments employees, for example.

To be honest, Apple is a very secretive company and it doesn't have to say, specifically, where it's spending that money. However, everyone is well aware that Apple is always working on products that would cannibalize its current lineup.

According to Dediu the pattern represents "increasing commitment and engagement in parts of the value chain as part of a continuous evolution of Apple’s role. Furthermore, it’s something that should be seen as a signal of a new era in how technology companies operate. We see hints of “vertical integration” with Microsoft building hardware, and Google buying Motorola and Amazon selling devices. Apple did all these things and now it casts an eye over the next frontier: components."




SOURCE  Business Insider Top Chart - ASYMCO

By 33rd Square

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Duke University engineers have demonstrated for the first time that they can alter the texture of plastics on demand, for example, switching back and forth between a rough surface and a smooth one.

By applying specific voltages, the team has also shown that it can achieve this control over large and curved surface areas.

"By changing the voltage applied to the polymer, we can alter the surface from bumpy to smooth and back again," said Xuanhe Zhao, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. "There are many instances, for example, when you'd want to be able to change at will a surface from one that is rough to slippery and back again."

Scientists have long been able to create different patterns or textures on plastics through a process known as electrostatic lithography, in which patterns are "etched" onto a surface from an electrode located above the polymer. However, once the patterns have been created by this method, they are set permanently.

"We invented a method which is capable of dynamically generating a rich variety of patterns with various shapes and sizes on large areas of soft plastics or polymers," Zhao said. The results were published online in the journal Advanced Materials.

"This new approach can dynamically switch polymer surfaces among various patterns ranging from dots, segments, lines to circles," said Qiming Wang, a student in Zhao's laboratory and the first author of the paper. "The switching is also very fast, within milliseconds, and the pattern sizes can be tuned from millimeter to sub-micrometer."

The findings follow Zhao's earlier studies, which for the first time captured on videotape how polymers react to changing voltages. Those experiments showed that as the voltage increases, polymers tend to start creasing, finally leading to large craters. This explained in physical terms, for example, why polymers used to insulate electric wires tend to fail over time. The new lithography strategy takes useful insights from this failure mechanism.

On a more fanciful note, Zhao described the possibility of creating rubber gloves whose fingerprints could be changed on demand.

"The changeable patterns we have created in the laboratory include circles and straight and curved lines, which are basic elements of fingerprints," Zhao said. "These elements can be dynamically patterned and changed on a glove surface that covers fingertips.

"A spy's glove may be cool, but probably not for everyone," Zhao said. "However, the same technology can produce gloves with on-demand textures and smoothness tuned for various applications, such as climbing and gripping. Furthermore, surfaces capable of dynamically changing patterns are also useful for many technologies, such as microfluidics and camouflage."

Other potential usages of the new method include creating surfaces that are self-cleaning and water-repellant, or even as platforms for controlled-release drug-eluting devices.




Duke University 

Scientists at IBM Research have achieved major advances in quantum computing device performance that they say may accelerate the realization of a practical, full-scale quantum computer, with quantum states lasting up to 100 microseconds — a 2 to 4 times improvement over previous results. Thes major advances in device performance that may accelerate the realization of a practical, full-scale quantum computer. For specific applications, quantum computing, which exploits the underlying quantum mechanical behavior of matter, has the potential to deliver computational power that is unrivaled by any supercomputer today.

The scientists have established three new records for reducing errors in elementary computations and retaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits (qubits) — the basic units that carry information within quantum computing.

IBM has employed superconducting qubits, which use established microfabrication techniques developed for silicon technology, providing the potential to one day scale up to and manufacture thousands or millions of qubits.

IBM researchers will be presenting their latest results at the annual American Physical Society meeting taking place February 27-March 2, 2012 in Boston.
The Possibilities of Quantum Computing

The special properties of qubits will allow quantum computers to work on millions of computations at once, while desktop PCs can typically handle minimal simultaneous computations. For example, a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe.

These properties will have widespread implications foremost for the field of data encryption where quantum computers could factor very large numbers like those used to decode and encode sensitive information. Other potential applications for quantum computing may include searching databases of unstructured information, performing a range of optimization tasks and solving previously unsolvable mathematical problems.

Quantum states up to 100 microseconds

One of the great challenges for scientists seeking to harness the power of quantum computing is controlling or removing quantum decoherence — the creation of errors in calculations caused by interference from factors such as heat, electromagnetic radiation, and materials defects. To deal with this problem, scientists have been experimenting for years to discover ways of reducing the number of errors and of lengthening the time periods over which the qubits retain their quantum mechanical properties. When this time is sufficiently long, error correction schemes become effective making it possible to perform long and complex calculations.

IBM has recently been experimenting with a unique “three dimensional” superconducting qubit (3D qubit), an approach that was initiated at Yale University. Among the results, the IBM team has used a 3D qubit to extend the amount of time that the qubits retain their quantum states up to 100 microseconds — a 2 to 4 times improvement over previously reported records. This value reaches just past the minimum threshold to enable effective error correction schemes and suggests that scientists can begin to focus on broader engineering aspects for scalability.

In separate experiments, the group at IBM also demonstrated a more traditional “two-dimensional” qubit (2D qubit) device and implemented a two-qubit logic operation — a controlled-NOT (CNOT) operation, which is a fundamental building block of a larger quantum computing system. Their operation showed a 95 percent success rate, enabled in part due to the long coherence time of nearly 10 microseconds. These numbers are on the cusp of effective error correction schemes and greatly facilitate future multi-qubit experiments.

Quantum computing progress

“The superconducting qubit research led by the IBM team has been progressing in a very focused way on the road to a reliable, scalable quantum computer. The device performance that they have now reported brings them nearly to the tipping point; we can now see the building blocks that will be used to prove that error correction can be effective, and that reliable logical qubits can be realized,” observes David DiVincenzo, professor at the Institute of Quantum Information, Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Juelich.

Based on this progress, optimism about superconducting qubits and the possibilities for a future quantum computer are rapidly growing. While most of the work in the field to date has focused on improvements in device performance, efforts in the community now must now include systems integration aspects, such as assessing the classical information processing demands for error correction, I/O issues, feasibility, and costs with scaling.

IBM envisions a practical quantum computing system as including a classical system intimately connected to the quantum computing hardware. Expertise in communications and packaging technology will be essential at and beyond the level presently practiced in the development of today’s most sophisticated digital computers.

IBM Press Release

Join critically-acclaimed author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and world-renowned theoretical physicist and author Lawrence Krauss as they discuss biology, cosmology, religion, and a host of other topics.

The authors will also discuss their new books. Dawkins recently published The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True, an exploration of the magic of discovery embodied in the practice of science. Written for all age groups, the book moves forward from historical examples of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena to focus on the actual science behind how the world works.

Krauss's latest book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, explains the scientific advances that provide insight into how the universe formed. Krauss tackles the age-old assumption that something cannot arise from nothing by arguing that not only can something arise from nothing, but something will always arise from nothing.

Also, in case you missed it, here is Richard Dawkins uncut interview and laboratory tour with Craig J. Venter for "The Genius of Charles Darwin", the Channel 4 UK TV program which won British Broadcasting Awards' "Best Documentary Series" of 2008. Craig Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research and has been credited with being instrumental in mapping the human genome. His team published the first complete genome of an individual human - Venter's own DNA sequence.

Fire in a combat vehicle, aboard a ship or other confined space such as an airplane cockpit puts warfighters at risk. Today’s fire suppression technologies are many decades old and focus largely on disrupting the chemical reactions involved in combustion by spraying water, foams or other chemicals on the flames. The key to transformative firefighting approaches may lie in the fundamentals of fire itself.

While water primarily cools a flame, carbon dioxide suffocates it by diluting the surrounding oxygen. Chemical suppressants such as halons work to disrupt the combustion process. These technologies suffer from limitations such as collateral damage to valuable property, environmental toxicity and limited effectiveness in different types of fire. All existing suppressants are composed of matter and must be physically delivered and dispersed throughout the fire. This limits the rate at which fires can be extinguished and the ability to combat fires in confined spaces or behind obstacles.

According to Matthew Goodman, DARPA program manager, “we successfully suppressed small flames and limited re-ignition of those flames, as well as exhibited the ability to bend flames. These effects, to date are very local—scaling is a challenge that remains to be overcome.”

DARPA's Instant Fire Suppression (IFS) program, which ended recently, sought to establish the feasibility of a novel flame-suppression system based on destabilization of flame plasma with electromagnetic fields and acoustics techniques. The DARPA research team at Harvard University has demonstrated suppression of small methane and related fuel fires by using a hand-held electrode, or wand.

“We’ve made scientific breakthroughs in our understanding and quantification of the interaction between electromagnetic and acoustic waves with flame plasma,” said Goodman. “Our goal was to advance understanding of this interaction and its applicability to flame plasma for suppressing flames.”


DARPA's Instant Fire Suppression (IFS) program, which ended recently, sought to establish the feasibility of a novel flame-suppression system based on destabilization of flame plasma with electromagnetic fields and acoustics techniques. The DARPA research team at Harvard University has demonstrated suppression of small methane and related fuel fires by using a hand-held electrode, or wand.

DARPA

In article for the Irish Times, writer Paul O'Donohue recounts the acts of Charles Whitman, who in 1966 infamously climbed tothe top the bell tower at University of Austin and began shooting people.  All told he killed 15 people in 1966 before being killed by police.

In a suicide note he requested an autopsy. He was convinced that something was wrong with his brain as he had been experiencing overwhelming violent impulses which he struggled to control. He had gone to a doctor, but did not return. The autopsy revealed a brain tumour that affected his hypothalamus and amygdala, a part of the brain involved in the regulation of emotion and in particular the regulation of fear and aggression.

Rapid developments in neuroscience raise many complex questions that need to be considered regarding its many potential uses in the future. One tool to begin this process is provided by the British Royal Society in the form of a number of online modules under the overall title Brain Waves. The aim of the Brain Waves project is “to explore what neuroscience can offer, what are its limitations and what are the potential benefits and the risks posed by its applications”.

The first report, published in January 2011, is entitled Neuroscience, Society and Policy and focuses on the development of neuroscience and the technology through which it operates. It examines such areas as neuroimaging, neuropharmacology (brain – drug interactions), understanding conscious and unconscious decision-making and brain interfaces with external devices and prostheses such as games and artificial limbs. It also examines governance issues.

Module two, published in February last, is entitled Neuroscience: implications for education and lifelong learning. This module emphasises the fact that the brain remains plastic to varying degrees throughout the life-span and reinforces the ideas that “neurons that fire together, wire together” and that we must “use it or lose it” when it comes to gaining and retaining skills. Education, in the light of data from neuroscience, can contribute significantly to our cognitive abilities, resilience in the face of stress and our overall quality of life.

Module three, Neuroscience, Conflict and Security will be published soon and address concerns over the development of chemical and biological agents for weapons usage, incorporating data from neuropharmacology to target the nervous system.

Module four is titled Neuroscience and the Law and examines a number of the issues considered by David Eagleman, and a range of other topics including the age of consent and the use of neuroscience in the court.

Although many of the developments in neuroscience are yet to come and in particular the practical applications, it is time to begin to inform ourselves as to what is coming down the line. The information is complex and the ethical and governance issues require careful consideration, debate and discussion.

Irish Times

Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission and ground-based telescopes recently confirmed that the system, called KOI-961, hosts the three smallest exoplanets known so far to orbit a star other than our sun. An exoplanet is a planet that resides outside of our solar system. The star, which is located about 130 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation, is what's called a red dwarf. It's one-sixth the size of the sun, or just 70 percent bigger than Jupiter. 

The star is also cooler than our sun, and gives off more red light than yellow. The smallest of the three planets, called KOI-961.03, is actually located the farthest from the star, and is pictured in the foreground. This planet is about the same size as Mars, with a radius only 0.57 times that of Earth. The next planet to the upper right is KOI-961.01, which is 0.78 times the radius of Earth. The planet closest to the star is KOI-961.02, with a radius 0.73 times the Earth's. All three planets whip around the star in less than two days, with the closest planet taking less than half a day. Their close proximity to the star also means they are scorching hot, with temperatures ranging from 350 to 836 degrees Fahrenheit (176 to 447 degrees Celsius). The star's habitable zone, or the region where liquid water could exist, is located far beyond the planets. 

NASA/JPL-Caltech

For many, including Ray Kurzweil,  the path to artificial general intelligence lies with neuroscience, and more specifically the task of simulating the human brain.  


Whole brain emulation or mind uploading (sometimes called mind transfer) is the hypothetical process of transferring or copying a conscious mind from a brain to a non-biological substrate by scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device. The computer would have to run a simulation model so faithful to the original that it would behave in essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from the brain.  


For these reasons and more, the fields of neuroscience and artificial intelligence have experienced overlap and convergence in recent years.  

Kurzweil's Logarithmic Plot of Supercomputer Power

A number of projects to this end are taking place around the globe.  Here we outline and rate some of the more well-know projects.

1. The Blue Brain Project

Reconstructing the brain piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer—these are some of the goals of the Blue Brain Project since 2005.  The virtual brain will be an exceptional tool giving neuroscientists a new understanding of the brain and a better understanding of neurological diseases. The ultimate goals of brain simulation are to answer age-old questions about how we think, remember, learn and feel, to discover new treatments for the scourge of brain disease and to build new computer technologies that exploit what we have learned about the brain.

As a first step, the project succeeded in simulating a rat cortical column. This neuronal network, the size of a pinhead, recurs repeatedly in the cortex. A rat’s brain has about 100,000 columns of in the order of 10,000 neurons each. In humans, the numbers are dizzying—a human cortex may have as many as  two million columns, each having in the order of 100,000 neurons each.

Led by Dr. Henry Markram, The Blue Brain Project recently joined with other 12 partners  to propose the Human Brain Project – a very large 10 year project that will pursue precisely these aims. The new grouping has just been awarded a  Eur 1.4 million European grant to formulate a detailed proposal.

2. The Human Brain Project

As mentioned in some of the other projects, The Human Brain Project is currently a proposal to amalgamate some of these projects under one umbrella project.  

The project is integrating everything we know about the brain into computer models and using these models to simulate the actual working of the brain. Ultimately, it will attempt to simulate the complete human brain. The models built by the project will cover all the different levels of brain organisation – from individual neurons through to the complete cortex. The goal is to bring about a revolution in neuroscience and medicine and to derive new information technologies directly from the architecture of the brain.

3. SyNAPSE

SyNAPSE is a DARPA program that aims to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels. More simply stated, it is an attempt to build a new kind of computer with similar form, function, and architecture to the mammalian brain. Such artificial brains would be used in robots whose intelligence matches that of rats, cats, and ultimately even humans.

IBM is largely involved with SyNAPSE, under the Cognitive Computing Project.









4. Numenta / Hierarchical Temporal Memory Theory


Jeff Hawkins argues that attempts to create an artificial intelligence by simply programming a computer to do what a brain does are flawed and that to actually make an intelligent computer, we simply need to teach it to find and use patterns, not to attempt any specific tasks. Through this method, he thinks we can build intelligent machines, helping us do all sorts of useful tasks that current computers cannot achieve. He further argues that this memory-prediction system as implemented by the brain's cortex is the basis of human intelligence.





Numenta, a company formed by Hawkins was created to develop the theories Hawkins put forth in the book, On Intelligence.  Numenta is developing what will potentially be a category-defining product based on this technology. The product promises to dramatically reduce the cost and difficulty of extracting value from any type of data.


Hawkins is a spokesperson of sorts for the neuroscience and AI communities, however Numenta has recently been promising breakthrough developments.  As a former computer engineer turned neuroscientist, he embodies the convergence of the formerly separate fields of study.  





5. The Human Connectome Project


The Human Connectome Project aims to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data, an interface to graphically navigate this data and the opportunity to achieve never before realized conclusions about the living human brain.

The Human Connectome Project (HCP) is a project to construct a map of the complete structural and functional neural connections in vivo within and across individuals. The HCP represents the first large-scale attempt to collect and share data of a scope and detail sufficient to begin the process of addressing deeply fundamental questions about human connectional anatomy and variation. A collaboration between MGH and UCLA, the HCP is being developed to employ advanced neuroimaging methods, and to construct an extensive informatics infrastructure to link these data and connectivity models to detailed phenomic and genomic data, building upon existing multidisciplinary and collaborative efforts currently underway. Working closely with other HCP partners based at Washington University in St. Louis we will provide rich data, essential imaging protocols, and sophisticated connectivity analysis tools for the neuroscience community.

Many of the neural connections can be seen on the Connectome Project's Connection Viewer.  

Forget your old alphabet blocks, Modular Robotics Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. Combining sensor, logic and actuator blocks, young kids (and adults) can create simple modular robots that can exhibit surprisingly complex behaviour.

You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.

There are 15 different Cubelets available now, and the company has got a more configurations in the pipeline. They plan to release new models through their website.  Who knows, maybe there will soon be Cubelet competitions too.






Cubelets are now available for pre-order.

In an article published in Nature Communications, researchers have found that injecting stem cells into mice with progeria, a condition that causes premature aging, the mouse lifespan was extended two to three times what was expected.

With ageing, there is a loss of adult stem cell function. However, there has been no previous direct evidence that this has a causal role in ageing-related decline. The researchers tested this using muscle-derived stem/progenitor cells (MDSPCs) in murine progeria diseased mice.

Typically the progeria mice die at around 21 to 28 days of age, but the treated animals lived far longer — some even lived beyond 66 days. They also were in better general health, the researchers said.

These results establish that adult stem/progenitor cell dysfunction contributes to ageing-related degeneration and suggests a therapeutic potential of post-natal stem cells to extend health.

Animals that age normally were not treated with stem/progenitor cells as part of this study, but the provocative findings urge further research, state the researchers. They hint that it might be possible one day to forestall the biological declines associated with aging by delivering a shot of youthful vigor, particularly if specific rejuvenating proteins or molecules produced by the stem cells could be identified and isolated.

Nature Communications 3, Article 608

MIT neuroscientists have now shown that they can accurately predict which parts of the brain are face-selective.

The study, which appeared in the Dec. 25 issue of the journal  Nature Neuroscience, is the first to link a brain region’s connectivity with its function. No two people have the exact same fusiform gyrus structure, but using connectivity patterns, the researchers can now accurately predict which parts of an individual’s fusiform gyrus are involved in face recognition.

The MIT researchers are now expanding their connectivity studies into other brain regions and other visual functions, such as recognizing objects and scenes, as well as faces. They hope that such studies will also help to reveal some of the mechanisms of how information is processed at each point as it flows through the brain.

Health Canal

Scientists who've found that lab mice get smarter and more agile as they age when fed a mix of nutritional supplements say it may be possible to cure aging.

The diet and supplement plan are not conventional cures, but the animal results at McMaster University in Ontario have showed researchers the aging process can be slowed to avoid the physical and mental declines that to this point have been considered the "natural life cycle".

At Prof. David Rollo's biology laboratory, mice that ate bagel bits soaked in a cocktail of supplements such as B vitamins, vitamin D, ginseng and garlic lived longer than those not taking the special mice chow. Scientists still don't how the supplements actually work and interact in the body.


http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/aging-slowed-in-mice-with-supplement-mix

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has awarded Tomowave Laboratories a small business innovation research (SBIR) phase I grant in order to evaluate the health risks caused due to nanotechnology applications in medicine and industry. The innovative system by Tomowave will sensitively and quickly evaluate the health risks that are related with inducing nanoparticles into animals.

According to the CTO and the project’s principal investigator Dr. Alexander Oraevsky stated that the system will utilize adjustable near-infrared laser pulses to determine nanoparticle characteristics all through the body of the animal by changing absorbed optical energy into ultrasound sources. This technology also called optoacoustic tomography is highly effective in detecting gold silver, carbon nanoparticles with considerable biological tissue depths not possible using just optical techniques. Even minute quantities can be identified.

Present techniques available for nanoparticle detection, which include CT scans or X-ray imaging and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) do not detect carbon and metal nanoparticles effectively and cannot be accessed by companies that need to test industrial products and nanotechnology-based drugs.


Dr. Benjamin Adler, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, stated, "We are very excited that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has selected funding of our Phase I program entitled "Optoacoustic system for monitoring biodistribution of nanoparticles in vivo". According to Dr. Adler, "there is a pressing need for low-cost and high-sensitivity instrumentation capable of monitoring growth and clearance of nanoparticles in the body, to perform health safety assessments and determine efficacy of disease treatments". Current methods to detect nanoparticles, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and x-ray imaging (CT scans) are not sufficiently sensitive for metal and carbon nanoparticles, are very expensive and are not available to many companies which must test nanotechnology-based drugs and industrial products.


TomoWave is recognized globally in the field of optoacoustic imaging development and research. According to Dr. Adler, it is anticipated that these imaging systems will have high demand in nanotechnology-based bioengineering businesses and in academic labs that identify the risk of nano-devices and nano-drugs.

tomowave.com

In an official white paper published here, the Chinese government has laid out its intentions to launch a manned mission to the moon by 2020.

The whitepaper cites

Accordance with the "around, down, back to the" three-step development of ideas, to promote lunar exploration project construction, launch lunar soft landing and lunar Surveyor, to achieve a soft landing on the moon and the inspection probe, the second step to complete lunar exploration mission . Start the implementation of the lunar sample return as the goal of lunar exploration mission the third step.  [Translation by Google]

In 2003 China became only the third country to send one of its citizens into space independently. Yang Liwei's mission aboard Shenzhou 5 was followed by another substantial milestone when Zhai Zhigang conducted the first Chinese spacewalk five years later.

China has mapped the moon from two orbiting spacecraft and has plans for an unmanned lander, a lunar rover, and a mission to return 2kg of moon rock to Earth by 2020. The space agency this year demonstrated in-orbit rendezvous and docking tests between two spacecraft, laying the foundations for the construction of a future space station.

The emergence of China as a space-faring nation has the potential to threaten US and Russian prestige in space, by inspiring a new generation with headline-grabbing crewed missions.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham and Lancaster University, analysing data taken by the ATLAS experiment, have been at the centre of what is believed to be the first clear observation of a new particle at the Large Hadron Collider. The research was published 22 December 11 on the online repository arXiv.

The particle, the Chi-b(3P)is a new way of combining a beauty quark and its antiquark so that they bind together. Like the more famous Higgs particle, the Chi-b(3P) is a boson. However, whereas the Higgs is not made up of smaller particles, the Chi-b(3P) combines two very heavy objects via the same ‘strong force’ which holds the atomic nucleus together.

Andy Chisholm, the PhD student from the University of Birmingham who worked on the analysis said: ‘Analysing the billions of particle collisions at the LHC is fascinating. There are potentially all kinds of interesting things buried in the data, and we were lucky to look in the right place at the right time.’


http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2011/12/22-Dec-11-New-Particle-at-the-Large-Hadron-Collider-Discovered-by-ATLAS-Experiment--.aspx

Neurocientists at MIT have identified a master control gene for memory formation.  The work focused on the Npas4 gene, which previous studies have shown is turned on immediately following new experiences. The gene is particularly active in the hippocampus, a brain structure known to be critical in forming long-term memories.

The researchers found that Npas4 turns on a series of other genes that modify the brain’s internal wiring by adjusting the strength of synapses - the connections between neurons.

Investigating the genetic control systems of memory formation, the researchers studied a type of learning known as contextual fear conditioning: Mice receive a mild electric shock when they enter a specific chamber. Within minutes, the mice learn to fear the chamber, and the next time they enter it, they freeze.

The researchers showed that the Npas4 gene is turned on very early during this conditioning. “This sets Npas4 apart from many other activity-regulated genes,” Lin says. “A lot of them are ubiquitously induced by all these different kinds of stimulations; they are not really learning-specific.”

Furthermore, Npas4 activation occurs primarily in the CA3 region of the hippocampus, which is already known to be required for fast learning.

“We think of Npas4 as the initial trigger that comes on, and then in turn, in the right spot in the brain, it activates all these other downstream targets. Eventually they’re going to modify synapses in a way that’s likely changing synaptic inhibition or some other process that we’re trying to figure out,” says Kartik Ramamoorthi, a graduate student in Lin’s lab and lead author of the paper.

The MIT team also plans to investigate whether the same neurons that turn on Npas4 when memories are formed also turn it on when memories are retrieved. This could help them pinpoint the exact neurons that are storing particular memories.

“We’re hunting for the memory, and we think we can use Npas4 to mark where it is,” Ramamoorthi says. “That’s because it’s turned on specifically and now we can label the cells and maybe fish out where in the brain the memory is sitting.



http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6063/1669

Canadian researchers working on a vaccine to prevent HIV announced Tuesday they have received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials on humans in January.

A team led by Dr. Chil-Yong Kang, a virologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., plans to start Phase 1 of clinical trials on 40 HIV-positive patients to test the safety of the vaccine.

“FDA approval for human clinical trials is an extremely significant milestone for our vaccine, which has the potential to save the lives of millions of people around the world by preventing HIV infection," says Kang, a researcher and professor at Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.

Western President Amit Chakma says, "This joint venture between Sumagen and Western is a prime example of what collaboration between private industry and university researchers can achieve. Dr. Kang and his team are to be commended for their exceptional talent and remarkable persistence in developing a vaccine that addresses a tragic health crisis affecting millions of people around the globe."

Montreal Gazette