Dr. Boaz Almog: Quantum Levitation

ForaTv/ In October 2011, Boaz Almog and Barak Deutscher from the superconductivity group at Tel-Aviv University led by Prof. Guy Deutscher, demonstrated how a superconductor disc is trapped in a surrounding magnetic field, a phenomenon called "Quantum Levitation" or "Quantum Locking". By using the exceptional large scale superconductors produced by Mishael Azoulay, they are able to demonstrate a quantum effect that, although well known to physicists worldwide, was never seen and demonstrated this way. In addition to developing new superconductor technologies and applications, the superconductivity group in Tel-Aviv University is dedicated to teaching and educating the young and adults about superconductivity, through the unique and counter-intuitive phenomena of 'quantum locking' and 'quantum levitation'.

Hobbit Humans Come to Life With New Fossils

A reconstruction of a Hobbit face.

Susan Hayes, University of Wollongong

discovery

By Jennifer Viegas 

New bones attributed to Homo floresiensis -- aka the "Hobbit Human" -- along with other recent findings, are helping to reveal what members of this species looked like, how they behaved, and their origins.

The latest findings, described in a Journal of Human Evolution paper, are wrist bones unearthed on the Indonesian island of Flores. Since they are nearly identical to other such bones for the Hobbit found at the site, they refute claims that H. floresiensis never existed.

"The tiny people from Flores were not simply diseased modern humans," Caley Orr, lead author of the paper, told Discovery News.

"The new species of human stood approximately 3' 6" tall, giving it its nickname 'The Hobbit,'" continued Orr, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at Midwestern University.

He said that they were "similar to modern humans in many respects." For example, he explained that they walked on two legs, had small canine teeth, and lived what appears to have been an iconic "cave man'" lifestyle.

"Stone tools and evidence of fire use were found in the cave, along with the remains of butchered animals, such as Stegodon (an extinct elephant relative), indicating that meat was a part of diet," Orr said.

He and his colleagues, however, also point out the differences between the Hobbit individuals and modern humans.

The Hobbits had arms that were longer than their legs, giving them a slightly more ape-like structure. Their skulls had no bony chins, so their faces had more of an oval shape. Their forehead was sloping. The inferred brain size was tiny, putting them in the IQ range of chimpanzees.

"Remarkably, the feet were also long relative to the legs, as fantasy fans might expect of a Hobbit," he added.

The Hobbit's wrist looked like that of early human relatives, such as Australopithecus, but the key ancestral candidate now is Homo erectus, "Upright Man."

It is possible that a population of H. erectus became stranded on the Indonesian island and dwarfed there over time. Orr said that "sometimes happens to larger animals that adapt to small island environments."

A problem, however, is that H. erectus is somewhat more modern looking than the Hobbit, so researchers are still seeking more clues.

Another question concerns whether or not the Hobbits ever mated with modern humans. There is evidence that happened to Neanderthals, which have left traces of their genome in modern human DNA. So far, however, conditions have not been right to extract DNA from H. floresiensis bones.

Nonetheless, the Hobbit -- which went extinct relatively recently during the Pleistocene -- is now better known due to the new discoveries.

"These fossils provide further, clear evidence that H. floresiensis is in no way a pathological modern human, or that its primitive morphology is related simply to its small body size," said Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "Instead, it is clearly its own, unique and very intriguing species."

Kivell added, "What is particularly interesting is that H. floresiensis is associated with such a long, well-documented history of stone tools. (Its primitive hand and wrist were) still apparently capable of making and using stone tools, suggesting that H. floresiensis solved the morphological and manipulative demands of tool-making and tool-use in a different way than Neanderthals and ourselves."

Orr and his team continue to study the Hobbit humans, with at least one other paper about the interesting species in the works.

Friedrich Kittler: The Modern World

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Friedrich Kittler, German historian and theorist, lecturing on the history of writing. In this lecture he talks about manuscript culture vs printed culture rising out of Gutenberg's innovation, the copyleft culture of the Gutenberg technologies, how the scientific revolution really started with these texts that were printed after the discovery of woodcuts copper plates and paper mills, how the printing press facilitated the transmission of technical knowledge, how the Jesuits entered the Chinese empire of Peking; typecutters, fonts and cryptography, and Leon Battista Alberti, the development of capital letters, the development of common mathematical symbols by Johannes Widmann (the +/- sign), Raphael Bombolli and Gerolamo Cardano (equations), Simon Stevin and the Dutch zero, and François Viète, the harmony of the fifth in tuning systems, how innovations in common mathematical notation and intercultural participation made possible musical innovations, how the end of notation in Latin was the beginning of open-source knowledge, algebraic notation, the need for symbols, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and binary arithmetic, 18th century mathematicians and algorithms, Jacques du Vaucanson's digesting duck, Leonard Euler and mechanical sytheses of voices, the 18th century German school system, changes in paper production in material media history, Canadian lumber, semaphores as optical system of signs, optical telegraphy speeding up military communications, invention of the typewriter by Remington, Etienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's first sound recording of Au Claire de la Lune, the effect of these changes on literature of the 19th century, Sir Flinders Petrie, Alan Turing's Turing machine, cryptography, Pearl Harbor, closing remarks on the need to learn program languages to see the limits of language, Assembler programming language, Q&A.
Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School (EGS), Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland, Europe. Friedrich Kittler. 2011.

Friedrich Adolf Kittler (1943 -2011) was a post-Structuralist philosopher, as well as historian and theorist of media communications and technology. Kittler studied German Studies, Romance Languages and Philosophy at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg/Breisgau. In 1976, he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. His work was heavily influenced by both Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Kittler became a Professor of German at Freiburg in the early eighties. During the decade he held positions as a visiting lecturer and professor at the University of California, in Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and later at the University of Stanford and the University of Basel. In 1984, he completed his Habilitation at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau, and from 1986-1990 headed the DFG's Literature and Media Analysis project in Kassel. Kittler was a Membre associé of the Collège international de philosophie, Paris from 1983-1986. In 1987, Kittler was appointed Professor of Modern German Studies, at Ruhr University and began working as Professor of German at the University of Bochum.

In 1993, he received the media arts prize for theory from the ZKM Karlsruhe (Zentrums für Kunst und Medientechnologie); from 1995 to 1997, he headed a Federal Research Group on Theory and History of Media. Kittler was also a member of the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Culture and the Bild Schrift Zahl research group.

In 1996, Friedrich Kittler was recognized as a Distinguished Scholar by Yale University, and in 1997 as Distinguished Visiting Professor by Columbia University.

Scientists try to access ancient body of water

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Darwin in Space: How Multigenerational Missions Could Shape Human Evolution

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“New environments inside this starship, for example, new radiation environments, whatever the gas composition is that people are breathing, whatever is the gravity field, those basic environmental conditions will reshape the human genome.”

That’s Cameron Smith. He’s an anthropologist at Portland State University who studies human evolution and prehistory. But he’s also very interested in the human future, including how space travel will impact the human race—both culturally and biologically. He wrote an article on the subject in the January issue of Scientific American, called “Starship Humanity.” He recently talked by phone with John Matson, host of our 60-Second Space podcast, about what might happen to a spacefaring humanity if we really were to take a star trek.

John Matson: This article that you’ve written for Scientific American, maybe you can just give us a brief overview of what the article is about.

Cameron Smith: You bet. So far the experience of humanity in space has been very limited. We have gone up for short periods of time, we’ve gone in very small numbers. But as space access becomes cheaper and more people start going up, eventually we’re going to have communities, we’re going to have populations of people up there. And then it shifts, our understanding of that is going to have to shift from purely biology to anthropology. These will be communities of people, and of course communities are cultural and they’re also biological. So anthropology marries culture and biology. And it will be used to help us plan out successful space colonization.

JM: Let’s say, just to set a scenario, a group of space travelers sets out on a multigenerational voyage to Alpha Centauri, where we now know that there is an exoplanet. What’s going to happen to these people on the way?

CS: Well, we can only predict that change will occur. We can make some predictions about some very few biological changes that might occur. But because mutation is random, and mutation is the origin of new characteristics in populations, because that is ultimately random, it’s not entirely possible to say precisely what will happen. What we can say, though, is that new environments—for example, new radiation environments, whatever the gas composition is that people are breathing, whatever is the gravity field inside this starship—those basic environmental conditions will reshape the human genome. Subtly, subtly, but they will reshape it.

We know that we have evolved under almost 15 pounds of pressure per square inch at sea level. And in the last few thousand years, though, some people have migrated to higher elevations, where they are under somewhat less pressure. Their biology has changed to account for that, or to make it possible to live there. They have different blood oxygen levels, they have deeper chests with greater what is called lung ventilation, greater capacity for breathing in and taking in oxygen. And even the biology of the developing infant is somewhat different. And I am certain that exactly the same sort of thing, on that same magnitude, will happen in off-Earth environments.

JM: What about weightlessness? Do we have any sense of what that would do to human physiology in terms of stature or size of human beings?

CS: Weightlessness is a big issue, and 30 years of almost continuous presence of humans in space—this is quite amazing—whether in Mir or the International Space Station or other stations, for 30 years somebody has been in Earth orbit almost continuously. What they have learned through that long period is that, yeah, weightlessness can have some pretty detrimental effects. Bone loss is one of them. Muscle is also reduced, but bone loss is a big one.

And so, I don’t think we’re going to try to do long-term space colonization in free-floating zero gravity. So we’ll go to places like Mars where there is one third, roughly, the gravity of Earth, and I think we’ll build these things that rotate and give us artificial—well, they give us gravity by rotating. You saw it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the rotating space station. That works, and I think we’re going to be doing that for a much longer time than trying to actually live in zero or very small gravity.

But yes, it will have effects on the physiology as well. I was thinking of course in Mars, at one third, roughly, gravity, essentially in evolution, essentially if you can get away with something that costs less energy to do than your sibling, you have a selective advantage. And on Mars if you don’t require all of the muscle that a person does on Earth, where you have an extra two thirds gravity, then presumably you live in better health and have more offspring. So in the long term on Mars I think we will eventually see a lighter, lither build than on Earth.

JM: So the image of those spindly little green men is maybe not too far-fetched.

CS: Maybe so.

JM: Now, do we have a sense of how quickly these changes start to happen?

CS: The time scale for significant biological changes—yes, you can get them in a few centuries. You can start to see effects on the physiology in a number of centuries. This is the timescale that I’ve been working with. For example I’m in contact with a group in Germany called Icarus Interstellar. They’re devising propulsion systems to reach stars on the scale of several centuries. So I’ve been thinking about that scale as well—what kind of changes would we see in that kind of time frame? And some basic population genetics calculations that I’ve done, that concern what’s called time-to-fixation, and this is the spread of novel genes in a population.

And this suggests that yes, within a few centuries you could have changes on the order of different skin hues, or altered skin colors, different hair textures. But radical reshaping of the human body, for example. major stature differences or even new anatomical structures, those should take much, much longer. Those should take into the many thousands of years.

JM: There’s definitely a perception, especially in this country, in the U.S., that space exploration is on pause, that it’s ground to a halt. I happen to disagree with that, but it’s clear that no one is going to Alpha Centauri tomorrow. So why is it important to consider all these things now? Why is it important to think out all the implications of what space travel might mean?

CS: It’s absolutely important to start now because there’s so much to do. I mean, if we’re talking about long-term voyages, we’re talking about again, understanding things that we are just barely understanding today. For example, we have only in the last two decades got a high-resolution understanding of the human genome. And that helps us to understand human evolution, and evolution, it cannot be stopped. The only way to stop it is with extinction. And evolution of humanity is going to continue in space. And to prepare for it—again, you could do it without anthropology, but I don’t think it would survive. I don’t think it would work. So to do it with a good expectation of success, we need to think in long term. Well, what is the field that has given us a long-term understanding of humanity? That’s anthropology. Biology, relatively short-term, although it deals with evolution. But humanity, human evolution is somewhat different from most other evolution. And it's anthropology that has explored that. So, I think anthropology is going to be central to this.

JM: So as the physicists and engineers are working on propulsion systems and cosmic ray shielding, this is something that anthropologists should be working on in parallel, you believe?

CS: I believe absolutely we need to build an anthropology of space, an anthropology of space colonization. We know if we're going to spend generations in space that you have to prepare for the long term. Again, we think of it as people pop up there and they come back down. And the long-term view is, no, eventually, this will be migration. And this is part of the goal. Even just a few years ago NASA had a Vision Report that they released, which said that the essential mission of NASA was to better life here on Earth, to extend life there, that is, move some part of humanity to be able to live off of earth, and to find life beyond, that is exobiology. The interesting thing there is that in common in all three of those, what is common about those, it's not computers, it's not the technology, you need all of that, but what is common about those three statements is that it's about life. It's about living things. And living things change through time by evolution, and it's anthropology that has understood human evolution.

JM: You have a fairly recent book out about evolution.

CS: I have a book out now, a Popular Science book about human adaptation and space colonization, and in that my co-author and I are sketching out, it's an exploration, we're sketching out some of the kinds of ways that anthropology can assist us in making a success of space colonization. But right now I'm working on a technical book, it'll be a couple of years down the line, that again brings everything pertinent known from anthropology to the concept of space colonization, and hopefully that can be a foundation for a space anthropology.

JM: Now just to sort of wrap things up here, aside from the physics and the engineering of the actual spacecraft, what do you think will be the biggest challenge facing either the people who are putting together a crew for a long-duration spaceflight, or for the crew themselves?

CS: Well, one critique of this whole endeavor of space colonization and space activity by people in general is that, well, this isn’t going to fix humanity. We’re just going to transport our ancient problems off of the surface of the Earth. Well, I think so. Yeah, this isn’t meant to fix humanity. It is meant to give humanity an insurance policy. If the Earth is hit by a catastrophe, at least someone is left, if we are a several-planet species, for example.

The biggest challenge, I think they’ll be both biological and cultural. We don’t know how reproduction works in space. We also have to be very careful—we can’t just be ready to go and colonize space once we understand human biology in space and human evolution. We have thousands of plant and animal domesticates that are going to have to go with us. We can’t be eating canned food for generations. We have to ensure the health of those populations as well. That is why, you asked before, why start now? Well, there is a tremendous amount to do to think about all this.

So what will be the challenges? They will be both biological and cultural. We will have biological evolution happening—some of it will be painful. Much of that evolution will play out on those early stages of development. And there will be an increase, let’s say, in infant mortality. We’ll also have our same cultural baggage. We have ethnic rivalries, we have political differences, we have religious issues. I don’t think that’s going to go away. We should certainly take our best nature with us, but those things are rather ancient, and I think those will be as big a challenge as the biology.

Cameron Smith’s book, co-authored with Evan Davies is titled Emigrating Beyond Earth: Human Adaptation and Space Colonization. And Smith’s article "Starship Humanity" is in the January issue of Scientific American. A short preview is available free on the Web site, titled "How Humans Will Evolve on Multigenerational Space-Exploration Missions."

That’s it for this episode. Get your science news at our Web site, www.scientificamerican.com, where you can check out the In-Depth Report about Humanity’s Enduring Fascination with the Apocalypse. The so-called Mayan apocalypse is just the latest in a long line of doomsday predictions. And, ironically, it will not be the last. And follow us on Twitter, where you’ll get a tweet whenever a new article hits the Web site. Our Twitter name is @sciam. For Scientific American’s Science Talk, I’m Steve Mirsky, thanks for clicking on us.

An information-processing approach to the origin of life

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Is life based on software and information? (Plants in the Rwenzori Mountains, Uganda; credit: Wikimedia Commons)

A novel approach to the question of life’s origin, proposed by two Arizona State University scientists — Paul Davies, an ASU Regents’ Professor and director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and Sara Walker, a NASA post-doctoral fellow at the Beyond Center — in an open-access Journal of the Royal Society Interface paper, attempts to dramatically redefine the problem.

The authors shift attention from the “hardware” — the chemical basis of life — to the “software” — its information content. They suggest that the crucial distinction between non-life and life is the way living organisms manage the information flowing through the system.

“We propose that the transition from non-life to life is unique and definable,” said Davies. “We suggest that life may be characterized by its distinctive and active use of information, thus providing a roadmap to identify rigorous criteria for the emergence of life. This is in sharp contrast to a century of thought in which the transition to life has been cast as a problem of chemistry, with the goal of identifying a plausible reaction pathway from chemical mixtures to a living entity.”

“Chemical based approaches,” Walker said, “have stalled at a very early stage of chemical complexity — very far from anything we would consider ‘alive.’ More seriously they suffer from conceptual shortcomings in that they fail to distinguish between chemistry and biology.”

“To a physicist or chemist life seems like ‘magic matter,’” Davies explained. “It behaves in extraordinary ways that are unmatched in any other complex physical or chemical system. Such lifelike properties include autonomy, adaptability and goal-oriented behavior — the ability to harness chemical reactions to enact a pre-programmed agenda, rather than being a slave to those reactions.

“We believe the transition in the informational architecture of chemical networks is akin to a phase transition in physics, and we place special emphasis on the top-down information flow in which the system as a whole gains causal purchase over its components, This approach will reveal how the logical organization of biological replicators differs crucially from trivial replication associated with crystals (non-life). By addressing the causal role of information directly, many of the baffling qualities of life are explained.”

Nonlocal biological functions

“The most important features of biological information (i.e. functionality) are decisively nonlocal,” the authors say. “Biologically functional information is therefore not an additional quality, like electric charge, painted onto matter and passed on like a token. It is of course instantiated in biochemical structures, but one cannot point to any specific structure in isolation and say “Aha! Biological information is here!”

The authors expect that, by re-shaping the conceptual landscape in this fundamental way, not just the origin of life, but other major transitions will be explained — for example, the leap from single cells to multi-cellularity.

“In all of these cases where appeal is made to an informational narrative, we encounter context- (state-) dependent causation. In this respect, biological systems are quite unlike traditional mechanical systems evolving according to fixed laws of physics.

“In biological causation, subject to informational control and feedback, the dynamical rules will generally change with time in a manner that is both a function of the current state and the history of the organism (suggesting perhaps that even the concept of evolution itself may be in need of revision.”

Life in non-organic substrates?

This perspective “forces new thinking in how life might have arisen on a lifeless planet, by shifting emphasis to the origins of information control, rather than — for example — the onset of Darwinian evolution or the appearance of autocatalytic sets (i.e. either analog or digital that lack information control), which, although certainly important to the story of life’s emergence, do not rigorously define how/when life emerges as a function of chemical complexity.

“It also permits a broader view of life, where the same underlying principles would permit understanding of living systems instantiated in different chemical substrates (including potentially non-organic substrates). …

“Purely analog life-forms could have existed in the past but are not likely to survive over geological timescales without acquiring explicitly digitized informational protocols. Therefore life-forms that ‘go digital’ may be the only systems that survive in the long-run and are thus the only remaining product of the processes that led to life.

“As such, the onset of Darwinian evolution in a chemical system was likely not the critical step in the emergence of life. … Instead, the emergence of life was likely marked by a transition in information processing capabilities. This transition should be marked by a reversal in the causal flow of information from bottom-up only to a situation characterized by bi-directional causality.

“Characterizing the emergence of life as a shift in causal structure due to information gaining causal efficacy over matter marks the origin of life as a unique transition in the physical realm.”

Hallmarks of life

The authors suggest these specific hallmarks of life:

• Global organization
• Information as a causal agency
• Top-down causation
• Analog and digital information processing
• Laws and states co-evolve
• Logical structure of a universal constructor
• Dual hardware and software roles of genetic material
• Non-trivial replication
• Physical separation of instructions (algorithms) from the mechanism that implements them

Walker is also affiliated with the NASA Astrobiology Institute in Mountain View, Calif. and the Blue Marble Space Institute, Seattle.

References:

• Sara Imari Walker and Paul C.W. Davies, The Algorithmic Origins of Life, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2013, DOI: 10.1098/​rsif.2012.0869 (open access)

Woman with quadriplegia feeds herself chocolate using mind-controlled robot arm

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Jan Scheuermann, who has quadriplegia, brings a chocolate bar to her mouth using a robot arm she is guiding with her thoughts, while researcher Elke Brown, M.D., watches in the background (credit: UPMC)

Reaching out to “high five” someone, grasping and moving objects of different shapes and sizes, feeding herself dark chocolate.

For Jan Scheuermann and a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC, accomplishing these seemingly ordinary tasks demonstrated for the first time that a person with longstanding quadriplegia can maneuver a mind-controlled, human-like robot arm in seven dimensions (7D) to consistently perform many of the natural and complex motions of everyday life.

In a study published in the online version of The Lancet, the researchers described the brain-computer interface (BCI) technology and training programs that allowed Ms. Scheuermann, 53, to intentionally move an arm, turn and bend a wrist, and close a hand for the first time in nine years.

Less than a year after she told the research team, “I’m going to feed myself chocolate before this is over,” Ms. Scheuermann savored its taste and announced as they applauded her feat, “One small nibble for a woman, one giant bite for BCI.”

“This is a spectacular leap toward greater function and independence for people who are unable to move their own arms,” agreed senior investigator Andrew B. Schwartz, Ph.D., professor, Department of Neurobiology, Pitt School of Medicine. “This technology, which interprets brain signals to guide a robot arm, has enormous potential that we are continuing to explore. Our study has shown us that it is technically feasible to restore ability; the participants have told us that BCI gives them hope for the future.”

On Feb. 10, 2012, after screening tests to confirm that she was eligible for the study, co-investigator and UPMC neurosurgeon Elizabeth Tyler-Kabara, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Neurological Surgery, Pitt School of Medicine, placed two quarter-inch square electrode grids with 96 tiny contact points each in the regions of Ms. Scheuermann’s brain that would normally control right arm and hand movement.

The electrode points pick up signals from individual neurons and computer algorithms are used to identify the firing patterns associated with particular observed or imagined movements, such as raising or lowering the arm, or turning the wrist, explained lead investigator Jennifer Collinger, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PM&R), and research scientist for the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. That intent to move is then translated into actual movement of the robot arm, which was developed by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab.

Two days after the operation, the team hooked up the two terminals that protrude from Ms. Scheuermann’s skull to the computer. “We could actually see the neurons fire on the computer screen when she thought about closing her hand,” Dr. Collinger said. “When she stopped, they stopped firing. So we thought, ‘This is really going to work.’”

7D control

How the neuroprosthetic system works. Two silicon-substrate microelectrode arrays surgically implanted in the motor cortex (upper right) allow recordings of ensemble neuronal activity, which are then translated into intended movement commands. This brain-derived information is conveyed to a shared controller that integrates the participant’s intent, robotic position feedback, and task-dependent constraints. Using this bioinspired brain-machine interface, the paralyzed woman could manipulate objects of various shapes and sizes in a 3D workspace. (Credit: Jennifer L Collinger et al./The Lancet)

Within a week, Ms. Scheuermann could reach in and out, left and right, and up and down with the arm, which she named Hector, giving her 3-dimensional control that had her high-fiving with the researchers. “What we did in the first week they thought we’d be stuck on for a month,” she noted.

Before three months had passed, she also could flex the wrist back and forth, move it from side to side and rotate it clockwise and counter-clockwise, as well as grip objects, adding up to what scientists call 7D control.

In a study task called the Action Research Arm Test, Ms. Scheuermann guided the arm from a position four inches above a table to pick up blocks and tubes of different sizes, a ball and a stone and put them down on a nearby tray. She also picked up cones from one base to restack them on another a foot away, another task requiring grasping, transporting and positioning of objects with precision.

“Our findings indicate that by a variety of measures, she was able to improve her performance consistently over many days,” Dr. Schwartz explained. “The training methods and algorithms that we used in monkey models of this technology also worked for Jan, suggesting that it’s possible for people with long-term paralysis to recover natural, intuitive command signals to orient a prosthetic hand and arm to allow meaningful interaction with the environment.”

Electrocortigraphy (ECoG) study

In a separate study, researchers also continue to study BCI technology that uses an electrocortigraphy (ECoG) grid, which sits on the surface of the brain rather than slightly penetrates the tissue as in the case of the grids used for Ms. Scheuermann.

In both studies, “we’re recording electrical activity in the brain, and the goal is to try to decode what that activity means and then use that code to control an arm,” said senior investigator Michael Boninger, M.D., professor and chair, PM&R, and director of UPMC Rehabilitation Institute. “We are learning so much about how the brain controls motor activity, thanks to the hard work and dedication of our trial participants. Perhaps in five to 10 years, we will have a device that can be used in the day-to-day lives of people who are not able to use their own arms.”

The next step for BCI technology will likely use a two-way electrode system that can not only capture the intention to move, but in addition, will stimulate the brain to generate sensation, potentially allowing a user to adjust grip strength to firmly grasp a doorknob or gently cradle an egg.

After that, “we’re hoping this can become a fully implanted, wireless system that people can actually use in their homes without our supervision,” Dr. Collinger said. “It might even be possible to combine brain control with a device that directly stimulates muscles to restore movement of the individual’s own limb.”

For now, Ms. Scheuermann is expected to continue to put the BCI technology through its paces for two more months, and then the implants will be removed in another operation.

“This is the ride of my life,” she said. “This is the rollercoaster. This is skydiving. It’s just fabulous, and I’m enjoying every second of it.”

The BCI projects are funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs, the UPMC Rehabilitation Institute and the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

For more information about participating in the trials, call 412-383-1355.

How this compares to previous studies

The results of previous work have shown that neural activity can be recorded from the motor cortex and translated to movement of an external device or the individual’s own muscles, the authors say. However, until now, the results of human studies have not shown whether the natural and complex movements can be done consistently for different tasks.

“Here, we have shown that a person with chronic tetraplegia can do complex and coordinated movements freely in seven-dimensional space consistently over several weeks of testing. This study is different from previous studies in which investigators had little control in translation dimensions, used staged control schemes, or had insufficient workspace to complete very structured tasks.

“Increasing dimensional control allows our participant to fully explore the workspace by placing the hand in the desired three-dimensional location and orienting the palm in three dimensions. This study is the first time that performance has been quantified with functional clinical assessments. Although in most human studies only a few days of performance data were reported, we have shown that the participant learned to improve her performance consistently over many days using different metrics.

“By using training methods and algorithms validated in non-human primate work, individuals with long-term paralysis can recover the natural and intuitive command signals for hand placement, orientation, and reaching to move freely in space and interact with the environment.”

First map of how the brain organizes everything we see

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These sections of a semantic-space map show how some of the different categories of living and non-living objects that we see are related to one another in the brain’s “semantic space” (credit: Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Jack Gallant/Neuron)

How do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to organize all the categories of objects and actions that we see, and they have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings.

Continuous semantic space

The result — achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips — is what researchers call “a continuous semantic space.”

Some relationships between categories make sense (humans and animals share the same “semantic neighborhood”) while others (hallways and buckets) are less obvious. The researchers found that different people share a similar semantic layout.

“Our methods open a door that will quickly lead to a more complete and detailed understanding of how the brain is organized. Already, our online brain viewer appears to provide the most detailed look ever at the visual function and organization of a single human brain,” said Alexander Huth, a doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study published Wednesday, Dec. 19 in the journal Neuron.

Medical diagnosis/treatment, brain-machine interfaces

Semantic-space map construction process (Credit: Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Jack Gallant/Neuron)

A clearer understanding of how the brain organizes visual input can help with the medical diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. These findings may also be used to create brain-machine interfaces, particularly for facial and other image recognition systems. Among other things, they could improve a grocery store self-checkout system’s ability to recognize different kinds of merchandise.

”Our discovery suggests that brain scans could soon be used to label an image that someone is seeing, and may also help teach computers how to better recognize images,” said Huth, who has produced a video and interactive website to explain the science of what the researchers found.

It has long been thought that each category of object or action humans see — people, animals, vehicles, household appliances and movements — is represented in a separate region of the visual cortex. In this latest study, UC Berkeley researchers found that these categories are actually represented in highly organized, overlapping maps that cover as much as 20 percent of the brain, including the somatosensory and frontal cortices.

To conduct the experiment, the brain activity of five researchers was recorded via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they each watched two hours of movie clips. The brain scans simultaneously measured blood flow in thousands of locations across the brain.

Researchers then used regularized linear regression analysis, which finds correlations in data, to build a model showing how each of the roughly 30,000 locations in the cortex responded to each of the 1,700 categories of objects and actions seen in the movie clips. Next, they used principal components analysis, a statistical method that can summarize large data sets, to find the “semantic space” that was common to all the study subjects.

The results are presented in multicolored, multidimensional maps showing the more than 1,700 visual categories and their relationships to one another. Categories that activate the same brain areas have similar colors. For example, humans are green, animals are yellow, vehicles are pink and violet and buildings are blue.

“Using the semantic space as a visualization tool, we immediately saw that categories are represented in these incredibly intricate maps that cover much more of the brain than we expected,” Huth said.

Other co-authors of the study are UC Berkeley neuroscientists Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu and Jack Gallant.

An MRI viewer on the Gallant Lab website (gallantlab.org/semanticmovies) shows how information about the thousands of object and action categories is represented across human neocortex (credit: Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Jack Gallant/Neuron)

La actividad mental convertida en música (o «así suena el cerebro humano»)

Microsiervos

Investigadores han convertido la actividad mental en música, y suena increíblemente parecida a una improvisación de jazz con piano. El traductor cerebro-a-sonido convierte las variaciones eléctricas del cebrero en el tono de la notas y la circulación sanguínea en su intensidad.

El audio se puede oir en Listen: The Music of a Human Brain >>

Higgs Boson Likely a Boring Boson [and documentary]

Ian O'Neill  

The thing with physicists is that they love discovering something unexpected, strange or exotic. This mindset is what makes physics, and indeed all science disciplines, awesome. But in light of the grand announcement of the probable discovery of the elusive Higgs boson in July, it looks like the particle that was discovered is likely a "standard" Higgs boson. As in, it's a little bit boring.

Of course, "boring" is a relative term. The story of the hunt for the Higgs -- the 'exchange particle' that endows matter with mass -- reads like a Dan Brown novel, culminating in the construction of the biggest, boldest and most complex machine mankind has ever conceived: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). There's more twists, turns and subplots than you can shake a lepton at.

But the famous Higgs boson, that until recently has been purely a theoretical particle only appearing in equations, looks like it comes from the Standard Model of physics and not something more exotic.

The Standard Model is a set of equations and particles that underpin our known Universe. It's a recipe book of sorts and works like this: If you collide particle A with particle B you get particle C plus some energy -- we know what will come out of a particle interaction even before the interaction takes place. There's nothing unexpected in this recipe book; so it doesn't work like this: If you collide particle A with particle B you get particle Q and -- what the #$%@?! -- a small elephant playing with a black hole!

The latter scenario would violate our known laws of physics, suggesting something more exotic is going on. In that case, there would be some kind of new physics, something beyond the Standard Model at play -- perhaps an exotic result from the LHC would provide evidence of "supersymmetry." One interpretation of supersymmetry suggests there may be an entire family of Higgs bosons that cannot be explained by the Standard Model. However, supersymmetry has recently been dealt a "hospitalizing" blow. 

Read  More >>

TheNovadex On the 4th July 2012 the Higgs Boson was found with a mass of 125-126 GeV.
Why was it soo important to create a multi billion dollar device to detect it.  

Powerful camera seeks snapshots of dark energy

ReutersVideo

Nov. 09 - The most powerful sky-mapping instrument ever built is about to embark on a far-reaching survey of deepest space to find evidence of the theoretical force called Dark Energy. From a high plateau in Chile, the Dark Energy Camera is being pointed billions of light years into the cosmos in an effort by astronomers to answer questions about Dark Energy's influence over the expansion of our universe. Elly Park reports.

Carl Sagan, política y religión

Microsiervos

Hoy es el cumpleaños de Carl Sagan, uno de los más conocidos divulgadores científicos de los últimos años, que podría haber cumplido hoy 78 años de no haber muerto tan joven.

Pero nos ha dejado muchas frases que recordar, algunas de ellas muy apropiadas con la que está cayendo:

En ciencia suele ocurrir que un científico diga: «Es un buen argumento, yo estaba equivocado», cambie de opinión y desde ese momento no se vuelva a mencionar la antigua posición. Realmente pasa. Aunque no todo lo frecuentemente que debería ya que los científicos son humanos y el cambio es a veces doloroso. Pero ocurre cada día. No recuerdo la última vez que algo así pasó en política o religión.

Artificial Inteligent Could Make a Healthier, Wealthier World

ForaTv

Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals?

Discovery news

Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor

spiegel.de

The only modern humans whose ancestors did not interbreed with Neanderthals are apparently sub-Saharan Africans, researchers say.

New findings suggest modern North Africans carry genetic traces from Neanderthals, modern humanity's closest known extinct relatives.

Although modern humans are the only surviving members of the human lineage, others once roamed the Earth, including the Neanderthals. Genetic analysis of these extinct lineages' fossils has revealed they once interbred with our ancestors, with recent estimates suggesting that Neanderthal DNA made up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes. Although this sex apparently only rarely produced offspring, this mixing was enough to endow some people with the robust immune systems they enjoy today.  More >>

Nuclear Fusion Project Struggles to Put the Pieces Together

Scientific American/ Geoff Brumfiel and Nature magazine

peakoil.com

The world's largest scientific project is threatened with further delays, as agencies struggle to complete the design and sign contracts worth hundred of millions of euros with industrial partners, Nature has learned.

ITER is a massive project designed to show the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a power source. The device consists of a doughnut-shaped reactor called a tokamak, wrapped in superconducting magnets that squeeze and heat a plasma of hydrogen isotopes to the point of fusion. The result should be something that no experiment to date has been able to achieve: the controlled release of ten times more energy than is consumed.

That's the dream. But so far, ITER has been consuming mostly money and time. Since seven international partners signed up to the project in 2006, the price has roughly tripled to around €15 billion (US$19.4 billion), and the original date of completion has slipped by four years to late 2020. Many of the delays and cost increases have come from an extensive design review, which was completed in 2009 (see 'Fusion dreams delayed').

Now, sources familiar with the project warn that the complex system for buying ITER's many pieces could put the project even further behind schedule. Rather than providing cash, ITER's partners have pledged 'in kind' contributions of pieces of the machine. Magnets, instruments and reactor sections will arrive from around the world to be cobbled together at the central site in St-Paul-lès-Durance in southern France. Because no one body holds the purse strings, designs for the machine's components face a tortuous back-and-forth between the central ITER Organization and national 'domestic agencies', which ensure that local companies secure contracts for ITER's components.

Nowhere is the problem more pronounced than the tokamak, the central structure that will eventually house ITER. The construction of the building is meant to be contracted out by Fusion for Energy (F4E), Europe's domestic agency. But the ITER Organization could not tell the agency what needed to be built, says Rem Haange, ITER's technical director, until it received data from the other domestic agencies on the numerous systems and subsystems that the building must house. That process was seriously behind schedule when Haange arrived in 2011, he says. "Not a single piece of data had been given by the domestic agencies."

Haange says, however, that the project remains firmly on schedule, and he is racing to make up for lost time. A task force of engineers is working through the tokamak building design floor-by-floor to finalize it. "We have a deadline for every floor level, and we are just about making it," he says. The final design will be finished in March next year, but to keep the project on schedule, F4E must tender the construction contract by the end of this year.

Contract compromises
F4E is also encountering trouble on another key contract, for the giant poloidal field coils that will wrap around the girth of the machine. The coils are among the largest in ITER, and the bottommost ones must be completed before the machine can be assembled. The ITER Organization authorized procurement of the coils in 2009, but F4E's tender received just a single, joint bid from the French firm Alstom and the German company Babcock Noell.

F4E rejected the bid because it came in far above the agency's cost expectations, according to multiple sources, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the bidding process. Isabelle Tourancheau, a spokeswoman for Alstom, said that the bid had failed after "long and difficult technical and commercial negotiations". Aris Apollonatos, a spokesperson for F4E, says that the contract will now be broken into seven parts to make it more attractive to competitors and put it back out to tender. A meeting earlier this month garnered interest from 27 companies, he says. More >>

U.S. Energy Department Unleashes Its Titan Supercomputer

Scientific American/  Larry Greenemeier

afterdawn.com

In 2005 engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Jaguar, a system that would later be upgraded into a world-beating supercomputer. By 2011 it had grown to a room-size system that used seven megawatts of energy, ran nearly 225,000 processor cores and had a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops, or 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second. Topping Jaguar, albeit necessary to deliver ever more complex modeling of sophisticated energy challenges, would not be easy.
Simply adding more CPUs, or central processing units, to scale Jaguar to 20 petaflops would require enough energy to power 60,000 homes. To best their own record, the Oak Ridge engineers instead turned to video games—or more precisely, to the graphics processors used in Microsoft Xboxes, Nintendo Wiis and other video game systems.
As of Monday Jaguar becomes Titan, a supercomputer that leverages both CPU and GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerators to deliver 10 times the performance of Jaguar with more than five times the power efficiency.
The key to Titan's speed and efficiency is a design that uses more than 18,500 NVIDIA GPUs, along with nearly 300,000 CPU cores, which typically form the foundation of high-performance computers. The GPUs account for about 90 percent of the system's computational performance and enable Titan to remain roughly the same size as Jaguar.

When fully brought up to speed, Titan (a Cray XK7 system) promises to be the world's most powerful open-science supercomputer, even more powerful than the DoE's Sequoia, a 16.3-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q system crowned the world's fastest supercomputer in June. Sequoia differs from Jaguar/Titan, which placed sixth on the list, in that Sequoia is used exclusively by the DoE's National Nuclear Security Administration to monitor U.S. nukes. Titan will be used by a variety of researchers for a variety of projects.
Titan will initially support a handful of key projects at Oak Ridge, including Denovo, simulation software that models the behavior of neutrons in a nuclear power reactor. Oak Ridge's engineers designed Denovo for Jaguar as a way to help extend the lives of the U.S.'s aging nuclear power plants, which provide about a fifth of the country's electricity. Running Denovo, Titan will take 13 hours to model the complete state of a reactor core at a specified point in time, a job that took Jaguar 60 hours to perform.
"The ability to burn nuclear fuel uniformly is very much dependent on knowing and being able to predict the distribution of neutrons in the core," says Tom Evans, a computational scientist at Oak Ridge's Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), which created Denovo. Titan will enable much more precise simulations.
Titan calculations will also be used to provide nanoscale analysis of materials used to build electric motors and generators as well as model the burning of a variety of fuels in internal combustion engines. Still another application will simulate long-term global climate. A sizable amount of Titan's capacity in the coming year will be devoted to the DoE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program (INCITE), which invites academia, government researchers and industry to apply for access to the supercomputer for their various projects.  More >>

Cuba on my mind/ National Geographic

Juan Valdes*

New and Complete Map of Cuba, supplement to National Geographic magazine, October 1906; NG Maps.

Since our first post, this blog has addressed the history of cartography at National Geographic, geographic names (toponyms), and even the cartographic exploits of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, the American artist best known for the painting “Whistler’s Mother.” I hope that these topics have proven of interest to some if not all of you. But what we have not addressed is the personal more intimate side of cartography here at the Society.

Unquestionably, National Geographic is the place to be if you love the science as well as the art of mapmaking. Our production schedules are full of stimulating and challenging projects that often test our knowledge of the cartographic profession. Once in a while, we will be assigned a project so close and near to our hearts that it becomes an overriding passion. Several months ago, I was given such an assignment—a large format (36″ x 24″) political map of Cuba.

The last time the Society published such a map was in October 1906! Those of you in the exiled Cuban community, both in the U.S. and abroad, know the significance of this map. Anyone who has visited Miami’s Little Havana, Tampa’s Ybor City, or even Union City, New Jersey, can’t avoid seeing maps of Cuba painted on walls, plastered on windows, or even printed on the sides of grocery bags.

To Cuban exiles of a certain generation, such maps bear more significance than any mere icon—they serve as portals to a place and time forever frozen in our hearts and minds. The mere site of them awakens our senses. They evoke the smell of sugar being processed in the mills, the taste and feel of a mango, and even the sounds of dominoes being shuffled on a tabletop.

So you may be wondering where I’m going with this blog. Well, I thought it could serve as a preface for a series of blogs on the making of our new map of Cuba. In future posts, the project’s staff will provide you with their experiences in the production of this map. And perhaps by the time it’s printed in June, you will also have Cuba on your minds.

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*Cuban born Juan José Valdés is The Geographer and National Geographic Maps' Director of Editorial and Research. He guides and assists the Map Policy Committee in setting border representations, disputed territories, and naming conventions for National Geographic. As NG Map's Director of Editorial and Research, he is responsible for ensuring the accuracy and consistency of its maps and map products. Also he is a Peter Pan refugee.