They're made using tiny points of plasma light called voxels, that are created when the focused energy of a laser ionises the surrounding air.
The lasers used by the team from the University of Tsukuba's Digital Nature Group (DNG) are special femtosecond lasers transmitting in bursts of 30 to 270 femtoseconds (1 femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second
Combined with a spatial light modulator, a mirror, and a Galvano scanner (used to precisely target lasers),
which monitors finger and hand movements. While previous experiments have achieved similar results, the DNG researchers say their study is the first to offer such a high resolution without being harmful to the human touch.
"Our results led to calmer and safer plasma generation that can be incorporated into our daily lives."
#World first underground urban farm opens for business in London The world first underground urban farm has started trading in London,
making use of Old world War II tunnels underneath the city to host an eco-friendly,
sustainable farming business. rowing Underground (love the name!)uses hydroponics systems and LED lighting to produce a range of vegetables
and herbs including celery, rocket, parsley, radish, and mustard leaf. A pesticide free farming process-the results of 18 months of research
and preparation-has been designed to produce crops with the least amount of energy expenditure possible. The operators claim the hydroponics
and looped irrigation system they use requires 70 percent less water than open-field farming and can produce crops all year round,
but perhaps Growing Underground greatest asset when it comes to low-impact farming will be its location.
Buried underneath urban London in Clapham in the city southwest the project backers claim theyl be able to deliver produce rom farm to fork in under four hours and all without the usual environmental impact of truck-based food transportation across England motorways.
The farm will first supply local restaurants through market distribution, but will later sell directly to the public.
The farm makes use of WWII-era bomb shelters located 12 storeys underground that were designed originally to provide shelter for 8, 000 Londoners during air raids.
The depth of the facility now provides some much-needed insulation to help grow crops 52 weeks of the year
with the temperature constant at 16 degrees Celsius throughout the seasons. Not only is this an excellent example of how to breathe new life into an empty,
but it also provides the latest glimpse of how farming is moving into the 21st Century thanks to some pioneering high-tech agriculture ideas.
Already this year wee seen advancements like Japan largest indoor farm, which claims to be up to 100 times more productive than outdoor fields.
And a new development set to open in New jersey later this year is transforming an old steel factory into the world largest vertical farm.
this facility is expected to produce up to 1 million kilograms of pesticide free produce annually. With food supply management and security looking to be an increasing concern this century due to all sorts of environmental and economic factors,
it heartening to see food innovation like Growing Underground take off. Or should that be take root
#Soon your cracked smartphone screen will be able to self-repair A new self-repairing material has been developed by researchers in the UK
and they say itl be ready to integrate into everything from smartphone screens to nail varnish within the next five years.
The technology has been developed by a team from England University of Bristol, led by chemist Duncan Wass,
There could be self-healing car paint, bicycle frames and wind turbines that don crack, and car windshields that could repair themselves after an encounter with an airborne pebble.
It just a case of adding the substance to existing products, says King:""While the Bristol researchers have focused on aviation,
Right now, we're on the verge of smartphones that won't crack, and will charge from zero to 100 percent in 30 to 60 seconds, perhaps by harvesting energy from the air.
Just as many of us remember a time without mobile phones, soon we'll be looking back at how inconvenient and primitive those ubiquitous little devices in our pockets used to be k
#Wave generator powers US electrical grid for the first time The US has started receiving power from wave energy for the first time, thanks to a prototype wave generator called Azura.
Installed off the coast of Hawaii at the US NAVY's Wave Energy Test Site in Kaneohe bay, this 40-tonne,
bright yellow device is the first of what the national Department of energy (Doe) says could be a fleet of wave generators working together to supply clean, renewable power to America coastal cities.
Northwest Energy Innovations (NWEI), says the design will be improved and the new iteration will be installed deeper and in the vicinity of much bigger waves,
which Steve Dent from Engadget says will be enough energy to power several hundred homes. The key to the success of the Azura design is in how it manages to capture all aspects of movement in a wave,
which the Doe says marks a radical shift in how wave energy devices operate.""Waves have both side-to-side and up and down-down motion,
or the other,"says the Doe website.""The Azura can harness movement in 360 degrees,
bobbing, twisting and wobbling its way to a higher electricity output.""The team plans on installing the new megawatt-capable system in 2017,
and has been supplying wave energy to the local grid since February. According to World Ocean Review, the global potential of wave energy is estimated to be around 11,400 TWH per year,
with the potential for that to be converted into some serious useable energy.""Its sustainable generating potential of 1,
700 TWH per year equates to about 10 percent of global energy needs,"the Review States. If wee smart, wel get on that sooner rather than later h
#Abnormal IVF embryos can now be predicted within 30 hours of development The chromosomal abnormalities that affect at least half of the human embryos created for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) can now be predicted within the first 30 hours of development at the cell
-1 stage-days before they need to be transferred into a woman's body. The discovery could help improve the odds of an IVF embryo developing into a pregnancy.
The reason such low odds exist is that between 50 and 80 percent of all embryos created for IVF end up developing a severe chromosomal abnormality that can dramatically increase their chances of being miscarried,
This means that abnormalities can be detected at the earliest stage of human development, which will allow doctors to make a more informed choice
when selecting embryos for implantation, and spend less time culturing embryos that were never going to make it.
Prior to the discovery, abnormalities could only be detected at day five or six which means these embryos have to be cultured
and a waste of resources for the doctors, who could have been cultivating healthier embryos for her."
"A failed IVF attempt takes an emotional toll on a woman who is anticipating a pregnancy as well as a financial toll on families, with a single IVF treatment costing thousands and thousands of dollars per cycle,"one of the team,
Using a computer model, they could predict whether the embryo will be chromosomally normal or abnormal as it develops."
and research to improve a couple's chances of having a biological child of their own. This discovery can potentially increase those chances."
the researchers are keen to have continued their research by other teams to figure out even stronger markers for abnormalities i
#IBM creates the world's most powerful computer chip IBM has built a working version of a new computer chip,
At around four times more powerful than today's top-of-the-line technology, it should pave the way for a new generation of super-speedy computers and gadgets in the not-too-distant future.
All this power is made possible by transistors that are just 7 nanometres in size (7 billionths of a metre),
Today's smallest transistors are 14nm in size with 10nm versions on the way. Smaller transistors mean more can be packed into a single chip,
which in turn leads to faster smartphones, laptops, and computers. IBM's breakthrough is still a long way from getting into consumer gadgets,
but its lab work proves that 7nm transistors are possible. For a long time, computer technology has followed the path known as Moore's law,
named after Intel cofounder Gordon Moore. It states that computing power has the potential to double every two years,
and so far, it's held true. More recently, as computer chips get ever denser and the laws of physics start to restrict further improvements,
there been some doubt within the industry that Moore's law could continue to be applied.
But thanks to IBM's work and other projects across the world, it seems there's plenty of life in it yet.
The challenge now is translating what IBM has done in its research lab into a full-scale manufacturing process.
As well as replacing silicon with a silicon-germanium alloy, the technique also uses Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to etch the microscopic patterns required into each chip.
It's an incredibly delicate and detailed process, but the end results are a computer chip that's faster,
smaller, and more energy-efficient. A number of partners have been working with IBM on the technology,
including Globalfoundries, Samsung, and SUNY (the State university of New york). It's part of an overall research push that will cost them $3 billion over the course of five years."
"For business and society to get the most out of tomorrow's computers and devices,
scaling to 7nm and beyond is essential, "Arvind Krishna of IBM Research told The New york times,
adding that the breakthrough"builds on decades of research that has set the pace for the microelectronics industry".
"Globalfoundries'Gary Patton said the milestone is going to be essential in"helping to address the development challenges central to producing a smaller, faster, more cost-efficient generation of semiconductors".
"We can wait to see the results l
#Scientists link up monkey and rat brains in world-first experiment In a provocative study reminiscent of the hive mind network of Star Treksborg villains,
researchers have created shared brain networks for the first time by digitally linking multiple animal brains in two ground-breaking experiments.
Neuroscientists at Duke university in the US linked together the brains of monkeys and rodents in separate experiments to study how they can work together to perform simple computational tasks.
The neural network created, which the researchers call a rainet lets the animals share both sensory and motor information with one another,
Once connected, the three monkeys were able to control the movements of a virtual avatar arm on a computer screen in front of them.
Experts think society wouldn want it, even if it were technologically possible. here may be special instances where you want a long-term connection with someone like a married couple
or a military platoon, commented Anders Sandberg of the University of Oxford, who was involved not in the research. ut there no guarantee that brain-to-brain interfaces will be a sensible thing in practice.
neural networks and hive minds tend to create all kinds of problems for the unwitting humans who create or jack into them:
#Scientists are figuring out how to make medicinal marijuana, without the high Scientists have figured out how to separate the pain relieving qualities of medical marijuana from its psychological side-effects in an effort to offer people a new high-free option.
The research focussed on the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, known as THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which is not only responsible for the high associated with the drug-plus hallucinations, delusions, memory loss,
and feelings of anxiety or calm-it also been shown to slow tumour growth in mice.
And now, scientists have figured out that the mechanisms by which the drug delivers its desired medical effects
and negative psychological effects work independently from one another -which means that one can be switched off while the other one works its magic."
"There has been a great deal of medical interest in understanding the molecular mechanisms at work in THC, so that the beneficial effects can be harnessed without the side-effects,"one of the team,
Peter Mccormick from the University of East Anglia in the UK said in press release.""THC acts through a family of cell receptors called cannabinoid receptors.
Our previous research revealed which of these receptors are responsible for the anti-tumour effects of THC.
the researchers figured out that negative psychological side-effects of the drug, such as memory defects, mood swings, anxiety,
and paranoia, were triggered by a single pathway in the brain that was separate from the pathway that triggers the drug cancer-killing properties.
"Reporting the results in PLOS Biology, the team says with 5ht2ar turned off in mice,
and thinks it could be the key to medical marijuana without the negative side effects.""For me, the ideal drug would be in one of two scenarios:
In late-stage patients who had received already surgery, the blood test could also predict their chances of survival and relapses.
symptoms don often show until the disease has progressed to life-threatening stages, which means more than 80 percent of patients end up dying from it."
surgical oncologist David Linehan from the University of Rochester Medical centre in the US told Elaine Schattner at Forbes. The key to the new blood test is a tiny,
it thought that exosomes play a role in a whole bunch of biological processes such as coagulation, communication between cells, and waste management.
And more recently, theye been identified as potential markers for disease. Linehan and his team analysed exosomes in blood samples taken from 190 patients with pancreatic cancer, 32 with breast cancer,
called GPC1, was only being carried by exosomes in the blood of the cancer patients. According to Schattner at Forbes
and how likely it was to progress after surgery, based on how much of the protein was being carried by the exosomes.
because it's one of the cancers we don't have any reliable screening test for one of the researchers,
Derek Raghavan from the Levine Cancer Institute in the US told Linda Carroll at NBC News."It kills people
which means the team still needs to figure out how to properly differentiate between the different types of cancer it can detect in the final analysis.
But one of the team, Raghu Kalluri from the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in the US, told NBC News that he thinks the blood test could be available in as little as a year.
and treating this disease, and fast n
#This sensor technology could make recharging a thing of the past If you own a smartphone,
you're no doubt familiar with the nightly ritual of plugging it in to charge overnight so it doesn run out of juice halfway through the day.
Most personal gadgets, from phones to digital cameras, need regular top-ups to keep them from failing at the most inconvenient moment,
but now there a new technology that could finally reduce our dependency on wall sockets. New zealand tech firm Stretchsense has announced it's working on a new type of energy harvesting sensor that can bend and flex
generating power as it does So that power can be stored and called on when required, so in the future you might not have to hunt around for your charging adapter every evening.
Stretchsense CEO Ben O'brien introduced the technology at the 2015 Wearable technologies Conference in the US,
The new sensors have been patented and have completed the academic testing stage, according to O'brien, and the company is now in talks with more than 100 clients about ways they could be used with actual products.
when we'll be able to take advantage of this new sensor technology, and a commercial launch may still be some way off.
as these gadgets are naturally bending and shifting shape during the course of the day-something like the Apple Watch could benefit from the extra battery life provided by Stretchsense's sensors."
harvesting energy from human motion, "said O'brien.""Through our work with the University of Auckland, we have been able to create a compact,
price appropriate solution that in the near future should start to see commercial usage.""O'brien has described previously self-powering wearables as"the Holy grail"for the tech industry
and something Stretchsense is committed to bringing to market. The company lists medical monitoring, sportswear clothing and even connected cars as potential use cases for its technology-bend
and pressure sensors can measure how the forces of movement are affecting those inside a vehicle, for example.
Ultimately you could power up your fitness tracker just by hitting your daily step count,
and further down the line maybe even recharge your smartphone as it bounces around in your pocket or bag.
lighter and cheaper in the coming years, opening up new possibilities for the way our gadgets are designed and powered r
#The LHC has discovered a brand new class of particles Just months after switching the Large hadron collider (LHC) back on at record-breaking energy levels,
Quarks are the building blocks that make up composite subatomic particles, and these particles are classified depending on how many quarks they're comprised of.
Although his work was on baryons, the model allowed the existence of other quark composite states,
Pc (4450)+ and Pc (4380+.+After studying the mass of these particles, the team concluded that they could only be explained by being in pentquark states."
thanks to the huge amount of data provided by the LHCB.""It as if the previous searches were looking for silhouettes in the dark,
#Scientists figure out how to make solar cells produce fuel AND electricity A new type of solar cell can convert liquid water into clean hydrogen fuel 10 times more effectively than any other technology,
and uses 10,000 times less precious material in the process. Invented by researchers in The netherlands,
the secret to these new prototype solar cells are gallium phosphide nanowires, which can split water into its hydrogen
and oxygen components far more cheaply and efficiently than the batteries and semiconductor materials that have been used in the past.
The efficiency of solar cell technology has improved dramatically over the past decade and is now providing Germany with at least half its national energy requirements.
And earlier this year in The netherlands, it was announced that a tiny, 70-metre stretch of road covered in solar cells generated enough electricity to power an household for a year.
Over the past few years, scientists have been figuring out how to take things one step further by using solar cells to produce both fuel and electricity.
The dream is one day wel be using nothing but the boundless energy of the Sun to not only power our homes, but our cars
trains, and buses too. Previous studies have shown that connecting an existing silicon solar cell to a water-splitting battery can produce hydrogen fuel,
but it certainly not a cheap enough process to be a realistic alternative. The most promising option is using some kind of semiconductor material that can convert sunlight into an electrical charge while splitting water into useable components,
like an all-in-one solar fuel cell, but semiconductor materials aren cheap either. A team Eindhoven University of Technology investigated the potential of gallium phosphide (Gap),
which is a compound of gallium and phosphide that also used in the production of red,
orange, and green-coloured LED LIGHTS, and has shown great potential in terms of its electrical properties. But gallium phosphide is expensive to produce,
and when used in big, flat sheets, it not capable of absorbing sunlight as efficiently as needed for a viable solar cell system.
So the researchers tried producing a grid of tiny gallium phosphide nanowires measuring 90 nanometres thick and 500 nanometers long,
and integrated them with existing solar cell technology. Not only did they end up using 10,000 less gallium phosphide than
if they used it to build a flat surface, but they discovered a whole new way to make solar fuel."
"This immediately boosted the yield of hydrogen by a factor of 10 to 2. 9 percent,
even though this is still some way off the 15 percent achieved by silicon cells coupled to a battery."
no one going to use it no matter how much better for the environment it is. Their challenge now is to figure out how to increase the yield of their gallium phosphide grids
so their solar cells can meet this 15 percent battery yield.""For the nanowires we needed 10,000 less precious Gap material than in cells with a flat surface.
That makes these kinds of cells potentially a great deal cheaper, "lead researcher Erik Bakkers says.""In addition, Gap is also able to extract oxygen from the water
-so you then actually have a fuel cell in which you can temporarily store your solar energy.
In short, for a solar fuels future we cannot ignore gallium phosphide any longer.""The results have been published in Nature Communications u
The new procedure simply involves placing electrodes onto their lower back, where they deliver gentle electrical stimulation to the patients'spines through their skin.
but until now, they'd had to surgically implant an electrical device. This is the first time movement has been restored voluntarily without surgery."
"These encouraging results provide continued evidence that spinal cord injury may no longer mean a lifelong sentence of paralysis and support the need for more research,"Roderic Pettigrew,
a bioengineer at the US National institutes of health who wasn't directly involved in the study, said in a press release."
"The potential to offer a life-changing therapy to patients without requiring surgery would be a major advance;
it could greatly expand the number of individuals who might benefit from spinal stimulation.""The study was carried out over an 18-week period at the University of California,
Los angeles (UCLA). Each of the five participants had been paralysed for at least two years before they were fitted with the stick-on electrodes,
and they underwent one 45-minute training session each week, during which the researchers asked them to remain passive
or try to move their legs while electrical stimulation was applied to their backs. During the final four weeks of training, the men were given also a drug called buspirone,
which mimics the action of serotonin and has been shown to help mice with spinal cord injuries move again.
At the start of the study the men's legs only moved when the electrical stimulation on their backs was strong enough to generate an involuntary step.
The researchers believe that the treatment works by helping to reestablish communication between the brain and spinal cord."
a distinguished professor in biology and physiology at UCLA. The team backed up this hypothesis by recording the electrical signals generated in the men's calf muscles
if further noninvasive spinal stimulation and training can get them back on their feet-something that the four earlier patients who had implanted electrodes on their spines have achieved already
whether the procedure can help people with partial paralysis."We have focused on individuals with complete paralysis throughout this whole process
that those individuals with partial injuries have even more room for improvement.""""All patients are going to need something slightly different,
so that the physician and the patient can select a therapy that is best for them.""The results have been published open-access in the Journal of Neurotrauma u
#New Ebola vaccine is 100%successful in Guinea clinical trials A new single-dose vaccine has been shown to be 100 percent effective against Ebola after just one week.
000 people in Guinea offer the most promising evidence so far that we may be able to protect against the haemorrhagic fever.
Known as VSV-ZEBOV, the vaccine is now going through further trials in younger patients, and if all goes to plan could become the first licensed vaccine against Ebola.
As of right now around 28,000 people in Guinea, Sierra leone and Libera have been infected with Ebola,
A second study group of 3, 528 people were injected with the vaccine three weeks after they'd potentially been exposed to Ebola.
but the rest were protected fully against the haemorrhagic fever within six days.""Indeed, no vaccinee developed symptoms more than six days after vaccination, irrespective of whether vaccination was delayed immediate
or,"the researchers report in The Lancet. After it became clear that vaccinating people immediately was the best strategy,
the international team of researchers stopped waiting to vaccinate those at high-risk of infection.""The initial results of the study show that the vaccine can effectively contain the further spread of the Ebola virus,"the University of Bern in Switzerland,
which was involved in the research, wrote in a statement.""We believe that the world is on the verge of an efficacious Ebola vaccine,
"World Health Organisation (WHO) vaccine expert Marie Paule Kieny told reporters at a media briefing announcing the results on Friday.
The trial, which was supported by the drug firm Merck, THE WHO and the Canadian, Norwegian and Guinean governments, is now continuing in children between the ages of 13 and 17.
#Intel new memory format is 1, 000 times faster than current flash memory Tech giants Intel and Micron have announced a new class of computer memory called 3d XPOINT,
which the companies say is up to 1, 000 times faster than the conventional NAND flash memory we use in devices today.
and accessing data in the near-term future. In addition to the phenomenal speed gains 3d XPOINT is said to provide 1, 000 times greater endurance when saving new data to the memory.
It also 10 times denser than current flash, meaning it could lead to smaller components and ultimately even smaller devices.
While NAND might not exactly be a household name, it the kind of digital storage employed in virtually all small consumer electronics currently on the market:
memory cards, USB KEYS, and the solid-state drives found in everything from smartphones to ultraportable laptops (not counting older computers or desktop PCS that still use mechanical platter hard drives).
3d XPOINT speeds are enabled by its ultra-dense transistor-less architecture, which its makers describe as a hree-dimensional checkerboard where memory cells sit at the intersection of words lines and bit lines Don worry,
that doesn make much sense to us either, but effectively, the memory is made from a tightly constructed 3d lattice,
which cuts down on the lengths information has to travel, leading to substantially reduced read/write processes for data. or decades,
the industry has searched for ways to reduce the lag time between the processor and data to allow much faster analysis,
said Rob Crooke, Intel SVP of nonvolatile memory solutions, in a statement. his new class of nonvolatile memory achieves this goal
and brings game-changing performance to memory and storage solutions. hose performance gains will initially be felt in the corporate and government sector,
where Intel and Micron say the new technology will improve the efficiency of big data systems.
Examples the companies provide include faster methods for identifying fraud patterns in financial transactions, and enabling genetic researchers to draw upon vast data sets in real time without any lag.
with faster and tougher data mechanisms theoretically delivering benefits for everything from 3d gaming through to better and potentially cheaper solid state drives and personal storage devices.
Intel and Micron haven announced when products with 3d XPOINT will be available, but the technology is going into production this year,
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