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Friday, June 17, 2011
With an Artificial Memory Chip, Rats Can Remember and Forget At the Touch of a Button
With an Artificial Memory Chip, Rats Can Remember and Forget At the Touch of a Button: "
Dr. Theodore Berger PR NEWSWIRE
A new brain implant tested on rats restored lost memories at the flick of a switch, heralding a possible treatment method for patients with Alzheimer's disease, stroke or amnesia. Such a 'neural prosthesis' could someday be used to facilitate the memory-forming process and help patients remember.
The device can mimic the brain's own neural signals, thereby serving as a surrogate for a piece of the brain associated with forming memories. If there is sufficient neural activity to trace, the device can restore memories after they have been lost. If it's used with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device can even enhance memory.
In the study, scientists at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California trained rats to learn a task, pressing one lever after another to receive water. In a series of tests, the rats pressed one lever and were then distracted. They had to remember which one they'd already pressed and therefore which lever to press next, left or right, in order to receive their reward.
The team attached electrodes to the rats' brains, connected to two areas in the hippocampus, called CA1 and CA3. Prior research has shown that the hippocampus converts short-term memory into long-term memory. The team recorded the signals between these regions as the rats performed their tasks, and then they drugged the rats so that the hippocampus regions could not communicate. The rats forgot which lever to press next, said Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineering professor at USC and lead author of the study, which is published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.
'The rats still showed that they knew ‘when you press left first, then press right next time, and vice-versa,'' Berger said. 'And they still knew in general to press levers for water, but they could only remember whether they had pressed left or right for 5-10 seconds.'
Then, the team made an artificial hippocampus, which could duplicate the normal neural signals between the CA1 and CA3 regions. They turned it on, and replayed the previously recorded signal from CA1 - like a recorded message from the brain. The rats remembered.
'Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget,' Berger said.
Although this is a long way from being tested in humans, the research shows that if there's enough information about the neural coding of memories, the signal patterns can be recorded and duplicated, and restored later through a neural implant. This could be difficult to do in patients with severely limited memory, as the New York Times points out - there needs to be a memory trace that can be recorded and amplified. But for patients with dementia, enhancing the memory-formation process can be useful - remembering where you put the keys, for instance, or where the bathroom is located. Simple memories like those could keep people independent for longer periods.
The researchers want to test the device in monkeys next, according to USC.
Department of Energy Will Use Fastest Supercomputer Ever to Design Better Batteries and Answer Cosmic Questions
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
IBM's 10-petaflop Mira system goes online next year
Blue Gene/Q "Mira" IBMThe Department of Energy is getting a 10-petaflop supercomputer to help scientists design efficient electric car batteries, understand climate change and unravel cosmic mysteries.
The IBM-built system, nicknamed “Mira,” will be operational at Argonne National Laboratory next year. At 10 quadrillion calculations per second, it will be twice as fast as today’s fastest supercomputer and 20 times faster than Argonne’s current model. If every person in the United States performed one calculation every second, it would take almost a year for them to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second, according to IBM.
This kind of computing power means Mira can solve problems that were previously too big for the most powerful current supercomputers. It would take Mira two minutes to solve a problem that takes current supercomputers two years, IDG News reports.
Thanks to improved chip designs and an energy-efficient water-cooling system, Mira will also be one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, IBM said. It runs on IBM’s Blue Gene/Q platform and its impressive specs include more than 750,000 processors and 750 terabytes of memory.Related Articles
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Technology, Rebecca Boyle, argonne national laboratory, batteries, climate change, computers, exascale computing, IBM, petaflop, supercomputers, supercomputing, watsonThe DOE selected 16 projects to start off with, including reducing energy inefficiency in transportation and developing advanced engine designs. The system will be able to model tropical storms, battery performance and the evolution of the universe, along with other complex simulations.
IBM said Mira is a stepping stone toward exascale computing, which beats petascale computers by a factor of 1,000. Exascale computers could solve questions that have remained beyond our reach, such as understanding regional climate change and designing safe nuclear reactors.
Meanwhile, IBM is building another 10-petaflop model called Blue Waters for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. And Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a 20-petaflop IBM model called Sequoia.
Mira will be operational in 2012 and scientists from industry, academia and government institutions will be able to use it.
[IBM]
via popsci.com
Smog on Titan Moon May Hold Ingredients For Life, New Study Says
Friday, October 8, 2010
In a simulation, a Titan-like atmosphere produces nearly all of life's building blocks
Titan Atmosphere Chamber Energized by microwaves, the Titanic gas mix inside the reaction chamber lights up like a neon sign. Thousands of complex organic molecules accumulated on the bottom of the chamber during this experiment, suggesting Titan's atmosphere is capable of producing the precursors for life. Sarah Hörst/University of ArizonaScientists studying Titan’s atmosphere have learned it can create complex molecules, including amino acids and nucleotide bases, often called the building blocks of life. They are the first researchers to show it’s possible to create these molecules without water, suggesting Titan could harbor huge quantities of life’s precursors floating in its atmosphere. It’s a breakthrough that even has implications for the beginning of life on Earth.
Researchers at the University of Arizona built a simulated Titan atmosphere in a special chamber in Paris and blasted it with microwaves, simulating the effect of solar energy. The reactions produced aerosols, which sank to the bottom of the chamber, where scientists scooped them up for study. What they found was unexpected, to put it mildly: all the nucleotide bases that make up the genetic code of all life on Earth, and more than half of the 22 amino acids that make proteins.
Of course, this doesn’t prove Titan has life — this was a test chamber, not the actual moon’s atmosphere, for one thing — but it’s intriguing, at least.
“Our results show that it is possible to make very complex molecules in the outer parts of an atmosphere," said Sarah Hörst, a graduate student in the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab, in a UA News story. She led the research effort with her adviser, planetary science professor Roger Yelle.
Titan is one of the most promising places for life elsewhere in the solar system. It has huge methane lakes and scientists recently learned that hydrogen is disappearing faster than it should at the surface, suggesting some sort of chemical reaction is consuming it.
The best data about Titan’s characteristics has come from the spacecraft Cassini, which has tasted some of the moon’s outermost atmosphere in a series of flybys since 2004. But Cassini was not designed to dip below 560 miles above the surface, much too far to really get a sense of what the moon’s atmosphere contains.Related Articles
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Science, Rebecca Boyle, astrobiology, atmosphere, Cassini, extraterrestrial life, methane, ringed planet saturn, Saturn, smog, titanTo truly test its capabilities, researchers would have to recreate the atmosphere in a lab, mixing the gases found on TItan and subjecting them to radiation. The microwaves caused a gas discharge, the same process that makes neon signs glow, which caused some of the nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide to bond together into solid matter. These aerosols were levitated in a special chamber before they got heavy enough to fall down.
The prospect of small floating life forms in the Titanic atmosphere is intriguing enough, but the study also revealed some interesting possibilities about the genesis of life on Earth. Titan’s atmosphere might be chemically similar to that of the early Earth, suggesting that instead of emerging from a primordial soup, the building blocks of life might have rained down from on high.
Hörst said the most interesting aspect of the study was proof that you can make pretty much anything in an atmosphere — a finding with major implications for astrobiology.
"Who knows this kind of chemistry isn’t happening on planets outside our solar system?” she said.
via popsci.com
Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded For Graphene, the Material of the Future
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics today to University of Manchester professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their work isolating graphene from graphite and identifying its behavior. Graphene, a one-atom thick sheet of carbon, is the thinnest, strongest material ever discovered. It conducts heat and electricity, and despite being one atom thick, is so dense even helium cannot pass through it. As the Swedish Academy of Sciences said in the Nobel Prize announcement: "Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again."
See our gallery of graphene's greatest hits.Surprisingly, the isolation was the easy part – they peeled the graphene off of a graphite crystal using Scotch tape. However, their work from that moment on has already had a huge effect on materials science.
Here at PopSci, we’ve been tracking graphene’s developments closely (and not just so we can say “we knew it when”). As it proves itself useful in everything from bandages to faster-than-ever transistors, we can’t help but wonder if its talents will ever stop emerging. We’ve compiled a gallery of graphene’s greatest hits so far so you can revisit its humble beginnings before the Nobel Prize goes to its head.
[CNET]
via popsci.com
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