Synopsis: Ict:

#Computer program roots out ancestors of modern tongues In Fiji, a star is a kalokalo. For the Pazeh people of Taiwan, it is mintol,

An algorithm devised by researchers in Canada and California now offers an answer#in this case, bituqen.

Statistician Alexandre Bouchard-C# t#of the University of British columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and his co-workers say that by making the reconstruction of ancestral languages much simpler,

but the authors say that earlier algorithms tended to be rather intractable and prescriptive. Bouchard-C# t#and colleagues'method can factor in a large number of languages to improve the quality of reconstruction,

and it uses rules that handle possible sound changes in flexible, probabilistic ways. The program requires researchers to input a list of words in each language, together with their meanings,

The algorithm can automatically identify cognate words (ones with the same root) in the languages. It then applies rules known to govern sound changes to deduce the probable root of each set of cognates.

Bouchard-C# t#and his colleagues found that their predictions matched those of the manual method in about 85%of cases (including bituqen."

admits Bouchard-C# t#."It looks as though this method could be a very useful laboursaving device,

Bouchard-C# t#and his colleagues used the method to test a hypothesis about language evolution first proposed in 1955 (ref. 2),

#Europe bets on drug discovery Two sites shuttered by the pharmaceutical giant Merck, one in Scotland and one in The netherlands, will soon be humming again with the work of drug discovery.

the pharmaceutical partners will be able to use the library#including molecules from their competitors#in their own drug screens.

#Scientists use 3-D printer to speed human embryonic stem cell research A blog by Scientific American.

Depositing human embryonic stem cells in cultures using a 3-D printer offers some advantages.

so the Heriot-Watt and Roslin Cellab scientists developed a printing system driven by pneumatic pressure and controlled by the opening and closing of a microvalve.

any tissue formed would yield better models of human biology than those formed from mouse cells.

and the shapes of thousands of other molecules is getting an upgrade. A method described in Nature this week1 makes X-ray crystallography of small molecules simpler, faster and more sensitive,

and his colleagues used computer simulations to create a model of the protein shell of the virus that causes the disease,

as the Conservative government of Prime minister Stephen Harper tries to eliminate the deficit by 2015 amid a dreary economic outlook.

#'Hologram-lite'idea for 3d phone displays Now physicist David Fattal and his colleagues at Hewlett-packard Laboratories in Palo alto have developed a sort of'hologram-lite'approach.

the display beams different images in different directions, so that a person's left and right eyes see slightly different images#a requirement for the brain to process an image as 3d.

Moving the display screen around also produces different images, so that it appears as if the object were being viewed from up to 64 different vantage points over a field of view spanning 90 degrees.

as in an ordinary LCD screen#the display can also produce moving images. Figuring out how to modulate the LCD screen to produce the views is orders of magnitude easier than working out the complicated interference patterns needed to make a moving hologram visible from any direction,

says Fattal. And because each circular diffraction grating is just 12 micrometres across, the system is suited ideally to mobile technologies,

Existing 3d-display technologies tend to have larger pixel sizes and therefore operate better at distances of a few metres,

For example, many commercial 3d televisions use lenses to send underlying light sources in different directions. But the pixels in that case tend to be larger

Nick Holliman, a computer scientist at Durham University, UK, describes the work from Fattal's team as a very nice idea and a great technology demonstrator.

But it would be dauntingly expensive to maintain servers and staff to analyse the data

So Jalas, the centre s director of genetics resources and services, has outsourced parts of the analysis. He uploads his clients sequencing data to cloud-computing software platforms

And the cloud-based interfaces let him collaborate with doctors in Israel without worrying about repeatedly transferring data on slow Internet connections."

and software to make sense of those data.""It s a huge unmet need, says David Ferreiro, a biotechnology analyst with investment bank Oppenheimer & Company in New york,

and analysis software that by 2016 could top $4#billion per year, according to BCC Research, a market-research company in Wellesley,

which provides genetic analysis software on its cloud-based platform and allows users to upload and run their own algorithms.

Source: BCC Researchother firms offer a range of approaches. Seven Bridges Genomics, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

aims to be accessible to people with no expertise in bioinformatics, and provides access to free tools for designing custom-made analysis pipelines.

Ingenuity Systems in Redwood City, California, allows users to upload a list of mutations in a person s genome,

He says that they will have to prove that their products are better than freely available software

says Elizabeth Worthey, director of genomic informatics at the Human and Molecular genetics Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Bina Technologies in Redwood City sells a server that can sit in a customer s own data centre

and is optimized to run genome-analysis software. Knome of Cambridge Massachusetts, announced last year that it plans to sell $125, 000 genome-analysis machines for use in customers labs (see Nature 490,157;

or enter their nesting sites, or take off from the pavement, Brown explains. And that in turn would enable them to survive

and a detector captures the signals like a viewer watching a cinema screen. The system records activity from the full brain every 1. 3 seconds.

Lever now plans to analyse fragments of crust collected from other sites in the Pacific ocean and the North atlantic."

#Wireless brain-computer interface streams thought commands with the speed of an Internet connection Following more than a decade of engineering work,

a wireless brain-computer interface could finally give paralyzed people the ability to control everyday devices like TVS, computers,

The researchers say that the wireless BCI is able to stream thought commands via its radio at a rate of 48 megabits per second, about the speed of a home Internet connection.

The amount of data transmitted daily by the device equals about the amount of data stored on 200 DVDS.

Blackrock is already selling the wireless processor to research labs under the product name ereplex-W for about $15, 000.

The processor inside the device amplifies the electrical signals emitted by neurons, then translates the information into digital codes,

and the built-in radio beams this info to the receiver placed within a few meters. From this point the original thought command becomes available as a control signal for computers.

The device was developed by the Braingate consortium based at Brown University. Braingate was among the first to place implants in the brains of paralyzed people

Users can interact with Brainx3 in real-time by perturbing brain regions with transient stimulations to observe reverberating network activity,

Within the immersive mixed/virtual reality space of Brainx3 users can explore and analysis dynamical activity patterns of brain networks

This is the first time throughout the world that the spinal-cord activation patterns for walking have been decoded Paraplegics still have neural connections (so-called locomotion centers) below the site of the injury

Just like a set of building blocks, the neural network in the spinal cord is able to combine these basic patterns flexibly to suit the motor requirement,

it is the neural networks in the spinal cord that actually generate the complex motor patterns. These locomotion centers are to be found in most vertebrates.

and coordinating muscle movements in the legs should also help in developing new approaches to rehabilitation aimed at utilizing those neural networks that are still functional following an accident

Exactly how the neural networks need to be stimulated depends upon the patient individual injury profile and is the subject of further studies.

In previous studies using mouse models of fragile X, Bear and others discovered that the loss of this gene results in exaggerated protein synthesis at synapses, the specialized sites of communication between neurons.

Of particular interest, they found that this protein synthesis was stimulated by the neurotransmitter glutamate, downstream of a glutamate receptor called mglur5.

the researchers used a mouse model of 16p11.2 microdeletion, created by Alea Mills at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

biochemical, and behavioral analyses, the MIT team compared this 16p11.2 mouse with what they already had established in the fragile X mouse.

Synaptic protein synthesis was disrupted indeed in the hippocampus, a part of the brain important for memory formation.

which collectively occupy an area smaller than a millimeter in the mouse brain, are organized functionally in a seesaw-like fashion:

when he began experiments using newly developed fiber optic devices that allowed him to record Agrp-POMC activity in real time as mice were given food after a period of fasting. o one had recorded actually the activity of these neurons in a behaving mouse,

if we gave a hungry mouse some food, then slowly, over many minutes, it would become satiated

If you simply give food to the mouse, almost immediately the neurons reversed their activation state.

This happens when the mouse first sees and smells the food, before they even take a bite.

and mouse models with mutations in TBK1 or OPTN to study ALS disease mechanisms and to screen for drug candidates.

There are estimated to be 100 million cells in a mouse brain and 65 billion in a human brain.

it binds itself to catalytic sites on its surface. This essentially forms a coating that prevents the fibrils from assisting other proteins in misfolding

users would need to drink only one to two milliliters of the liquid to obtain a standard prescribed dose."

The country Center for Research in Legitimacy and Political Protest claims that it has developed a computer program that will sift through social media websites every five minutes looking for signs of organized political opposition.

it alerts law enforcement officials and others via a mobile phone app. The Russian site, Izvestia (via Google translate) says that illegal activity and unauthorized actions,

according to Russian law, includes: Meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets. The software dubbed Laplace Demon after Pierre-Simon Laplace theoretical all-seeing intellect that could calculate the future based on the state of all matter pays particular attention to social media groups known to organize such rallies

and monitors the number of likes and reposts. In this way, it can anticipate when momentum is building

and alert the authorities. Anyone caught participating in such unlawful activity as free speech will be fined up to about $600 (30,000 rubles)

Yevgeny Venediktov, Twitter is the main focus for the software. He wrote, e conducted a survey

and found out that it is precisely this social network is not only the leader among social media on the number of hosted links to extremist content,

"Duru wrote in a description of a Youtube video of the hoverboard's record-breaking flight.

#First-Ever Face recognition ATM Comes to China Some Chinese inventors have been developing high-tech innovations for everyday objects everything from umbrellas to a robot that delivers food to restaurant patrons

Researchers from Tsinghua University and Tzekwan technology, a financial security protection firm, have announced the first ATM that works with facial recognition capabilities, reports the South China Morning Post.

The researchers stated that this new kind of ATM MACHINE will apply facial recognition technology, high-speed banknote handling,

and exactly how these machines will collect facial recognition data. The United states currently does not use this kind of ATM biometric technology

but Baltimore Securityplus Federal Credit union did run a trial for a machine that used facial recognition tech

did that someone racist post on Facebook really stick in your craw and leave you peeved all morning,

but after using the head-mounted gadget a couple of times, says he has he wearable batting 1,

and bioengineering and Isy Goldwasser, is a wireless device that pairs with an iphone or ipad via a Bluetooth connection (Android app coming soon).

Using the app, you chose the kind of session, the intensity as well as the length of a session.

Google new venture called Project Soli enlists the help of radar to accurately detect minute hand

I/O developer conference, displaying how users could move their fingers in the air to control objects in the virtual world.

Google wants to put the chip into small electronic devices like smartwatches, along with everyday objects. The release date for the API to Soli has not yet been announced yet. via Business Inside n

The tiny robot is made of pre-cut polystyrene or paper panels which when heated, fold themselves into a very specific and asymmetrical shape.

#Facial recognition System Detects Pain It a dilemma that plagued doctors for centuries: When it comes to pain management,

Researchers at the UC San diego School of medicine are hoping that facial recognition and artificial intelligence systems might help solve the problem.

In a study published this week in the journal Pediatrics, the researchers suggest that the technology can indeed help with accurate pain level assessment.

The research team used specially designed software to analyze the facial expressions of 50 kids, ages 5 to 18 years old, recovering from laparoscopic appendectomies.

and computer vision (CV) and machine-learning (ML) techniques enable reliable, valid measurement of pain-related facial expressions from video.

The computer vision techniques used in the study are based on the Facial Action Coding system (FACS),

whereas a facial recognition system could provide constant monitoring. And in cases when pain comes in pulses or waves,

After an injection several centimeters into the brain of a laboratory mouse the scientists were able to monitor electronic brain signals.

#'Wi-fi'Nanoparticles Send Signals from the Brain The problem with talking to our own brains,

with the idea of establishing a kind of direct wireless connection to neurons. DNEWS: Brain-To-Brain Networking Takes First Baby Stepsthe agnetoelectricnanoparticles (MENS) injected in the mice have several special properties.

First, theye small enough to sidle up to the neural network itself. Within whispering distance, you might say.

the electric field can directly couple to the electric circuitry of the neural network. he nanoparticles could be used to deliver drugs to specific parts of the brain.

Wearable device Changes Your Moodthe technique could also be used to create a new kind of brain-computer interface.

#Brain-Sensing Headband Helps Users Manage Stress Technology and relaxation don always go hand in hand. However, a brain-sensing headband that reads brain waves

and provides real-time feedback has been developed to help users better focus and manage stress. The Muse headband is lined with seven EEG sensors that detect the brain electrical activity

and sends information about the user state of mind to a smartphone app, Calm, which is available on both ios and Android.

DNEWS: Is The Internet Really Ruining Your Attention span? Users are asked then to participate in a three-minute guided exercise that aims to reduce stress, calm anxiety and increase focus and concentration.

Results are provided through a series of graphs and charts, displaying performance and spikes that represent moments of distraction.

There also an option to track progress over time. Interaxon, the company behind the Muse headband and a Mars venture client, claims that sustained use of the device will train one brain to stay more naturally calm and focused.

Stress Slows Metabolismthe product website explains the benefits of focused attention training: esearch has shown using an app

#Printing Color Images Without Ink A new technology creates colorful images by manipulating light rather than applying ink.

producing the colorful logo. nlike the printing process of an inkjet or laserjet printer, where mixed color pigments are used,

Artists Discover 3-D Printingthe Missouri S&t team believes the mechanical coloring on the silver/silica materials provide a much higher printing resolution than conventional color printing, according to Gizmag.

Then they compared the daily temperature at sites with contrails above them with similar data from places where there weren any of the man-made clouds in the sky.

Otherwise, the sites were basically similar in terms of land use, cover, soil moisture and air-mass conditions. The researchers found that contrails somehow depress the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures

#Floating, Touchable'Fairy Lights'Unveiled A team of researchers from Japan has found a way to use a high-speed laser to create a touchable plasma display in mid-air.

"has advantages over other 3-D displays. For starters, it doesn require physical matter arranged

aerial user interfaces and volumetric images. Laser Levitates Diamondsalthough the displays right now are tiny, at just eight cubic millimeters,

there hope that they will become larger as the technology progresses. Furthermore, lessons from this experiment can also be expanded to other rendering principles such as fluorescence and microbubble in solid/liquid materials, according to the researchers.

Hadrian begins by using computer-aided design (CAD) to determine the precise placement of every brick in a given structure to within one hundredth of an inch.

#LED Bulbs Offer a Low energy, Wireless Connection This lightbulb could work as your next wireless router.

At the University of Virginia, researchers have unveiled a new way to transmit wireless data in light waves from LED LIGHTS a much more reliable and faster alternative to radio wave Wi-fi. DNEWS:

Is The Internet Really Ruining Your Attention span? e developed a modulation algorithm that increases the throughput of data in visible light communications, Maite Brandt-Pearce,

an engineering professor at the University of Virginia, told Phys. org. e can transmit more data without using any additional energy.

developed this new way to connect to the Internet. The technology would require no more energy than is used currently to emit light.

a desk lamp that provides an Internet connection when the light is on. Bring The nternet Of Thingsinto Your Homeesearchers have called it i-Fi?

the concept could provide a big boost to connectivity speeds with the potential to use every light in a building as an Internet transmitter. via Phys. or a

and tablets you might consume are the real deal. Back in 2014, the company was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.

You want to make sure they have the right medication. n an interconnected world where smartphones and Apple Watches are becoming ubiquitous,

with the interconnected age and concerns over personal data, are there any concerns from potential consumers over the idea of ingesting technology that contains so much information?

There is really an impenetrable firewall between your body and the information that you are getting from the product. uh said that there has been avid interest in the technology,

#NYC Is Turning Trash cans Into Wi-fi Hotspots Consider the humble trash can. Stalwart and immobile, it populates our cities by the thousands,

Late last year, hi-tech waste management company Bigbelly upgraded two of its waste recycling stations in downtown Manhattan with Wireless internet hubs.

The Wireless internet option essentially turns the trash cans into free public Wi-fi hotspots, providing throughput of 50 to 75 MB per second.

the Wi-fi trash cans provide a strong signal that not blocked by buildings or other structures.

Wi-fi Sprinkler Saves Waterbigbelly is now working with the city to add Wi-fi to hundreds more waste stations throughout the city five boroughs, with a particular concentration in underserved neighborhoods.

The bins will pay for themselves, eventually, with display advertising. The smart trash cans will join another citywide initiative to turn all those old abandoned public pay phones into charging stations

and Wi-fi hot spots. More than 10,000 refurbished pay phone kiosks are set to go live by the end of the year.

The panels of the car connect to body sensors on the driver body. As the driver pulse quickens

Google recently built a robot car that can drive by itself, which has a similar objective.

and linked with your smartphone. Other portable spectometers have been deployed by scientists in the field, but SCIO is the first to market itself as a consumer device.

The makers of SCIO hope that, by working with developers and pairing the device with software apps,

For instance, out-of-the-box apps planned for release will allow users to scan food for nutritional value.

Algorithms interpret the data in the light spectrum, and identification information is delivered back to your phone within seconds.

As more people use the SCIO system, SCIO atabase of matterwill get faster and more accurate over time.

in fact when a programmer pushed a button on the top of their heads. One robot had a placebo button

and display a level of self-awareness to distinguish itself from the other two robots. It also opened the door to the possibility that self-aware robots could make their way into the future e

#Lab on a chip turns smart phones into mobile disease clinics Smart phones can pay our bills,

easy-to-use smart phone attachment (shown above) that can test patients for multiple deadly infectious diseases in 15 minutes.

It only takes a tiny bit of power from the smart phone to detect and display the results:

Based on the team screens of soil, the compound seems to be relatively rare, so Lewis doubts that many bacteria have evolved to produce an enzyme that could destroy it.

Theye also developing a version that attaches to cellphone cameras as a quick and portable diagnostic test. s

Running these data through a computer model, they found that they could get the experimental results

The research has been uploaded to the arxiv server and submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

With the software loaded onto a rover engineers can simply input desired waypoints for the rover to reach

The system also uses the cameras and satellite images to monitor progress. In 2012 Seeker was tested for the first time in the Atacama desert in Chile a landscape similar to that of Mars. There it guided the Robovolc rover built to traverse the edge of volcanoes over several kilometres in a single day.

With the software loaded onto a rover engineers can simply input desired waypoints for the rover to reach

The system also uses the cameras and satellite images to monitor progress. In 2012 Seeker was tested for the first time in the Atacama desert in Chile a landscape similar to that of Mars. There it guided the Robovolc rover built to traverse the edge of volcanoes over several kilometres in a single day.

and broadcast a ham radio signal for amateurs to tune in to o

#Spacecraft seek geysers without human help When the Rosetta spacecraft sends its lander to the surface of a comet on 12 november the lander will follow prearranged orders from Earth to touch down safely

Kiri Wagstaff and her colleagues at the Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California have developed software that can identify a plume of water

The researchers tested the software on unprocessed images of comet Hartley 2 and Saturn's moon Enceladus.

But the software will be of even more benefit on future missions to the outer solar system and eventually planetary systems outside our solar system.

So Sarty and his colleagues at MRI manufacturer MRI-Tech Canada of Calgary Alberta and space flight hardware maker Com Dev International of Cambridge Ontario have developed a technique called Transmit Array Spatial Encoding

Additional radio signals cause the protons in your body's liquids to resonate with the magnetic field

To shrink down TRASE uses a novel radio wave timing technique that requires much smaller magnets.

All this significantly reduces the hardware complexity of an MRI which saves us considerable weight making it suitable for space flight Sarty told New Scientist.

The mathematics and the results are too similar to just be a coincidence. Journal reference:

It might seem a simple matter for someone to use Google earth say or Microsoft's Bing images to obtain evidence to support their case.

Why would they need space detectives? But it is not so simple. Finding the right pictures means trawling through huge databases of historical satellite data

Computer simulations suggested that when galaxies merge they usually form a single blob-shaped galaxy classed as elliptical.

#Water-splitter could make hydrogen fuel on Mars Making fuel on site for a return trip to Mars may be a step closer.

and double as portable power-packs for computers or other kit used in the field. But existing methods for creating usable hydrogen gas from water require a lot of electricity.

In a single degenerate system the shock wave from the white dwarf explosion should smash into the surrounding gas from the companion star generating radio waves.

Pérez-Torres and colleagues saw no radio waves so concluded SN 2014j probably began as two white dwarfs.

It's just that the mathematics of focusing is disrupted by the planet's gravity he says.

On 10 june Google acquired Skybox Imaging a 5-year-old Silicon valley firm for $500 million.

The appeal for Google and other firms is the potential to mine profitable data from satellite images.

Google has said it will use the images to improve Google earth and its Maps app though that is likely to be just the beginning of its plans.

It wants to hire satellites already in orbit to prospect landfill sites for potentially valuable materials.

If the satellite gives us 1000 potential sites from the 25000 in the UK we would then use drone reconnaissance to get a richer picture of say the wood cover

And with an open software interface anyone will be able to develop apps that use the imagery.

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