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Category: computing – Page 968

7 Mind-Blowing Digital Health Tools That Could Disrupt Health Care in 2016

Wow!!! Chewing gum wearable technology, Cyborg Chips, Ingestible sensors to let doctors know if you’re taking your meds, etc. 2016 is going to be interesting

The phrase “Brave New World” has become one of the most often used clichés in medical technology in recent years. Google the title of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian, and anticipatory, novel with the word medicine and 2,940,000 results appear.

But could there be better shorthand to describe some of the recent developments in medical, health and bio-tech? Consider these possibilities coming to fruition, or close to, in 2016:

1. Back from Extinction

Gene-editing startup Editas Medicine of Cambridge, Mass., filed to go public this month. The company’s founder, Harvard professor George Church, hopes to, among other things, revive the extinct woolly mammoth or create a facsimile. Investors include Google and Bill Gates.

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Medgadget @ CES 2016: Samsung Shows Off S-Patch Wearable Featuring Its Bio-Processor Chip (VIDEO)

S-PatchA couple weeks ago Samsung affirmed its ongoing commitment to the digital health space with the release of the Bio-Processor. The Bio-Processor is a single, compact chip that is capable of measuring PPG, ECG, skin temperature, GSR, and body fat. While it’s already in mass production and anticipated to be found in devices soon, Samsung took some time during its CES press event to demonstrate the Bio-Processor’s power in a prototype device called the S-Patch.

Not a lot was said about the S-Patch, but it’s a reference platform and won’t enter production. Because the Bio-Processor is built into the S-Patch, both data collection, storage, and processing takes place on the device itself. The brief demo also showed the S-Patch wirelessly transmitting real-time data (we assume via Bluetooth) to a mobile device.

Take a look below at an excerpt from Samsung’s CES press event showing the S-Patch in action:

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Why evolution may be intelligent, based on deep learning

Makes sense.

Moth Orchid flower (credit: Imgur.com)

A computer scientist and biologist propose to unify the theory of evolution with learning theories to explain the “amazing, apparently intelligent designs that evolution produces.”

The scientists — University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science professor Richard Watson * and Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) professor of biology Eörs Szathmáry * — say they’ve found that it’s possible for evolution to exhibit some of the same intelligent behaviors as learning systems — including neural networks.

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DARPA Advance Breaks New Ground for Operating In Congested Electromagnetic Spectrum

Competition for scarce electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is increasing, driven by a growing military and civilian demand for connected devices. As the spectrum becomes more congested, the Department of Defense (DoD) will need better tools for managing the EM environment and for avoiding interference from competing signals. One recent DARPA-funded advance, an exceptionally high-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC), represents a major step forward. The ADC could help ensure the uninterrupted operation of spectrum-dependent military capabilities, including communications and radar, in contested EM environments. The advance was enabled by 32 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) semiconductor technologies available through DARPA’s ongoing partnership with GlobalFoundries, a manufacturer of highly-advanced semiconductor chips.

The EM spectrum, whose component energy waves include trillionth-of-a-meter-wavelength gamma rays to multi-kilometer-wavelength radio waves, is an inherently physical phenomenon. ADCs convert physical data—that is, analog data—on the spectrum into numbers that a digital computer can analyze and manipulate, an important capability for understanding and adapting to dynamic EM environments.

Today’s ADCs, however, only process data within a limited portion of the spectrum at a given time. As a result, they can temporarily overlook critical information about radar, jamming, communications, and other potentially problematic EM signals. DARPA’s Arrays at Commercial Timescales (ACT) program addressed this challenge by supporting the development of an ADC with a processing speed nearly ten times that of commercially available, state-of-the-art alternatives. By leveraging this increased speed, the resulting ADC can analyze data from across a much wider spectrum range, allowing DoD systems to better operate in congested spectrum bands and to more rapidly react to spectrum-based threats.

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How to Teleport Info Out of a Black Hole

Many folks often ask “What’s next for technology after Quantum?” Many suggests space, some folks suggest some sort of vNext technology or science that hasn’t been identified or fully discovered, etc. It truly is something that many of us have been asking ourselves for the past few years. However, there is still so much that still needs to be experimented with in ragards to Quantum; including teleporting information via Quantum from a black hole. And, what and how will this type of experiment improve our own usage of Quantum in the future.

The information that can be extracted from this hypothetical black hole is quantum information, meaning that instead of existing in either a 0 or 1 state, like a classical bit, the data collected would exist as a superposition of all potential states.

“We’ve demonstrated concretely that it is possible, in principle, to retrieve some quantum information from a black hole,” said study co-author Adam Jermyn, a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge in England. [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]

But don’t go tossing your computer into the nearest black hole just yet. The amount of information that can be retrieved is tiny — just one quantum bit, or qubit. What’s more, getting that bit would likely mean sacrificing the possibility of retrieving other quantum information from the black hole, the researchers reported in October 2015 in the preprint journal arXiv.

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Human v2.0

Visit: http://www.spaceandintelligence.com
https://www.facebook.com/SpaceAndIntelligence

Meet the scientific prophets who claim we are on the verge of creating a new type of human — a human v2.0. At a certain moment in the future computer intelligence will equal the power of the human brain. Some believe this will revolutionise humanity — we would be able to download our minds to computers extending our lives indefinitely. Others fear this will lead to oblivion by giving rise to destructive ultra intelligent machines. One thing they all agree on is that the coming of this moment — and whatever it brings — is inevitable.

Originally published in 2006 by BBC Horizon.

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Quantum Computing – things that need to be considered for our future Quantum Computing World

Sharing my recent posting that I did on Linkedin Pulse. I will admit that I purposely delayed this article in concerns of creating a panic; however, with the progress that has been occuring across the globe and in some cases accelerated the maturity of this technology; I believe it is time for governments, industries, etc. to start thinking about their own broader strategic plans around Quantum as well as how they will address any impacts.

Quantum Computing is making great progress in so many areas such as chips, network/ Internet, etc. each month. And, many industries such as financials, telecom, tech, and public sector namely defense and space, etc. have made big investments in this technology as well as have developed some interesting partnerships such as Wall Street. Everything looks so promising and exciting for our future when we look at the various ways how Quantum Computing can change our lives around AI, improving the medical technologies, how we interact with devices (wearables, VR, etc.), and even how we travel will advance through this technology. The future looks extremely rosy and bright; right?.

I believe it can be with Quantum; however, in every major shift/ disruption in technology, there is always a transformation progression that has to naturally occur thru stages. And, Quantum is no different; however, the disruption that Quantum will bring is going to be on a much more massive scale than what we have seen in the past. The reason why is Quantum is truly going to impact and improve every area of technology not just in devices, or a platform, AI, VR, etc.; I mean everything in technology will be changed and improved by Quantum over time.

Granted this will not be like a major change overnight like we saw with the iPhone, etc. This initial change will occur over a series of years possibly over the next 7 to 10 years. As each country continues to accelerate in their own efforts to be a fully Quantumized; we need to understand where the potential risks exist and have a good plan for how we plan to address our own risks and challenges during and after this transformation.

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Researchers gauge quantum properties of nanotubes, essential for next-gen electronics

Loving the progress around Quantum.

Today, a group of scientists — John A. Rogers, Eric Seabron, Scott MacLaren and Xu Xie from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Slava V. Rotkin from Lehigh University; and, William L. Wilson from Harvard University — are reporting on the discovery of an important method for measuring the properties of nanotube materials using a microwave probe. Their findings have been published in ACS Nano in an article called: “Scanning Probe Microwave Reflectivity of Aligned Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes: Imaging of Electronic Structure and Quantum Behavior at the Nanoscale.”

The researchers studied single-walled carbon nanotubes. These are 1-dimensional, wire-like nanomaterials that have electronic properties that make them excellent candidates for next generation electronics technologies. In fact, the first prototype of a nanotube computer has already been built by researchers at Stanford University. The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center is currently developing nanotube transistors for commercial use.

For this study, scientists grew a series of parallel nanotube lines, similar to the way nanotubes will be used in computer chips. Each nanotube was about 1 nanometer wide — ten times smaller than expected for use in the next generation of electronics. To explore the material’s properties, they then used microwave impedance microscopy (MIM) to image individual nanotubes.

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