Scientists have successfully taught a collection of human brain cells in a petri dish how to play the video game “Pong” — kind of.
Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created “ mini-brains ” consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports. The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity.
We think it’s fair to call them cyborg brains, Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs and research lead of the project, told New Scientist.
In the first episode of Humans+, Motherboard dives into the world of future prosthetics, and the people working on closing the gap between man and machine.
We follow Melissa Loomis, an amputee from Ohio, who had experimental nerve reversal surgery and is going to Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab to test out its latest Modular Prosthetic Limb, a cutting-edge bionic arm funded in part by DARPA. Neuro-interfacing machinery is a game changer in terms rehabilitating patients, but what possibilities do these advancements open for the future?
On October 15, 2020, the European Union imposed sanctions on six senior Russian officials and a leading Russian research institute over the alleged use of a nerve agent from the Novichok family in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Russia dismissed as baseless the EU’s allegations that it had not complied with its obligations, under the convention it ratified in 1997, to discontinue its chemical weapons program. Russian officials said the country had nothing to do with Navalny’s poisoning and implied that if any party had used nerve agents on him, it would have been Western secret services. Vladimir Putin, who in 2017 had personally watched over the destruction of the last remaining Russian chemical weapons stash, ridiculed the findings of four separate laboratories, confirmed by the OPCW, that a Novichok-type organophosphate poison was identified in Alexey Navalny’s blood.
Two years earlier, in 2018, Russia had dismissed as unfounded allegations that its military intelligence had used Novichok to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Similarly, Russia had then stated that it had no ongoing chemical weapons program and had destroyed all of its prior arsenals; while alluding that UK agencies may have used their own stash of Novichok to poison the Skripals in a false-flag operation.
A year-long investigation by Bellingcat and its investigative partners The Insider and Der Spiegel, with contributing investigations from RFE/RL, has discovered evidence that Russia continued its Novichok development program long beyond the officially announced closure date. Data shows that military scientists, who were involved with the original chemical weapons program while it was still run by the Ministry of Defense, were dispersed into several research entities which continued collaborating among one another in a clandestine, distributed R&D program. While some of these institutes were integrated with the Ministry of Defense – but camouflaged their work as research into antidotes to organophosphate poisoning – other researchers moved to civilian research institutes but may have continued working, under cover of civilian research, on the continued program.
2021 will be remembered as a significant year for the cyber security industry. With the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, the threat landscape was in constant flux. Major ransomware attacks demonstrated not just their impact on businesses, but wider society too. As we look ahead to 2022, the only constant in our industry is uncertainty in the cyber realm, but here are a few of our predictions for next year, based on trends we’re already seeing emerge.
The innovation could be a game-changer for communication technologies, such as phones and internet connections.
A team from UCF has developed the world’s first optical oscilloscope, an instrument that is able to measure the electric field of light. The device converts light oscillations into electrical signals, much like hospital monitors convert a patient’s heartbeat into electrical oscillation.
Until now, reading the electric field of light has been a challenge because of the high speeds at which light waves oscillates. The most advanced techniques, which power our phone and internet communications, can currently clock electric fields at up to gigahertz frequencies — covering the radio frequency and microwave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Light waves oscillate at much higher rates, allowing a higher density of information to be transmitted. However, the current tools for measuring light fields could resolve only an average signal associated with a ‘pulse’ of light, and not the peaks and valleys within the pulse. Measuring those peaks and valleys within a single pulse is important because it is in that space that information can be packed and delivered.
𝘼𝙣 𝙚𝙭𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙡 𝙫𝙖𝙘𝙘𝙞𝙣𝙚 𝙨𝙪𝙘𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙛𝙪𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙖𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙨 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙛… See more.
An experimental vaccine successfully eliminated aging cells from the bodies of mice, helping to prolong the rodents’ lives and reverse some signs of age-related disease.
Reddit user htGoSEVe posted a map of the potential rail voyage, later updating his post to reflect the fact that sections of the journey — from Lisbon to Hendaye in France, and the Paris-Moscow Express, for example — have been paused during the pandemic.
Rail enthusiasts estimate that it would cost a little over £1,000 in tickets.
But fellow Reddit user Shevek99 commented to suggest that the journey could be made even longer and more ambitious by starting further east.
HONG KONG, Dec 17 (Reuters Breakingviews) — After conquering semiconductors, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s biggest chipmaker has a new challenge: kickstarting Taiwan’s stalled green transition. Bureaucracy and red tape have marred the island’s renewable-energy goals. The company’s (2330.TW) voracious appetite for cleaner power will offer a much-needed spark.
Referendums on whether to restart a nuclear power plant and whether to change the location of a planned $2 billion liquid fossil gas terminal highlight how politically contentious the island’s energy issues are. President Tsai Ing-wen has pledged to phase out nuclear power and is hoping gas-fired plants will supply half of the $600 billion economy’s electricity needs by 2025. At the same time, she has promised to increase the share of renewable sources to 20%, from 5.4% in 2020.
On paper that’s doable, but in practice it looks increasingly out of reach. Covid-19 disruptions held up wind and solar projects, but lengthy and complex approval processes are also to blame. Offshore wind developers, for instance, must obtain consent letters from at least eight different authorities as well as approval from the environmental watchdog even to be eligible to bid for projects. Those that make it to the second round must also detail how they can meet local procurement requirements, often onerous criteria given how new the industry is in Taiwan. According to one 2021 estimate, unfinished wind and solar projects totalled $83 billion, among the highest in Asia.
For all that neural networks can accomplish, we still don’t really understand how they operate. Sure, we can program them to learn, but making sense of a machine’s decision-making process remains much like a fancy puzzle with a dizzying, complex pattern where plenty of integral pieces have yet to be fitted.
If a model was trying to classify an image of said puzzle, for example, it could encounter well-known, but annoying adversarial attacks, or even more run-of-the-mill data or processing issues. But a new, more subtle type of failure recently identified by MIT scientists is another cause for concern: “overinterpretation,” where algorithms make confident predictions based on details that don’t make sense to humans, like random patterns or image borders.
This could be particularly worrisome for high-stakes environments, like split-second decisions for self-driving cars, and medical diagnostics for diseases that need more immediate attention. Autonomous vehicles in particular rely heavily on systems that can accurately understand surroundings and then make quick, safe decisions. The network used specific backgrounds, edges, or particular patterns of the sky to classify traffic lights and street signs—irrespective of what else was in the image.
