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Category: computing – Page 181

Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, but the signal does not contain usable data. The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.

On March 3, the Voyager mission team saw activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the rest of the computer’s unreadable data stream. The new signal was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team wasn’t initially sure what to make of it. But an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory.

The FDS memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status. It also contains science or engineering data for downlink. The team will compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue.

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Scientists have created a communication network entirely based on light that enables seamless connectivity across space, air, and underwater environments. The new network design combines different types of light sources to ensure connectivity no matter the environment.

“In today’s world, data transmission is critical for communication, navigation, emergency response, research, and commercial activities,” said research team leader Yongjin Wang from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Suzhou Lighting Chip Monolithic Optoelectronics Technology Co. Ltd., both in China. “This new wireless network enables uninterrupted connectivity across environments, facilitating two-way real-time data transmission between the network nodes that carry out communication and data exchange within and between networks.”

In the Optica Publishing Group journal Optics Express, the researchers describe the completely light-based communication network and demonstrate real-time video communication between network nodes. They also show that it can support both wired and wireless device access simultaneously and can carry out bidirectional data transmission between network nodes. Both capabilities are key for providing various services to different users at once.

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Can virtual reality (VR) be tailored to explore larger areas and allow users to “walk” around their environment? This is what a recent study published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics hopes to address as a team of international researchers have developed a new VR system called RedirectedDoors+ that can allow users to expand their environments beyond the real-world physical boundaries, such as walls and doors. This study holds the potential to not only expand VR environments but also drastically reduce the real-world environments that are typically required for VR experiences.

“Our system, which built upon an existing visuo-haptic door-opening redirection technique, allows participants to subtly manipulate the walking direction while opening doors in VR, guiding them away from real walls,” said Dr. Kazuyuki Fujita, who is an assistant professor in the Research Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC) at Tohoku University and a co-author on the study. “At the same time, our system reproduces the realistic haptics of touching a doorknob, enhancing the quality of the experience.”

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Femoral head avascular necrosis (AVN) is a debilitating condition that prevents the thighbone from repairing itself at the portion closest to the hip, leading to possible collapse.

In a new study in Arthoplasty Today, a team including Yale Department of Orthopaedics & Rehabilitation’s Daniel Wiznia,…

In a paper published in the journal Arthroplasty Today, Daniel Wiznia, MD, assistant professor of orthopaedics & rehabilitation and co-director of Yale Medicine’s Avascular Necrosis Program, presents a new surgical technique designed to prevent or delay hip collapse in patients with femoral head avascular necrosis (AVN). Thanks to 3D innovations and novel applications of intraoperative navigation technology developed at Yale, Wiznia is leading a multidisciplinary approach to optimizing clinical outcomes.

Femoral AVN, otherwise known as osteonecrosis, is a debilitating condition associated with compromised blood supply to the portion of the thighbone closest to the hip. It particularly impacts the head of the bone. When the small vessels there are injured, the bone can no longer repair itself. Upwards of 20,000 new cases of femoral AVN are diagnosed each year in the United States, and those with the condition face a range of potential complications, such as collapse of the femoral head.

AVN is commonly diagnosed in people between the ages of 30 and 65. For some patients, there are no symptoms, which results in the condition being discovered incidentally. Up to 67 percent of patients with femoral AVN progress to symptomatic disease. A total hip arthroplasty (THA), otherwise known as a total hip replacement, is the current best treatment when the femoral head ultimately collapses. However, THA in younger patients has an increased risk of mechanical failure due to a higher level of physical activity and the length of time that the hip implant will be utilized. Therefore, there is a need for therapeutic strategies that effectively delay and prevent hip collapse, reducing the likelihood of requiring a THA.

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Bellevue, Wash.-based Lumen Orbit, a startup that’s only about three months old, says that it’s closed a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round to launch its plan to put hundreds of satellites in orbit, with the goal of processing data in space before it’s downlinked to customers on Earth.

The investors include Nebular, Caffeinated Capital, Plug & Play, Everywhere Ventures, Tiny.vc, Sterling Road, Pareto Holdings and Foreword Ventures. There are also more than 20 angel investors, including four Sequoia Scouts investing through the Sequoia Scout Fund. “The round was 3x oversubscribed,” Lumen CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston told GeekWire in an email.

Johnston is a former associate at McKinsey & Co. who also co-founded an e-commerce venture called Opontia. Lumen’s other co-founders are chief technology officer Ezra Feilden, whose resume includes engineering experience at Oxford Space Systems and Airbus Defense and Space; and chief engineer Adi Oltean, who worked as a principal software engineer at SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond, Wash.

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Physicists at the University of Regensburg have choreographed the shift of a quantized electronic energy level with atomic oscillations faster than a trillionth of a second.

Throwing a ball into the air, one can transfer arbitrary energy to the ball such that it flies higher or lower. One of the oddities of quantum physics is that particles, e.g., electrons, can often only take on quantized energy values—as if the ball was leaping between specific heights, like steps of a ladder, rather than flying continuously.

Qubits and quantum computers as well as light-emitting quantum dots (Nobel Prize 2023) make use of this principle. However, electronic energy levels can be shifted by collisions with other electrons or atoms. Processes in the quantum world usually take place on atomic scales and are also incredibly fast.

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Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and datastores in the DB Engines rankings and there are really only a handful of commercially viable operating systems. But what if the operating system is the problem?

We are so used to thinking of the operating system as the foundation of the system that this kind of talk seems more weird than it does heresy, but make no mistake. When Michael Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia and a team of techies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are involved in creating a new operating system, it is definitely going to be heresy.

Stonebraker says that the spark for the idea for DBOS, which is short for database operating system, came when he was listening to a talk by Zacharia, who among other things was the creator of the Spark in-memory database while at the AMPLab at the University of California Berkeley and the co-founder and chief technology officer of Databricks, which has commercialized Spark.

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There’s a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIs help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs. In recent years, the devices have even gone wireless. If mind-reading computers become part of everyday life, we’ll need doctors to install the tiny electrodes and transmitters that make them work. So if you have steady hands and don’t mind a little blood, being a BCI surgeon might be a job for you.

Shahram Majidi, a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, began operating in clinical trials for a BCI called the Stentrode in 2022. (That’s “stent” as in a tube that often sits inside a vein or artery.) Here he talks about a not-too-distant future where he’s performing hundreds of similar procedures a year.

Brain-computer interfaces have been around for a few decades, and there are different kinds of implants now. Some have electrodes attached to your brain with wires sticking out of your head and connecting to a computer. I think that’s great as a proof of concept, but it requires an engineer sitting there and a big computer next to you all the time. You can’t just use it in your bedroom. The beauty of a BCI like the Stentrode, which is what I’ve worked with, is that nothing is sticking out of your brain. The electrodes are in blood vessels next to the brain, and you get there by going through the patient’s jugular. The receiver is underneath the skin in their chest and connected to a device that decodes the brain signals via Bluetooth. I think that’s the future.

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