which comprises groups from the universities of Basel Lausanne Geneva and ETH Zurich and representatives from IBM.
#Scientists use light to make mice asocial California Institute of technology rightoriginal Studyposted by Jessica Stoller-Conrad-Caltech on September 19 2014scientists have discovered antagonistic neuron populations in the mouse amygdala that control
That is when high-intensity light was used the mice became aggressive in the presence of an intruder mouse.
When the neurons associated with asocial behavior were turned on the mouse began self-grooming behaviors such as paw licking
For example if a lone mouse began spontaneously self-grooming the researchers could halt this behavior through the optogenetic activation of the social neurons.
and the activation stopped the mouse would return to its self-grooming behavior. Surprisingly these two groups of neurons appear to interfere with each other s function:
#Color display designed for squid skin camo Rice university rightoriginal Studyposted by Jade Boyd-Rice on September 16 2014scientists have developed a new full-color display technology that once refined could be a critical component for creating artificial
The technology uses aluminum nanoparticles to create the vivid red blue and green hues found in today s top-of-the-line LCD televisions and monitors.
The color display technology delivers bright red blue and green hues from five-micron-square pixels that each contains several hundred aluminum nanorods.
and the spacing between them researchers Stephan Link and Jana Olson showed they could create pixels that produced dozens of colors including rich tones of red green
and blue that are comparable to those found in high-definition LCD displays. luminum is useful
and washed outsays Link associate professor of chemistry at Rice and the lead researcher on the PNAS study. he key advancement here was to place the nanorods in an ordered array. lson says the array setup allowed her to tune the pixel s color in two
Olson s five-micron-square pixels are about 40 times smaller than the pixels used in commercial LCD displays.
To make the pixels she used aluminum nanorods that each measured about 100 nanometers long by 40 nanometers wide.
She used electron-beam deposition to create arrays regular arrangements of nanorods in each pixel.
She was able to fine-tune the color produced by each pixel by using theoretical calculations by Rice physicists Alejandro Manjavacas a postdoctoral researcher
and Link say the research team hopes to create an LCD display that uses many of the same components found in today s displays including liquid crystals polarizers and individually addressable pixels.
The photonic aluminum arrays would be used in place of the colored dyes that are found in most commercial displays.
and the inherent directionality of the nanorods provides another advantage. ecause the nanorods in each array are aligned in the same direction our pixels produce polarized lighthe says. his means we can do away with one polarizer in our setup
It could be useful in a number of ways. hey hope to further develop the display technology
In addition University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign co-principal investigator John Rogers and colleagues published a proof-of-concept study in PNAS in August about new methods for creating flexible black-and-white polymer displays
and relay commands this tiny wireless chip costs pennies to Make it's cheap enough to become the missing link between the internet as we know it
and the linked-together smart gadgets envisioned in the nternet of Things. he next exponential growth in connectivity will be connecting objects together and giving us remote control through the websays Amin Arbabian an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford university who recently demonstrated this ant
We have the internet to carry commands around the globe and computers and smartphones to issue the commands.
What's missing is a wireless controller cheap enough to so that it can be installed on any gadget anywhere. ow do you put a bidirectional wireless control system on every lightbulb?
Arbabian asks. y putting all the essential elements of a radio on a single chip that costs pennies to make. ost is critical
Everything hinged on squeezing all the electronics found in say the typical Bluetooth device down into a single ant-sized silicon chip.
The antenna had to be small one-tenth the size of a Wi-fi antenna and operate at the incredibly fast rate of 24 billion cycles per second.
Arbabian has used these prototypes to prove that the devices work they can receive signals harvest energy from incoming radio signals
He thinks this technology can provide the web of connectivity and control between the global internet and smart household devices. heap tiny self-powered radio controllers are an essential requirement for the Internet of Thingssays Arbabian.
Source:
#Detector could vastly improve night-vision goggles Monash University right Original Studyposted by Glynis Smalley-Monash on September 8 2014 Researchers have developed a light detector that could revolutionize chemical-sensing equipment and night-vision technology.
#This smartphone case is 3x harder than steel Yale university Posted by Jim Shelton-Yale on September 5 2014a new smartphone case is lightweight thin harder than steel
Smartphone cases were a natural but challenging next step. t s obvious. The important properties in a cell phone case are hardness
and weightschroers says. He and his team produce the cases by blow-molding BMG sheets into brass molds to precise specifications.
which constitutes a huge advance in making smartphones more waterproof. With the right manufacturing partner Schroers says he could scale up production by late 2015.
and alerting users by sending out a wireless signal. ressure changes and temperature fluctuations happen around us all the time in the environment
which could provide another source of energy for certain applicationssays Shwetak Patel associate professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering at the University of Washington.
and data collected by the sensors is sent wirelessly to a receiver. A number of battery-free technologies exist that are powered by solar and ambient radio frequency waves.
The researchers say this technology would be useful in places where sun and radio waves can t always penetrate such as inside walls
or bridges and below ground where there might be at least small temperature fluctuations. For instance the device could be placed in an attic
and send data wirelessly to a receiver 5 meters away. That means any slight shift in an office building s air conditioning or the natural outside air temperature during the course of a day would be more than enough to activate the chemical in the bellows.
With our web page and source code others can download and build their own power harvesters. dditional researchers from University of Washington
The team will present its research at the Association for Computing Machinery s International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous computing this month in Seattle.
The Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing at the University of Washington and the Sloan Foundation supported the work.
and the prototype was created in the clean room at the IBM Research Centre in Ruschlikon Switzerland.
or the study the research team trained animals (Rhesus macaques) to use a brain-computer interface (BCI) similar to ones that have shown recent promise in clinical trials for assisting quadriplegics
and directed the recordings into a computer which translated the activity into movement of a cursor on
the computer screen. This technique allowed the team to specify the activity patterns that would move the cursor.
The test subjects goal was to move the cursor to targets on the screen which required them to generate the patterns of neural activity that the experimenters had requested.
Byron M. Yu assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie mellon believes this work demonstrates the utility of BCI for basic scientific studies that will eventually impact people s lives. hese findings could be the basis
Unlike other water splitters that use precious-metal catalysts the electrodes in the Stanford device are made of inexpensive and abundant nickel
professor at Stanford university. his is the first time anyone has used non-precious metal catalysts to split water at a voltage that low.
But scientists have yet to develop an affordable active water splitter with catalysts capable of working at industrial scales. t s been a constant pursuit for decades to make low-cost electrocatalysts with high activity
Demille and his colleagues built their own apparatus in a basement lab. It is an elaborate multilevel tangle of wires computers electrical components tabletop mirrors and a cryogenic refrigeration unit.
In developing countries keeping track of a baby s vaccine schedule on paper is largely ineffective says Anil Jain professor of computer science
They used an optical fingerprint reader to scan the thumbs and index fingers of babies and toddlers.
From this scanned data a schedule will be created and become a part of the vaccine registry system.
but we have shown its feasibilityjain says. e will continue to work on refining the fingerprint matching software
or mobile devices to harvest solar energy without obscuring the view. Past efforts to create similar materials have been disappointing with inefficient energy production
The technology is featured in the journal Advanced Optical Materials. t opens a lot of area to deploy solar energy in a nonintrusive waylunt says. t can be used on tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e reader.
#Algorithms could adjust screens to your vision University of California Berkeley Original Studyposted by Sarah Yang-Berkeley on August 15 2014.
Researchers are developing vision-correcting displays for computer monitors that would let people see text and images clearly without their glasses or contact lenses.
The technology could potentially help hundreds of millions of people who currently need corrective lenses to use their smartphones tablets and computers.
More importantly the displays could one day aid people with more complex visual problems known as high order aberrations
which cannot be corrected by eyeglasses says Brian Barsky professor of computer science and vision science and affiliate professor of optometry at University of California Berkeley. e now live in a world where displays are ubiquitous
and being able to interact with displays is taken for grantedsays Barsky who is leading this project. eople with higher order aberrations often have irregularities in the shape of the cornea
and this irregular shape makes it very difficult to have a contact lens that will Fit in some cases this can be a barrier to holding certain jobs
because many workers need to look at a screen as part of their work. he UC Berkeley researchers
and Ramesh Raskar colleagues at the Massachusetts institute of technology to develop their latest prototype of a vision-correcting display.
The setup adds a printed pinhole screen sandwiched between two layers of clear plastic to an ipod display to enhance image sharpness.
A paper on their findings is available in ACM Transaction on Graphics. he significance of this project is that instead of relying on optics to correct your vision we use computationsays lead author Fu-Chung Huang who worked on this project as part of his computer science Phd dissertation at UC
and it is non-intrusive. he algorithm which was developed at UC Berkeley works by adjusting the intensity of each direction of light that emanates from a single pixel in an image based upon a user s specific visual impairment.
In a process called deconvolution the light passes through the pinhole array in such a way that the user will perceive a sharp image. ur technique distorts the image such that
when the intended user looks at the screen the image will appear sharp to that particular viewersays Barsky. ut
if someone else were to look at the image it would look bad. n the experiment the researchers displayed images that appeared blurred to a camera which was set to simulate a person who is farsighted.
This latest approach improves upon earlier versions of vision-correcting displays that resulted in low-contrast images.
The new display combines light field display optics with novel algorithms. Huang now a software engineer at Microsoft corp. in Seattle notes that the research prototype could easily be developed into a thin screen protector
and that continued improvements in eye-tracking technology would make it easier for the displays to adapt to the position of the user s head position. n the future we also hope to extend this application to multi-way correction on a shared display
so users with different visual problems can view the same screen and see a sharp imagesays Huang.
The National Science Foundation helped support this work t
#Copper foam could make extra CO2 useful Brown University rightoriginal Studyposted by Kevin Stacey-Brown on August 14 2014a catalyst made from a foamy form of copper has vastly different electrochemical
properties from catalysts made with smooth copper in reactions involving carbon dioxide according to the new study.
if you roughen the surface of planar copper it would create more active sites for reactions with CO2. opper foam
Furthermore an explanation for core-collapse supernovae which calcium-rich transients resemble although fainter is the collapse of a massive star in a binary system where material is stripped from the massive star undergoing collapse.
or create an event that would look like a supernova. he researchers then compared their data to
The artificially generated faces were synthesized computer based on previous research showing that cues such as higher inner eyebrows
and computer-generated faces and rated how trustworthy or untrustworthy they appeared. As previous studies have shown subjects strongly agreed on the level of trustworthiness conveyed by each given face.
or NIR-IIA involves injectingâ water-soluble carbon nanotubes into a live mouse s bloodstream. The researchers then shine a near-infrared laser over the rodent s skull.
Fan is developing the sensor with Zhaohui Zhong an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and Girish Kulkarni a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering.
or elsewhere or provide data about air quality. ith our platform technology we can measure a variety of chemicals at the same time
if we need to see individual cells within a large volume of tissue#within a mouse kidney for example
and put all of the images back together with a computer. t s a very time-consuming process and it is error prone especially
#Wi-fi backscatter could make Internet of things real A new method uses radio frequency signals as a power source
and reuses existing Wi-fi infrastructure to provide internet connectivity to battery-free devices. Called Wi-fi backscatter this technology is the first that can connect battery-free devices to Wi-fi infrastructure.
Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it all without requiring batteries.
and connect these devices to the internet has kept this from taking off. f Internet of things devices are going to take off we must provide connectivity to the potentially billions of battery-free devices that will be embedded in everyday objectssays Shyam Gollakota an assistant professor of computer science
and engineering at the University of Washington. e now have the ability to enable Wi-fi connectivity for devices
what Wi-fi typically requires. he researchers will publish their results at the Association for Computing Machinery s Special interest Group on Data communication s annual conference this month in Chicago.
or cords by harnessing energy from existing radio TV and wireless signals in the air. This work takes that a step further by connecting each individual device to the internet
which previously wasn t possible. The challenge in providing Wi-fi connectivity to these devices is that conventional low-power Wi-fi consumes three to four orders of magnitude more power than can be harvested in these wireless signals.
The researchers instead developed an ultra-low power tag prototype with an antenna and circuitry that can talk to Wi-fi-enabled laptops or smartphones while consuming negligible power.
These tags work by essentially ookingfor Wi-fi signals moving between the router and a laptop or smartphone.
They encode data by either reflecting or not reflecting the Wi-fi router s signals slightly changing the wireless signal.
Wi-fi-enabled devices like laptops and smartphones would detect these minute changes and receive data from the tag.
In this way your smart watch could download emails or offload your workout data onto a Google spreadsheet. ou might think how could this possibly work
when you have a low-power device making such a tiny change in the wireless signal?
But the point is if you re looking for specific patterns you can find it among all the other Wi-fi reflections in an environmentsays coauthor Joshua Smith an associate professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering.
The Wi-fi backscatter tag has communicated with a Wi-fi device at rates of 1 kilobit per second with about 2 meters between the devices.
They plan to extend the range to about 20 meters and have filed patents on the technology.
The University of Washington Commercialization Gap Fund the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Washington Research Foundation the National Science Foundation and the University of Washington supported the work.
Source: University of Washington You are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license
#Algorithm edits boring bits out of Gopro videos Carnegie mellon University Posted by Byron Spice-Carnegie mellon on August 5 2014.
It's easy to capture video with smartphones Gopro cameras and Google glass but viewing it can get boring.
A new video highlighting technique can automatically pick out the interesting parts. Called Livelight this method constantly evaluates action in the video looking for visual novelty
and ignoring repetitive or eventless sequences to create a summary that lets a viewer get the gist of
or Google glass for example and quickly upload thumbnail trailers to social media. The summarization process avoids generating costly internet data charges and tedious manual editing on long videos.
This application along with the surveillance camera auto-summarization is now being developed for the retail market by Panoptus Inc. a startup founded by the inventors of Livelight.
and can do so on a conventional laptop. With a more powerful backend computing facility production time can be shortened to mere minutes according to the researchers.
Eric P. Xing professor of machine learning and Bin Zhao a Phd student in the machine learning department presented their work on June 26 at the Computer Vision
and Pattern Recognition Conference in Columbus Ohio. he algorithm never looks backsays Zhao whose research specialty is computer vision.
Rather as the algorithm processes the video it compiles a dictionary of its content. The algorithm then uses the learned dictionary to decide in a very efficient way
if a newly seen segment is similar to previously observed events such as routine traffic on a highway.
Segments thus identified as trivial recurrences or eventless are excluded from the summary. Novel sequences not appearing in the learned dictionary such as an erratic car
or a traffic accident would be included in the summary. Though Livelight can produce these summaries automatically users can also participating in compiling the summary.
In that instance Zhao says Livelight provides a ranked list of novel sequences for a human editor to consider for the final video.
The ability to detect unusual behaviors amidst long stretches of tedious video could also be a boon to security firms that monitor and review surveillance camera video.
Google, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the Air force Office of Scientific research supported the work r
A previously unpublished measurement of LB1 s occipital-frontal circumference the circumference of the skull taken roughly above the tops of the ears allowed the researchers to compare LB1 to clinical data routinely collected on patients with developmental disorders.
when we can use DNA sequencing on a very large scale. he yearlong study is one of the first to utilize a massive amount of genetic data to answer questions about the history of butterflies and moths.
and his team found that it s most similar to a population of wild rice species found in one location along the Niger river in Mali. ur data supports the hypothesis that the domestication of African rice was centric in this region of Africawing says.
That progressively opens a band gap beginning at about 3 percent tension according to the computations. The team created a phase diagram to illustrate the relationship of the band gap to strain and temperature.
The researchers used the Data analysis and Visualization Cyberinfrastructure (DAVINCI) supercomputer supported by the NSF and administered by Rice s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information technology.
Source: Rice Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license m
#Crows beat test that stumps little kids University of California Santa barbara right Original Studyposted by Andrea Estrada-UCSB on July 25 2014 In Aesop s fable about the crow
US Attorney general Eric holder Jr. was quoted recently in news reports as having xtreme extreme concernabout Yemeni bomb makers joining forces with Syrian militants to develop these hard-to-detect explosives which can be hidden in cell phones and mobile devices.
likely because computers don make judgments or look down on people the way another human might.
which will appear in Computers in Human Behavior, researchers recruited 239 adults through Craigslist. The participants,
The mere belief that participants were interacting with only a computer made them more open and honest, researchers found,
video analysis of the study subjectsfacial expressions showed that they were also more likely to show more intense signs of sadnesserhaps the most vulnerable of expressionshen they thought only pixels were present.
director of virtual humans research and a professor of computer science. he virtual character delivered on both these fronts and that is
and related the illness data with the presence or absence of parasites or viruses. In the Newfoundland colonies the researchers found the parasite Nosema apis a species that has been displaced by Nosema ceranae elsewhere
#Vibrating glove could teach you Braille A new wireless computing glove can help people learn to read
Audio cues let the users know the Braille letters produced by typing that sequence. Afterwards, everyone tried to type the phrase one time, without the cues or vibrations, on a keyboard.
Participants played a game for 30 minutes and were told to ignore the gloves. Half of the participants felt repeated vibrations and heard the cues,
No one in the study had typed previously on a Braille keyboard or knew the language. The study also didn include screens or visual feedback,
so participants never saw what they typed. They had no indication of their accuracy throughout the study. he only learning they received was guided by the haptic interface,
The Braille studies will be presented in Seattle this September at the 18th International Symposium on Wearable computers (ISWC.
and enable the economic production of gas resources with higher carbon dioxide content that would be too costly to recover using current carbon capture technologies says James Tour professor of mechanical engineering and nanoengineering and of computer science at Rice university.
It should provide us with new insights into how rhythmic brain activity supports core memory processes.
and outputs of this process but a microscopic quantum mechanical description of how the light excites the electrons is lacking.
and optical communications that are the basis for the internet and cable TV. The optical and electronic properties of metals cause excitons to last no longer than approximately 100 attoseconds (0. 1 quadrillionth of a second.
They connected their system to a computer and demonstrated that they could use it to scan
Vanderbilt University rightoriginal Studyposted by David Salisbury-VU on May 22 2014imagine a future in which plugs and external power sources no longer limit our electrical gadgets.
This possibility is one of the reasons for the current interest in building the capacity to store electrical energy directly into a wide range of products such as a laptop
today computers are ridiculously slow and take about 40,000 times more power to run. rom a pure energy perspective,
Their strategy was to enable certain synapses to share hardware circuits. The result was called a device Neurogrid.
It about the size of an ipad and can simulate many more neurons and synapses than other brain mimicking devices using only about the power it takes to run a tablet computer.
But it still a power hog compared to the brain. he human brain, with 80,000 times more neurons than Neurogrid, consumes only three times as much power,
which aims to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. By contrast the US BRAIN Projecthort for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologiesas taken a tool-building approach by challenging scientists to develop new kinds of tools that can read out the activity of thousands
Zooming from the big picture, Boahen article focuses on two projects comparable to Neurogrid that attempt to model brain functions in silicon and/or software.
IBM OLDEN GATECHIP One of these efforts is IBM Synapse Projecthort for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics.
with IBM on track to greatly increase the numbers of neurons in the system. HICANN CHIP FOR BRAIN SIMULATORS Heidelberg University Brainscales project has the ambitious goal of developing analog chips to mimic the behaviors of neurons and synapses.
Their HICANN chiphort for High Input Count Analog Neural Networkould be the core of a system designed to accelerate brain simulations
with a roadmap to greatly expand that hardware base. Each of these research teams has made different technical choices,
such as whether to dedicate each hardware circuit to modeling a single neural element (e g.,, a single synapse) or several (e g.,
, by activating the hardware circuit twice to model the effect of two active synapses. These choices have resulted in different trade-offs in terms of capability and performance.
With that cheaper hardware and compiler software to make it easy to configure, these neuromorphic systems could find numerous applications.
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