In order to enhance soldiers? memory, a brain implant chip which simulates the hippocampus is being researched by a USC bioengineering team.
Scientists believe the implant will vastly improve the memory of troops so that they can recall every detail of their training and become more effective fighters.
Researchers at the University of Southern California’s bio-engineering department have created the chip, which acts in exactly the same way as the hippocampus – the part of the brain that deals with memory.
In experiments, the team removed that section of the brain of dead rats and inserted the chip in its place. The implant sent exactly the same electronic signals as the real thing.
The next stage of the project is to test the implant on live animals. If this work proves to be as successful, experiments could one day be carried out on soldiers.
News.com.au
Italian researchers who created the world’s first cloned horse have now created 14 cloned piglets that are aimed at improving xenotransplantation?the transplant of organs from pigs to humans.
The research was led by Cesare Galli of the Laboratory of Reproductive Technology in Cremona, where the pigs were born several weeks ago.
According to a BBC News report, the experiment was part of a European Union project to study stem cells in cloned animals.
The report notes that researchers are interested in pigs because they are close to humans in terms of anatomy and physiology.
BBC via BetterHumans
Controversial plans to research nuclear ?bunker busters? have been abandoned by the by the US in the country’s 2006?s budget.
NewScientist
As President Bush urges Americans to cut back on the use of oil in wake of the recent surge in prices, more and more people are looking for more viable alternatives to the use of petroleum as the main fuel for the automotive industry. IsraCast recently covered the idea developed at the Weizmann Institute to use pure Zinc to produce Hydrogen using solar power. Now, a different solution has been developed by an Israeli company called Engineuity. Amnon Yogev, one of the two founders of Engineuity, and a retired Professor of the Weizmann Institute, suggested a method for producing a continuous flow of Hydrogen and steam under full pressure inside a car. This method could also be used for producing hydrogen for fuel cells and other applications requiring hydrogen and/or steam.
It’s a unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside the car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum. According to the company, the system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars. When it becomes commercial in a few years time, the system will be incorporated into cars that will cost about the same as existing conventional cars to run, and will be completely emission free.
IsraCast
The Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, US, has taken its first spectacular image, even though one of its eyes is still shut.
The $120-million telescope is the first of its kind, being comprised of two 8.4-metre primary mirrors on the same mount. It is still being built, but when completed, the telescope should have vision 10 to 12 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope.
NewScientist
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM unveiled the Blue Gene/L supercomputer Thursday and announced it’s broken its own record again for the world’s fastest supercomputer.
The 65,536-processor machine can sustain 280.6 trillion calculations per second, called 280.6 teraflops, IBM said Thursday. That’s the top end of the range IBM forecast and more than twice the previous Blue Gene/L record of 136.8 teraflops, set when only half the machine was installed.
In addition, the lab unveiled a lesser known but also powerful machine with a speed up to 100 teraflops. The ASC Purple is built from more conventional IBM server products. Together, ASC Purple and Blue Gene/L cost $290 million. Both will be used for nuclear weapons simulations and other computationally demanding tasks.
C/Net
Kansai Electric has developed technology to transmit one terabit per second, using fiber-optic cables on power-transmitting steel towers.
The company, Japan’s second-largest power supplier, says it is possible could be introduced by 2010.
ABC via KurzweilAI
Some superstring-inspired theories of physics ascribe extra dimensions to our reality, dimensions which we can’t perceive with normal senses, but which may be available to gravitational forces, at least. One effect is to make the gravitational force stronger at short distances in our world, and greatly reduce the energy required in a particle accelerator to create a miniature black hole, to the point that the upcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may make them in abundance.
This article now suggests that these baby black holes may warp the surrounding space-time “membrane” (or “brane”) to the extent that it actually wraps around the hole and reconnects, leaving the black hole off in a new, separate, “brane”, effectively creating a tiny new universe in that region.
Scitation via SciScoop
Optical illusions that fool most people don’t seem to trick those who suffer from schizophrenia, concludes a study published in the latest issue of Current Biology. The success may actually be linked to a weakness in a brain mechanism called contextual processing, which is responsible for picking out relevant sensory information from the barrage of stimuli a person constantly experiences. If that’s the case, it may explain why some schizophrenics misunderstand other people’s actions in the context of a situation or feel paranoia or persecution.
Scientific American
Meet the robots that can perform surgery from within your own body. Their creators hope that the remote-controlled surgeons are a step towards a time when traditional open surgery is a thing of the past.
Just 8 centimetres long, the devices are designed to be slipped inside a patient’s abdomen through a tiny incision. Once inside the body, the robots can be controlled by surgeons either on-site or hundreds of kilometres away.
The miniature medics are equipped with lights and a camera to relay video images back to their operator, and an array of different tools that could help surgeons stop internal bleeding by clamping or cauterizing wounds.
“This is just the start of things to come,” says team member and surgeon Dmitry Oleynikov. “At some point the surgeon’s hands won’t need to be in the body at all.”
Nature
Public Enemy remains defiantly cutting edge, not just in its music but, equally importantly, in its approach to distributing its songs to fans. Ever a proponent of self-determination, the group has done more than any band to bypass the big labels and make music as it sees fit. In the late 1990s, when fellow rapper Dr. Dre sued Napster for making his songs available for free, Public Enemy’s Chuck D defended the renegade file-sharing service, arguing that the internet gives artists an unprecedented ability to subvert corporate control and connect directly with their fans.
As a jab to PolyGram, Public Enemy’s distributor at the time, the group released There’s a Poison Goin’ On over the internet and on zip drives, until the band was finally released from its contract.
Wired
Physicists in Spain and Germany have proposed a technique for sending cold atoms through an array of slits that are much narrower than the de Broglie wavelength of the atoms. The phenomenon, which relies on “surface matter waves”, could be used to make atomic circuits.
PhysWeb
Technology that provides live translation of speech from one language to another has been revealed by scientists from the US and Europe.
Mr. Jou, a graduate student in language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, was simply mouthing words in his native Mandarin Chinese. But 11 electrodes attached to his face and neck detected his muscle movements, enabling a computer program to figure out what he was trying to say and then translate his Mandarin into English.
The result boomed out of a loudspeaker a few seconds later;
Alex Waibel, a professor at both universities, demonstrated the system that almost instantly translates speech from one language to another by giving a talk in English that was converted simultaneously into German and Spanish. “We want everyone working together but to maintain our individuality,” Waibel told reporters.
Post-Gazette and NS
Office of Naval Research researchers have developed a way to build extremely small sensors using nanorobot fabrication.
It allows a human operator using a powerful microscope and hand-held controller to manipulate nano-sized contact points remotely to construct the pixel elements that will form the heart of the sensor. Each pixel will be composed of carbon nanotubes, which have nanoscale diameters and submicron lengths. Because of the one-dimensional nature of carbon nanotubes, they have significantly lower thermal noise than traditional semi-conductors. A full-sized camera incorporating this technology would be inexpensive and lightweight—about one tenth the cost, weight, and size of a conventional digital camera.
The proposed IR camera is being considered for other applications as well, including the field of breast cancer detection.
Science Daily
A molecule that flips its arms like the slats on a Venetian blind might in future find uses in computer displays, computer memory, or even windows that become tinted at the flick of a switch.
NewScientist
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