SCIENCE THROUGH INNOVATION
Paralyzed Woman Flew A Fighter Jet Simulator Using Her Thoughts
One of the many great things about science is that it is so good at making us say “wow.” Just a few months ago, we shared with you the incredible story of a paralyzed woman who was able to control a robotic arm using only her thoughts, thanks to an innovative brainmachine interface system and a DARPA-led experimental robotics program. Now, the woman has astounded us once again by managing to use her mind to fly an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in a simulator. This latest breakthrough was shared recently by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) director Arati Prabhakar at the New America Foundation’s Future of War conference. Jan Scheuermann, a fifty-five-year-old mother of two, has a neurodegenerative disease that unfortunately rendered her paralyzed from the neck down back in 2003. Almost a decade later, Scheuermann signed herself up for a pioneering trial at the University of Pittsburgh in which surgeons implanted two tiny electrode grids into her brain. They were positioned precisely on a particular spot of the left motor cortex that is responsible for controlling movement of the right arm and hand. After using computer algorithms to match up patterns of brain activity to thoughts about specific arm movements, Scheuermann was eventually able to control a robotic arm using only her mind. She became remarkably adept at moving the arm and was soon able to move objects around, feed herself a chocolate bar and even give high fives.
Interestingly, Scheuermann was able to control both right-hand and left-hand prosthetic limbs. As the Washington Post points out, this was surprising given that the chips were implanted into her left motor cortex, which is traditionally responsible for controlling movement on the right side of the body. Since Scheuermann tolerated the implants so well, her participation in the DARPA project was gladly extended. But, according to Prabhakar, she decided that she wanted to try something new and even more challenging. And that new challenge was a simulator of the Pentagon’s newest fighter jet, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Of course, project leaders obliged, and for someone who has never sat in a cockpit before, she did remarkably well. Prabhakar points out that, rather than thinking about controlling the jet with a joystick, which is what pilots do in training, Jan is thinking about guiding it directly. “For someone who’s never flown—she’s not a pilot in real life—she’s flying that simulator directly from her neural signaling,” Prabhakar said. At the very least, this groundbreaking system showcases just how far technology and our understanding of the brain and nervous system have come along. But who knows what doors it could open up in the future for those suffering paralysis. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near ready for widespread use, so it will be a while before we see this technology helping others. But if we do reach that stage, Prabhakar points out that there are ethical considerations that should be addressed. “In doing that work, we’ve also opened this door,” she said. “We can now see the future where we can free the brain from the limitations of the human body. We can all imagine amazing good things and amazing potentially bad things that are on the other side of that door.”
Researchers Achieve Record-Smashing Wireless Connection Speeds
Do you know what wireless speeds of one terabit per second gets you? One hundred fulllength movies downloaded onto your phone in just three seconds. Researchers in the U.K. are now saying that they’ve achieved just that: 1 Tbps over a 5G connection for the first time ever. That's the fastest wireless speed to date. “This is the same capacity as fiber optics but we are doing it wirelessly,” Rahim Tafazolli of the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at the University of Surrey tells V3. Their tests were carried out under lab conditions over a distance of 100 meters (328 feet) using transmitters and receivers built at Surrey. The speed is more than 65,000 times faster than average 4G download speeds (that’s just 15 megabits per second, or Mbps). And it also smashes the previous 5G (or fifth generation) speed record achieved last October in tests: Samsung's 7.5 gigabits per second (Gbps),BBC reports, is less than one percent of the Surrey team's speed. Tafazolli and colleagues plan to take the technology out of the lab and onto the campus by as early as 2016, before demonstrating it to the public in early 2018. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily mean we'll be able to use it soon. “An important aspect of 5G is how it will support applications in the future. We don’t know what applications will be in use by 2020, or 2030 or 2040 for that matter, but we know they will be highly sensitive to latency,”he tells V3. Latency is the slowdown that’s introduced by infrastructure, Quartz explains, and it could remain a problem for decades. “We need to bring end-to-end latency down to below one millisecond so that it can enable new technologies and applications that would just not be possible with 4G,” Tafazolli says. Everything from playing 3D holographic games of chess over multiple smartphones to controlling connected cars over 5G may require rapid latency, he adds.
The Apple Car Will Be Really Different … If It Exists
It has been a week and the Apple Car rumor hasn’t been denied by Apple. (Here’s the background in case you have been living under a rock). So what are we to make of all this? Much of what has been talked about is complete speculation. That it will be electric, autonomous, a mini-van (!) all seem obvious or mis-communicated hearsay. Thinking about cars is the wrong way to approach thinking about the Apple Car. Instead, you have to think about Apple’s identity and how it approaches new markets. And let’s face it, a car would be a new market. First, Apple does not introduce incremental product improvements. This won’t be a car with an Apple logo or something that Tesla is doing. Instead, it will be something at least ten times better (you pick the metric) than anyone else is doing. It did that with the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and, possibly, the Apple Watch. Apple TV was ten times better than your TV or cable box, but it wasn’t ten times better than everyone’s product, which is probably why Apple deemed it a hobby. This means that if the company is working on something, whether it is electric or what have you, is unlikely to be the point. It is going to solve some problems that are major ones – so major that no one else has really tackled them. And guess what? I have no idea what those might be and neither likely does anyone in the car industry. The car industry has identified only two next-generation technologies of importance – electric motors and autonomous vehicles. Tesla leads the former, and we guess that Google leads the latter. Second, when Apple release these products, it envisages them as part of its hub of products. For the iPod, it was part of the personal computer as a hub concept. For the iPhone and iPad, that became the cloud as a hub. I suspect we are back to the iPhone as a hub with the Apple Watch. The question is, in five years' time, what will be the device that is
the hub for people. If you can answer that question, you may be able to guess what the Apple Car might do that will be new. Third, design and user-interfaces are where these new products come from. Looking good happens, but after function. So thinking about what a new Apple Car might look like is crazy. As crazy as thinking about whether the company will ship the car for US$29,999 for the 16GB model and $39,999 for the 64GB one. Instead, think about the designers. In this case, Jonny Ive. As the New Yorker profiled (in what seems to be an article preparing us for his retirement in six months), he commutes to and from San Francisco – that’s two hours at least in total – in a chauffeur-driven Bentley. That’s lots of time to think about what’s wrong with cars. In other words, the Apple Car is likely to be something that is important for commuters. Moreover, Apple devices tend to be familiar and not require explanation. What would a car that is obvious to use look like? That said, let me just throw another possibility into the mix. I wonder if the Apple Car is more about Disney. You know where it would be great to have a set of autonomous, minivan style cars? Disney World. In Disney World Florida, there is a fleet of buses designed to get people around. Lots of people spend lots of time waiting for them. Imagine instead that the whole area was turned over to autonomous vehicles with no other ones in sight. Think about how they could make that type of “community of the future” work. And to do it, think about what would happen if Disney partnered with Apple on that (as Apple and Disney have historically close ties). Anyhow, I am boldly going to say right here, right now, and for the record, that I have no idea what the Apple Car will do even if it is exists. But if it does happen, the chances are it will be very, very new. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Scientists Discover The Secret Of Why Indian Food Tastes So Good
For many people, Indian food is love at first bite. The wonderful combination of vibrant colors, invigorating aromas and bold yet perfectly balanced spices are enough to drive anyone into sensory overload. But what is it about Indian food that makes it so irresistibly divine? It turns out that there’s a lot more to it than simply dreaming up cocktails of spices and ingredients that seem to go well. After studying more than 2,500 recipes, scientists discovered that, contrary to what we might expect, the secret to Indian food’s exquisite taste is actually pairing ingredients that do not share many flavors. Furthermore, certain spices were found to actually accentuate this so-called negative food pairing phenomenon, such as cayenne pepper. But before we delve into the details of the study, let’s explore the wonderful world of ingredients. Foods can be broken down into the flavors they contain, which are the result of the different chemical constituents that produce a certain characteristic taste when combined. In the Western world, the prevailing hypothesis—heralded by wacky and wonderful chef Heston Blumenthal—is that foods that share many flavors should go well together. That’s how he figured out that the bizarre mix of caviar and white chocolate actually works. Although white chocolate is tricky to pair, it shares flavors with things like wasabi, pink peppercorn and brie. The flavors in dark chocolate also give rise to some unusual pairings, such as fried onions and parmesan.
A few years back, scientists tested this food pairing hypothesis by creating a flavor map in which foods with components in common are networked. From the wonderful interaction version on Scientific American, you can see that roasted beef shares the most flavor compounds with other foods, whereas things like rhubarb, fenugreek and violet share the least. From this, researchers concluded that although Western cuisines tend to use ingredient pairs that share lots of flavor compounds, East Asian cuisines actually tend to avoid doing this. To find out whether there may be any pairing trends in Indian cuisine, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur started off by downloading 2,543 recipes from an online database. These included recipes from various sub-cuisines, such as Punjabi and Bengali, spanning different climates and cultures. They then listed all of the different ingredients found across the recipes, 194 in total, and grouped them into categories like spice, vegetable and herb. Finally, they created a flavor network that demonstrated how often ingredients shared flavor compounds. Interestingly, in contrast to Western cuisine, Indian cuisine demonstrates strong negative food pairing with little flavor sharing. In other words, the more flavors particular ingredients have in common, the less likely they are to be found together in a recipe. Furthermore, some foods were found to strengthen the negative food pairing effect, such as cayenne pepper, garam masala and cinnamon. This means that a dish containing these ingredients is highly unlikely to also contain other foods with overlapping flavors. So why has this trend emerged? According to the authors, it could have something to do with the fact that historically, spices were primarily used to prevent spoilage by bacteria and also for their supposed health benefits. These medicinal beliefs therefore likely left their signature on traditional Indian recipes, the authors conclude.
New Laser Surgery Can Turn Your Eyes From Brown To Blue For $5000
In the classic 1930s movie, "The Wizard of Oz," Dorothy asks the good citizens of Oz whether they could dye her eyes to match her gown, and they happily oblige. Of course, eyes are not like hair, and 75 years on you still cannot dye your eyes to suit your outfit. But it turns out that you can actually change their color with the aid of a laser. The technique was pioneered by California-based Stroma Medical and it is currently available in several countries, but it has yet to receive approval in the United States. So far,37 patients in Mexico and Costa Rica have undergone the procedure, which permanently turned their eyes from brown to blue. If you fancy twinkling blue eyes yourself, you had best start saving your pennies as the procedure will set you back around $5,000 (£3,300). Those who don’t fancy breaking the bank are probably happy enough using colored contact lenses. So how does it work? It actually doesn’t involve adding any color to the eye—blue eyes are not this shade because of blue pigments, but rather the scattering of light. In blue-eyed people, when multicolored light falls on the eye, it is mostly the blue wavelengths that are reflected back and picked up by our own eyes. The difference with brown-eyed individuals is that the front layer of their eyes, called the stroma, contains an abundance of melanin, the pigment that also gives skin and hair their color. This results in the majority of light hitting the eye being absorbed, but the small amount reflected makes them appear brown to us. So to go from brown to blue, all you need to do is remove the melanin present in the iris. Stroma Medical’s chairman Dr. Gregg Homer explained to CNN how it works: “The fundamental principle is that under every brown eye is a blue eye. The only difference between a brown eye and a blue eye is this very thin layer of pigment on the surface.
If you take that pigment away, then the light can enter the stroma—the little fibers that look like bicycle spokes in a light eye—and when the light scatters it only reflects back the shortest wavelengths and that’s the blue end of the spectrum.” According to Homer, the laser procedure takes just 20 seconds, although the results won’t be apparent for several weeks as it takes time for the body to remove the dead pigment layer. While the go-ahead has not yet been given to perform the technique in the U.S., preliminary studies have suggested that it is safe, but it will take several years for the clinical trials to reach completion. Experts in the field have raised their eyebrows about its safety, however, with some suggesting that the pigment could cause a blockage in draining channels, which may increase pressure in the eye, ultimately leading to glaucoma if not resolved. But Homer counters this argument by pointing out that the debris resulting from the procedure would be too small to cause such problems. Although the procedure is fairly pricey, it's easy to see that there would be a high demand. Only 17% of the world's population has blue eyes and they are becoming less common. Would you go for it?