#Computer solves 120-year-old biology problem that had stumped scientists Can computer software invent scientific theories and ideas as well as crunch numbers?
That's the suggestion being put forward by Michael Levin and Daniel Lobo, two computer scientists at Tufts University, Massachusetts in the US,
who have programmed a computer to come up with its own scientific hypothesis on one of biology's most well-known mysteries.
The mystery in question: how the genes of a sliced-up flatworm regenerate into new organisms.
"The computer program created by Levin and Lobo was designed to repeat real-life studies over and over again, making small tweaks each time.
Essentially, the computer was guessing how a worm's genes connect together, and simulating a new theory each time
-if the end results were closer to data obtained in the real world, it took another step in that direction;
After three days, the software came up with a core genetic network code that matched all of the hundreds of actual experiments in its database.
but the actual software took years to put together. A customised computer language was required before the software could handle the available data,
and of course all that data had to be collected and collated from the various scientific research projects that have taken place down the years.
Only with the right raw materials in place could the program draw its conclusions.""The invention of models to explain what nature is doing is the most creative thing scientists do...
where functional data exist but the underlying mechanism is hard to guess.""Levin and Lobo's work has been published in the journal PLOS Computational biology,
Next up, the computer scientists are tackling the question of metastasis: how cancer begins to spread through the body o
#Engineers have created a computer that operates on water droplets Researchers in the US have built a fully functioning computer that runs like clockwork-but instead of electrons,
the same way that regular computers manipulate information. Although this new water-based computer could theoretically do everything a normal computer can thanks to its universal logic gates,
it much slower than the devices we currently use. But the team has far bigger plans in mind for their invention-revolutionising the way we process
"We already have digital computers to process information Our goal is to build a completely new class of computers that can precisely control
"Imagine if when you run a set of computations that not only information is processed but physical matter is manipulated algorithmically as well.
Prakash first came up with the idea for the computer nearly a decade ago, but although it was easy enough to work out how to control water droplets-by infusing them with magnetic nanoparticles
In regular computers this is the role of the clock, which perfectly times every single movement within the system,
And it carries information using the absence of presence of water droplets as the 1s and 0s of its binary code."
Theye hoping this will allow them to perform reactions that are done currently in bulk in test tubes with their computer-essentially,
and play around with the design to help take it to the next level. e are trying to bring the same kind of exponential scale up because of computation we saw in the digital world into the physical world,
#A new smartphone attachment could save you a trip to the eye doctor You might think nothing of a trip to the optometrist,
The D-EYE is a lens that clips onto the back of a smartphone (right now it works with the iphone 5
which is sent back to a specialist over the web. Thanks to the innovative mounting bumper, eye lens
"the inventors explain on the project's official site. The gadget has been developed by ophthalmologist Andrea Russo together with and Italian tech development firm Si14 Spa.
Once the link between doctor and patient is established, doctors are able to remotely control the device to choose where in the eye to look,
and levers created using the smartphone's LED flash camera lens and autofocus. It can compensate between-10d myopia (nearsightedness) to+10d hyperopia (farsightedness.
while the app is free to download. There are also plans for a cloud service to support the gadget
and to store the scans it takes. D-EYE isn't the only company looking to bring remote ophthalmic equipment into your own home.
#This origami-style battery could double the life of wearable gadgets If you own a smartwatch
-or indeed a smartphone-then you'll know that battery performance on modern-day gadgets isn't quite
The innovation here isn't so much the material used in the batteries-it's the same lithium-ion compound that makes up the smartphone batteries of today-but the way in
#Microsoft is building a drone army to catch mosquitoes and stop epidemics One potential use for drones that you might not have thought about is preventing the spread of disease.
Microsoft has launched just an initiative called Project Premonition, with the aim of detecting viruses before they infect a significant number of people using a fleet of Unmanned aerial vehicles (or UAVS).
because it carries so many pathogens,"Microsoft researcher Ethan Jackson, who is leading Project Premonition, told Allison Linn over on the company's blog."
"What we want to do is to be able to catch that mosquito efficiently, at scale and at low cost."
But Microsoft's new plan could greatly speed up this process and make it a lot cheaper, by sending out portable drones that are able to cover far more distance
To do this, they're developing software that will be able to quickly and accurately process genetic data collected by their mosquito-hunting UAV fleet,
giving researchers a better idea of the viruses that are out there and how they're spreading.
but Microsoft carried out a feasibility study in Grenada in the Caribbean in March, and presented its findings at the Microsoft Innovation Techfair in WASHINGTON DC last week.
The company now says it's working with academic partners across multiple disciplines to make Project Premonition a reality within the next five years.
By developing cloud databases and algorithms to store all of this data, the researchers behind Project Premonition hope to build a robust system capable of spotting dangers to humans and wildlife alike in the future u
Software studio Autodesk and construction firm Heijmans are two of the partners working with MX3D on the eye-catching project
The site is set to be a tourist attraction even before it's completed, with a visitor centre in the pipeline that will provide running updates on the bridge's process."
"What distinguishes our technology from traditional 3d printing methods is that we work according to the'printing outside the box'principle,
"MX3D Chief Technology Officer Tim Geurtjens says on the project site.""By printing with 6-axis industrial robots, we are limited no longer to a square box in
which everything happens. Printing a functional, life-size bridge is of course the ideal way to showcase the endless possibilities of this technique."
"The printing arms have been through several iterations to get them ready for the task: MX3D engineers say they've seen machines explode,
get clogged up and lose their bearings along the way, but now the final version of the hardware is ready to launch into action.
A small-scale test run has taken already place, producing a bridge a few feet across that could take the weight of a human being.
a self-contained bridge-printing robot could prove invaluable in connecting communities together again. In the meantime, keep your eyes on MX3D's new bridge in Amsterdam,
the team of students from Shanghai Jiao Tong University describe how they fitted one of their team members with a bluetooth electroencephalogram (EEG) headset.
and also highlights how close we're getting to a world like the one James cameron dreamed up in Avatar,
In a press release the students explain that their research"extended the traditional brain-computer interface technology
and tentatively attempted the avatar brain-brain communication"."The video on their research, which you can see below,
#This new technology lets you change the channel with your mind The BBC is testing a new type of headset that can read a user brainwaves
the headset has so far been tested by 10 BBC staff in their homes, using a customised version of BBC's iplayer platform.
head of business development for the BBC Digital, wrote in a blog post. The technology works by having iplayer cycle through a bunch of TV SHOWS,
and the headset allows the users to pick one using the strength of their brain activity.
so the user can either'tune out'mentally when they see a program theye not interested in,
which will show the user how close they are to successfully selecting a specific program.
If the user wants to switch programs or turn iplayer off halfway through, they will need to concentrate to turn on the iplayer main menu.
Nancy Owano describes the user reactions at Phys. org:""One user, smiling, said, 'It's nuts He was wondering if,
when watching with his son they would be fighting over brain waves to choose the program they could both watch.
Another user, looking puzzled over its being able to work as easily as it did said for her
technologists and other users an idea of how this technology might be used in future"."And while it will take a whole lot of upgrading to get even close to the speed and versatility of a good, old-fashioned TV remote,
it does offer some really interesting potential for people with disabilities. Tim Mildon from the BBC predicted that in the next 10 or 20 years,
The future of television is millions of people simultaneously rage quiting Game of Thrones with their minds every time religion burns a child i
#A deep learning machine just beat humans in an IQ TEST For the first time ever, a computer has outperformed humans in the verbal reasoning portion of an IQ TEST.
which involves converting data into a set of algorithms that a computer can make sense of.
Until now, computers have been pretty successful at beating humans in two out of the three parts of a standard intelligence quotient test,
In the past, the furthest programmers had gotten was to build machines that were capable of analysing millions of millions of texts to figure out which words are associated often with each other,
The researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research in Beijing, tried a different tack-they looked at words
Using an algorithm, they worked out how the words are clustered, and they then looked up the different definitions of each word in a dictionary.
The team helped the computers out further by feeding them multiple examples of questions so that they were able to recognise the question type
They then tested the computer against 200 human participants of various ages and educational backgrounds."
"This is a big step forward for artificial intelligence, and shows just how powerful deep learning can be.
The strategy has also been used to teach computers how to beat us at 49 old-school Atari games,
recognise food calories from a photo and even cook by watching Youtube videos.""With appropriate uses of the deep learning technologies, we could be a further step closer to the true human intelligence,
and reversibly disrupt Apc activity in a mouse with cancerous tumours in its colon. They already knew that the Apc gene was linked closely to an important pathway known as the Wnt signalling pathway,
According to Reuters, BMW has funded already software and applications that help electric car drivers locate nearby parking spots
#Material with superfast electrons displays mind-blowing magnetoresistance Researchers have found a material that could be used to build smaller and fast electronics in the future.
Known as giant magnetoresistance, this property is crucial to achieving the large storage capacity we've come to enjoy in our hard drives,
because helps computers to quickly read the information that's stored magnetically in hard drives. When materials with giant magnetoresistance are exposed to a magnetic field,
In comparison, the materials that are used currently in hard drives generally exhibit magnetoresistance of between 40 and 110 percent at room temperature.
"This material class therefore has enormous potential for future applications in information technology
#Here's how to make carbon nanoparticles with honey and a microwave Carbon nanoparticles can be incredibly useful in the treatment of many types of disease,
"The patch has been tested in mouse models and so far, looks very promising. According to the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
This doesn just mean the patch will be a hell of a lot more convenient for its users than the injection system,
and cheap tablet computers,"Ben Schiller points out at Fast Company, and the team at Caltech isn interested in adding busted loo to that list.
like any product,"lead software developer at Caltech, Cody Finke, told Schiller.""The difference between technology in the developed world and the developing world is that
visual information is captured by a tiny camera attached to the patient's glasses and sent to a pocket-sized computer,
If that all sounds very James cameron's Avatar to you, you're not wrong-the premise here isn't actually that dissimilar.
and combines Skype and basic robotics to create a remote body that allows a patient to feel
These instructions were sent via the Internet to a remote computer hooked up to a simple, wheeled robot.
seeing everything their robot does through Skype. The patient's face also appears on the computer screen."
"Each of the nine subjects with disabilities managed to remotely control the robot with ease after less than 10 days of training,"lead researcher José del R. Millán,
by adding the concept of wireless communication, the biosensor could be placed in one part of the body,
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.
#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.
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
Installed off the coast of Hawaii at the US NAVY's Wave Energy Test Site in Kaneohe bay, this 40-tonne,
or the other,"says the Doe website.""The Azura can harness movement in 360 degrees,
Using a computer model, they could predict whether the embryo will be chromosomally normal or abnormal as it develops."
#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.
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.
what IBM has done in its research lab into a full-scale manufacturing process. As well as replacing silicon with a silicon-germanium alloy,
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).
"For business and society to get the most out of tomorrow's computers and devices,
"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".
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.
neural networks and hive minds tend to create all kinds of problems for the unwitting humans who create or jack into them:
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,
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."
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
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,
#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,
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.
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,
But more than this, could aid in the development of new materials with improved performance such as LCD screens."
"Uptake of the current generation of organic solar cells has lagged behind more widespread silicon-based models, due to their comparative lack of performance even with a simplified construction via large printers.
as parts of phones and even cars. This discovery could help improve the performance of these solar cells,
#Huge 3-D displays without 3-D glasses Public screenings have become an important part of major sports events.
Currently it only has a modest resolution of five pixels by three but it clearly shows that the system works.
But the crucial point is that the individual laser pixels work. Scaling it up to a display with many pixels is not a problem says Jrg Reitterer (Trilite Technologies and Phd-student in the team of Professor Ulrich Schmid at the Vienna University of Technology.
Every single 3d-Pixel (also called Trixel) consists of lasers and a moveable mirror. The mirror directs the laser beams across the field of vision from left to right.
During that movement the laser intensity is modulated so that different laser flashes are sent into different directions says Ulrich Schmid.
To experience the 3d effect the viewer must be positioned in a certain distance range from the screen.
If the distance is too large both eyes receive the same image and only a normal 2d picture can be seen.
The newly developed display however can present hundreds of pictures. Walking by the display one can get a view of the displayed object from different sides just like passing a real object.
For this however a new video format is required which has already been developed by the researchers.
but we expect that new footage will be created especially for our displays--perhaps with a much larger number of cameras says Franz Fiedler CTO of Trilite Technologies.
Compared to a movie screen the display is very vivid. Therefore it can be used outdoors even in bright sunlight.
The team's most recent advance also brings the field closer to realizing carbon nanotube transistors as a feasible replacement for silicon transistors in computer chips
Additional authors on the ACS Nano paper include UW-Madison materials science and engineering graduate students Gerald Brady Yongho Joo and Matthew Shea and electrical and computer engineering graduate student Meng-Yin
Capacitors use an electrostatic charge to store energy they can release quickly, to a camera's flash, for example.
The predictive calculator also known as a nomogram was developed after the research team analyzed data from UCLA's 30 years of experience with liver transplantation for liver cancer.
and the existing American Joint Committee on Cancer pathologic TNM staging system giving transplant physicians and oncologists more information to work with in deciding how often to monitor for recurrence and whether or not adjuvant treatment
Publicly available data from 1994 to 2012 were compiled showing trends in U s . and international research funding productivity
Today's batteries provide a reliable power supply for our smartphones electric cars and laptops but are unable to keep up with the growing demands placed on them.
Dr Semih Afyon a scientist at the Electrochemical Materials Institute sums up the fundamental idea that is driving battery research:
This would be enough energy to power a mobile phone between 1. 5 and two times longer than today's lithium-ion batteries Afyon estimates.
#Robots learn to use kitchen tools by watching Youtube videos Researchers at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) partnered with a scientist at the National Information Communications technology Research Centre
The work will be presented on Jan 29 2015 at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence Conference in Austin Texas. The researchers achieved this milestone by combining approaches from three distinct research areas:
artificial intelligence or the design of computers that can make their own decisions; computer vision or the engineering of systems that can accurately identify shapes and movements;
and natural language processing or the development of robust systems that can understand spoken commands. Although the underlying work is complex the team wanted the results to reflect something practical and relatable to people's daily lives.
and understands it said Yiannis Aloimonos UMD professor of computer science and director of the Computer Vision Lab one of 16 labs and centers in UMIACS.
The work also relies on a specialized software architecture known as deep-learning neural networks. While this approach is not new it requires lots of processing power to work well
while for computing technology to catch up. Similar versions of neural networks are responsible for the voice recognition capabilities in smartphones
and the facial recognition software used by Facebook and other websites. While robots have been used to carry out complicated tasks for decades--think automobile assembly lines--these must be programmed carefully
and calibrated by human technicians. Self learning robots could gather the necessary information by watching others
#Researchers develop new instrument to monitor atmospheric mercury Researchers at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine
and monitor blue shifted atomic fluorescence. UM Rosenstiel School Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Anthony Hynes and colleagues tested the new mobile instrument
and how well future computers and other electronic devices will function. The new material, composed of both a semiconductor
and they have close research collaboration with Microsoft. The research is supported further by the Carlsberg Foundation and the Lundbeck Foundation n
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