Monthly Archives: January 2022

BIOTECH

In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered PigRoni Caryn Rabin | The New York TimesA 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs. It is the first successful transplant of a pigs heart into a human being.

Second Lifes Creator Is Back to Build a Metaverse That Doesnt Harm PeopleMark Sullivan | Fast CompanyAs Second Life positions itself as an alternative to a metaverse dominated by big tech, founder Philip Rosedale is returning as an advisor. In his advisory role at Linden, Rosedale will focus on product development, with the aim of shaping Second Lifes version of the future metaverse.

Jack Dorseys Block Is Working to Decentralize Bitcoin MiningJon Porter | The VergeBlock, the payment company formerly known as Square, is working on building an open Bitcoin mining system, itsCEO Jack Dorsey has announced. In a thread, Blocks general manager for hardwareThomas Templeton outlined the companys goals for the system, which is for it to be easily available, reliable, performant, and relatively power efficient compared to its hashrate. The overall aim is to make mining more decentralized, in turn making the overall Bitcoin network more resilient.

The Radical Intervention That Might Save the Doomsday GlacierJames Temple | MIT Technology ReviewEven if the world immediately halted the greenhouse-gas emissions driving climate change and warming the waters beneath the ice shelf, that wouldnt do anything to thicken and restabilize the Thwaitess critical buttress, saysJohn Moore, a glaciologist and professor at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland in Finland. So the only way of preventing the collapse is to physically stabilize the ice sheets, he says. That will require what is variously described as active conservation,radical adaptation, or glacier geoengineering.

First Transplant of a Genetically Altered Pig Heart Into a Person Sparks Ethics QuestionsMegan Molteni | StatThe groundbreaking procedure raises hopes that animal organs might one day be routinely used for human transplants, which would shorten waiting listswhere thousands of seriously ill people languish and die every year. But its also raising a few eyebrows and a lot of questions from bioethicists. Theres still relatively little known about how safe this is to try in humans, so Im viewing this with a little apprehension, said Arthur Caplan, the founding director of New York University School of Medicines Division of Medical Ethics.

Is Norway the Future of Cars?Shira Ovide | The New York TimesLast year, Norway reached a milestone. Only about 8 percent of new cars sold in the countryran purely on conventional gasoline or diesel fuel. Two-thirds of new cars sold were electric, and most of the rest were electric-and-gasoline hybrids. electric car enthusiasts are stunned by the speedat which the internal combustion engine has become an endangered species in Norway.

All Hail the Ariane 5 Rocket, Which Doubled the Webb Telescopes LifetimeEric Berger | Ars TechnicaNASAs Mission Systems Engineer for the Webb telescope, Mike Menzel, said the agency had completed its analysis of how much extra fuel remained on board the telescope. Roughly speaking, Menzel said, Webb has enough propellant on board for 20 years of life. This is twice the conservative pre-launch estimate for Webbs lifetime of a decade, and it largely comes down to the performance of the European Ariane 5 rocket that launched Webb on a precise trajectory on Christmas Day.

Cecilia DAnastasio | WirediWhen I look at other directors dealing with the theme of the internet, it tends to be kind of negative, like a dystopia, says Hosoda. But I always look at the internet as something for the young generation to explore and create new worlds in. And I still, to this day, have that take on the internet. So its always been optimistic. WatchingBelle, its easy to become absorbed in that optimism. Its visually stunning, with both its rural landscapes and a digital megalopolis packed tight with a breathtaking number of pixels.

The Subversive Genius of Extremely Slow EmailIan Bogost | The AtlanticDmitry Minkovsky has been working on [slow email app] Pony over the past three years, with the goal of recovering some of the magic that online life had lost for him. I used to find such projects appealing for their subversiveness: as art objects that make problems visible rather than proposing viable solutions to them. But now its clear that the internet needs design innovationsandbrake mechanismsto reduce its noxious impact. Our suffering arises, in part, from the speed and volume of our social interactions online. Maybe we can build our way toward fewer of them.

Image Credit:Pawel Czerwinski / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 15) - Singularity Hub

This week, astrophysicists presented the biggest map of the universe yet.

Having nailed down the position of 7.5 million galaxies, the map is larger and more detailed than all its predecessors combined. And its nowhere near complete. Using the ultra-precise Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the team is adding the coordinates of a million galaxies a month with plans to run through 2026. The final atlas will cover a third of the sky and include 35 million galaxies up to 10 billion light years away.

Of course, this particular map wont have much practical value for space explorers. Even at the speed of light, itd take us tens of thousands to millions of years to reach our closest galactic neighbors. Absent a convenient network of intergalactic wormholes, were likely stuck in our home galaxy for the foreseeable future. But the map has another purpose.

This project has a specific scientific goal: to measure very precisely the accelerating expansion of the universe, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratorys Julien Guy told Wired. By measuring the expansion over time, scientists hope to shine a light on dark energythe mysterious force that seems to be blowing the universe apartand predict the ultimate fate of the cosmos.

To locate galaxies, DESI uses a collection of 5,000 fiber-optic cables positioned by robotic motors to within 10 microns, less than the thickness of a human hair. This precise positioning allows the instrument to sop up the photons of 5,000 distant galaxies at a time, record their spectra in detail, and determine how much the light has been stretched into the redder bits of the spectrum during its journey to Earth. This redshift is caused by the expansion of the universe and indicates how far away a galaxy isthe redder the light, the more distant the galaxythus adding a third dimension to galaxy maps.

Whereas prior efforts like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey were slow and tediouswith scientists manually drilling holes and repositioning sensorsDESI is quick and automated, to the point of boring its operators on any given shift. But those shifts are prodigious, each adding some 100,000 galaxies to the map.

The scale is huge. Individual galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, are reduced to points of light flowing in enormous filaments, clusters, and voids. [These are] the biggest structures in the universe. But within them, you find an imprint of the very early universe, and the history of its expansion since then, Guy said in a statement.

Its by comparing the universes initial conditions just after the Big Bang to its expansion ever since that the team hopes to tease out a better understanding of how dark energy has changed over time.

In the 1990s, studies led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratorys Saul Perlmutter and Australian National Universitys Brian Schmidt attempted to measure the expansion of the universe. It had been assumed that the universes matterincluding stars, planets, dust, gas, and dark matterwould act like a brake on its expansion. Like a ball tossed into the air, gravitys pull would slow the universe down.

If you can measure the universes rate of expansion, you can predict its future trajectory. Will it grind to a halt under the force of its own matter and reverse course, imploding in a big crunch? Will it expand forever, eventually tearing itself apart? Or will it approach equilibrium, where the rate of expansion nears zero?

The teams gathered the light from supernovae with known luminositythese are called standard candles in astrophysicsto measure the expansion rate. Their results were surprising, to put it mildly. Instead of slowing, they found expansion was accelerating over time. Some gargantuan force was counteracting gravity, and scientists didnt have the faintest clue what it was.

Cosmologist Michael Turner dubbed this force dark energy and has called it the most profound mystery in all of science. Now, the race is on to better understand dark energy by putting together a more precise history of the universes evolution.

If expansion continues, the universe will never truly end. Over unimaginable eons, each orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe, expansion will pull galaxies apart, snuff out stars, and tear matter into its elementary constituents. The end state of the universe would be a chilly and everlasting dark age.

But scientists dont fully understand dark energy or know the fate of the universe with certainty. Which is why observations from projects like DESI are crucial. By mapping the large structure of the universe over time, scientists hope to chart how the rate of expansionand perhaps the dark energy driving ithas changed and how it might in the future.

DESI isnt the only mapping project out there. Other projects, like those that will be conducted by the European Space Agencys Euclid spacecraft and NASAs Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, will complement DESIs findings by looking deeper into the universe, and cataloging even earlier galaxies from when it was just a few billion years old. Scientists are excited to mine this data hoard to further refine the universes origin story.

In five years, we hope that we will find a deviation from this model of cosmology that will give us a hint of what really happens, Guy told New Scientist. Because today we are a little bit stuck in a simple model that describes perfectly well the data [we have], but doesnt give us any new information.

Image Credit: D. Schlegel/Berkeley Lab (using data from DESI)

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How Will the Universe End? Scientists Seek an Answer in the Biggest Galaxy Map Yet - Singularity Hub

Autonomous delivery was already on multiple companies research and development agenda before the pandemic, but when people stopped wanting to leave their homes it took on a whole new level of urgency (and potential for profit). Besides the fact that the pandemic doesnt seem to be subsidingnote the continuous parade of new Greek-letter variantsour habits have been altered in a lasting way, with more people shopping online and getting groceries and other items delivered to their homes.

This week Nuro, a robotics company based in Mountain View, California unveiled what it hopes will be a big player in last-mile delivery. The companys third-generation autonomous delivery vehicle has some impressive features, and some clever oneslike external airbags that deploy if the vehicle hits a pedestrian (which hopefully wont happen too often, if ever).

Despite being about 20 percent smaller in width than the average sedan, the delivery bot has 27 cubic feet of space inside; for comparisons sake, the tiny SmartForTwo has 12.4 cubic feet of cargo space, while the Tesla Model S has 26. It can carry up to 500 pounds and move at a speed of 45 miles per hour.

Nuro has committed to minimizing its environmental footprintthe delivery bot runs on batteries, and according to the press release, the company will use 100 percent renewable electricity from wind farms in Texas to power the fleet (though its unclear how theyll do this, as Texas is pretty far from northern California, and thats where the vehicles will initially be operating; Nuro likely buys credits that go towards expanding wind energy in Texas).

Nuros first delivery bot was unveiled in 2018, followed by a second iteration in 2019. The company recently partnered with 7-Eleven to do autonomous deliveries in its hometown (Mountain View) using this second iteration, called the R2though in the initial phase of the service, deliveries will be made by autonomous Priuses.

The newest version of the bot is equipped with sensors that can tell the difference between a pile of leaves and an animal, as well as how many pedestrians are standing at a crosswalk in dense fog. Nuro says the vehicle was designed to feel like a friendly member of the community. This sounds a tad dystopianit is, after all, an autonomous robot on wheelsbut the intention is in the right place. Customers will retrieve their orders and interact with the bot using a large exterior touchscreen.

Whether an optimal future is one where any product we desire can be delivered to our door within hours or minutes is a debate all its own, but it seems thats the direction were heading in. Nuro will have plenty of competition in the last-mile delivery market, potentially including an Amazon system that releases multiple small wheeled robots from a large truck (Amazon patented the concept last year, but theres been no further word about whether theyre planning to trial it). Nuro is building a manufacturing facility and test track in Nevada, and is currently in the pre-production phase.

Image Credit: Nuro

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This Autonomous Delivery Robot Has External Airbags in Case It Hits a Person - Singularity Hub

All memory storage devices, from your brain to the RAM in your computer, store information by changing their physical qualities. Over 130 years ago, pioneering neuroscientist Santiago Ramn y Cajal first suggested that the brain stores information by rearranging the connections, or synapses, between neurons.

Since then, neuroscientists have attempted to understand the physical changes associated with memory formation. But visualizing and mapping synapses is challenging to do. For one, synapses are very small and tightly packed together. Theyre roughly 10 billion times smaller than the smallest object a standard clinical MRI can visualize. Furthermore, there are approximately one billion synapses in the mouse brains researchers often use to study brain function, and theyre all the same opaque to translucent color as the tissue surrounding them.

A new imaging technique my colleagues and I developed, however, has allowed us to map synapses during memory formation. We found that the process of forming new memories changes how brain cells are connected to one another. While some areas of the brain create more connections, others lose them.

Previously, researchers focused on recording the electrical signals produced by neurons. While these studies have confirmed that neurons change their response to particular stimuli after a memory is formed, they couldnt pinpoint what drives those changes.

To study how the brain physically changes when it forms a new memory, we created 3D maps of the synapses of zebrafish before and after memory formation. We chose zebrafish as our test subjects because they are large enough to have brains that function like those of people, but small and transparent enough to offer a window into the living brain.

Zebrafish are particularly fitting models for neuroscience research. Zhuowei Du and Don B. Arnold, CC BY-NC-ND

To induce a new memory in the fish, we used a type of learning process called classical conditioning. This involves exposing an animal to two different types of stimuli simultaneously: a neutral one that doesnt provoke a reaction and an unpleasant one that the animal tries to avoid. When these two stimuli are paired together enough times, the animal responds to the neutral stimulus as if it were the unpleasant stimulus, indicating that it has made an associative memory tying these stimuli together.

As an unpleasant stimulus, we gently heated the fishs head with an infrared laser. When the fish flicked its tail, we took that as an indication that it wanted to escape. When the fish is then exposed to a neutral stimulus, a light turning on, tail flicking meant that its recalling what happened when it previously encountered the unpleasant stimulus.

Pavlovs dog is the most well-known example of classical conditioning, in which a dog salivates in response to a ringing bell because it has formed an associative memory between the bell and food. Lili Chin/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

To create the maps, we genetically engineered zebrafish with neurons that produce fluorescent proteins that bind to synapses and make them visible. We then imaged the synapses with a custom-built microscope that uses a much lower dose of laser light than standard devices that also use fluorescence to generate images. Because our microscope caused less damage to the neurons, we were able to image the synapses without losing their structure and function.

When we compared the 3D synapse maps before and after memory formation, we found that neurons in one brain region, the anterolateral dorsal pallium, developed new synapses while neurons predominantly in a second region, the anteromedial dorsal pallium, lost synapses. This meant that new neurons were pairing together, while others destroyed their connections. Previous experiments have suggested that the dorsal pallium of fish may be analogous to the amygdala of mammals, where fear memories are stored.

Surprisingly, changes in the strength of existing connections between neurons that occurred with memory formation were small and indistinguishable from changes in control fish that did not form new memories. This meant that forming an associative memory involves synapse formation and loss, but not necessarily changes in the strength of existing synapses, as previously thought.

Our new method of observing brain cell function could open the door not just to a deeper understanding of how memory actually works, but also to potential avenues for treatment of neuropsychiatric conditions like PTSD and addiction.

Associative memories tend to be much stronger than other types of memories, such as conscious memories about what you had for lunch yesterday. Associative memories induced by classical conditioning, moreover, are thought to be analogous to traumatic memories that cause PTSD. Otherwise harmless stimuli similar to what someone experienced at the time of the trauma can trigger recall of painful memories. For instance, a bright light or a loud noise could bring back memories of combat. Our study reveals the role that synaptic connections may play in memory, and could explain why associative memories can last longer and be remembered more vividly than other types of memories.

Currently the most common treatment for PTSD, exposure therapy, involves repeatedly exposing the patient to a harmless but triggering stimulus in order to suppress recall of the traumatic event. In theory, this indirectly remodels the synapses of the brain to make the memory less painful. Although there has been some success with exposure therapy, patients are prone to relapse. This suggests that the underlying memory causing the traumatic response has not been eliminated.

Its still unknown whether synapse generation and loss actually drive memory formation. My laboratory has developed technology that can quickly and precisely remove synapses without damaging neurons. We plan to use similar methods to remove synapses in zebrafish or mice to see whether this alters associative memories.

It might be possible to physically erase the associative memories that underlie devastating conditions like PTSD and addiction with these methods. Before such a treatment can even be contemplated, however, the synaptic changes encoding associative memories need to be more precisely defined. And there are obviously serious ethical and technical hurdles that would need to be addressed. Nevertheless, its tempting to imagine a distant future in which synaptic surgery could remove bad memories.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: geralt / 23803 images

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New Research: Memories May Be Stored in the Connections Between Brain Cells - Singularity Hub

Sometimes V is a good boy, other times, hes a bad boy. All of the time, V (real name Kim Taehyung) is a member of the award-winning boy band BTS. With already released solo songs like Christmas Tree and Snow Flower, some fans wonder when V will premiere his mixtape.

BTS resident good boy sometimes releases solo music with the K-pop groups original albums. Map of the Soul: 7 included the personal track Inner Child, co-written in part by V and RM. On Love Yourself: Tear, that was Singularity.

V also released solo music under the same stage name, including Snow Flower and Winter Bear, both are available on YouTube. In 2021, V debuted Christmas Tree, which appeared on the original television soundtrack for Our Beloved Summer.

Within a matter of weeks, the holiday song earned over 10 million Spotify plays. Still, fans anticipate more original music from this vocalist, with V confirming he has some songs already in the works.

Recently, that artist shared that his Myers-Briggs (MBTI) personality type changed from ENFP to INFP. That means that he projects an introverted personality instead of an extroverted personality. That, in turn, impacts his solo music and even his performances on stage but not his confidence.

Whether Im performing on stage, working on my music, or introducing myself, my confidence comes from having a clear conscience and sense of integrity, V continued during an interview with GQ. I believe thats how you can set yourself on the right path.

Even when posting to his individual Instagram account, V offers ARMYs a glimpse into his everyday life. This account even broke records on the social media platform regarding the number of followers V earned in a single day. Some followers shared their love for his selfies and videos of his dog Yeontan.

In addition to performing at the Permission to Dance on Stage concerts, V shared that hes spent time working on his mixtape. There is no set release date for this album, as the BTS members recently embarked on a period of rest and relaxation.

I know this about myself: I need a lot of time to work, V said during the same interview. Im always jotting down ideas and things Id like to write about in a journal or notebook, but I think I need at least three months to do something with it.

Recently, weve had a lot to prepare, so I havent had much time to sleep, let alone work, he added. Ive pushed it aside for the moment. When I have some time to rest, Im sure Ill work non-stop.

RELATED: BTS Vs Instagram Post of Him Jamming Out at the Harry Styles Concert Earned Over 28 Million Views

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BTS' V Reveals How His Introverted Side Will Be Reflected in His Mixtape - Showbiz Cheat Sheet