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Category: electronics – Page 26

Summary: Researchers found a way to assess consciousness without external stimulation, using a little-used approach where volunteers squeeze a force sensor with their hand when they breathe in and release it when they breathe out, resulting in more precise and sensitive measurements that may help improve treatment for insomnia and coma reversal.

Source: picower institute for learning and memory.

Studies of consciousness often run into a common conundrum of science—it’s hard to measure a system without the measurement affecting the system. Researchers assessing consciousness, for instance as volunteers receive anesthesia, typically use spoken commands to see if subjects can still respond, but that sound might keep them awake longer or wake them up sooner than normal.

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To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four thousandths of a second.

To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster.

Now scientists have come up with a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a second, or 250 million times faster than those digital cameras. That makes it capable of capturing something very important in materials science: dynamic disorder.

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The first SPAD camera.

TOKYO, April 3, 2023—Canon Inc. announced today that the company is developing the MS-500, the world’s first1 ultra-high-sensitivity interchangeable-lens camera (ILC) equipped with a 1.0 inch Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) sensor2 featuring the world’s highest pixel count of 3.2 megapixels3. The camera leverages the special characteristics of SPAD sensors to achieve superb low-light performance while also utilizing broadcast lenses that feature high performance at telephoto-range focal lengths. Thanks to such advantages, the MS-500 is expected to be ideal for such applications as high-precision monitoring.

The MS-500

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“Clinical cases of infections caused by C. auris almost doubled in 2021, according to research published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine. And the number of cases resistant to echinocandins, the first-line treatment for C. auris infections, tripled. While the fungus generally isn’t a threat for healthy people, it can be dangerous for those with weakened or compromised immune systems, and people using feeding tubes or catheters—in other words, a large proportion of patients in hospitals. The fungus can cause a bloodstream infection whose symptoms include fever, chills, sweats, and low blood pressure. It’s still rare in the U.S., but roughly one in three patients with an invasive infection will die from it; the fungus poses an “urgent threat,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Here’s a scenario that may sound familiar to fans of the postapocalyptic TV drama ‘The Last of Us’: a hard-to-kill fungus is beginning to spread among—and infect—vulnerable populations. Only this time, it’s real.

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In the pearly light of the pocket nucleo-bulb…’ — Isaac Asimov, 1951.

Cheap Paper-Based Sensors Let You Snoop For Pesticides ‘…the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers.’ — Frank Herbert, 1965.

Modern App Provides Video Technology From Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ ‘A special spot-wavex scrambler also caused his televised image, in the area immediately about his lips, to mouth the vowels and consonants beautifully.’ — Ray Bradbury, 1953.

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Art projects can fundamentally be anything you like, as long as you say they’re art at the end of it all. They don’t always work, or work well, but they often explore new ideas. Often, artists working on installations fall back on similar tools and techniques used by the maker community. [Julian] is no exception, and his Biotic Explorers work has many touchstones that will be familiar to the Hackaday set.

The Biotic Explorers Research Group is a broad art project, involving the creation of a fictitious scientific association. [Julian] created imaginary scientists, reports, and research to flesh out this world. The project culminates in the development of a prototype communications system, which uses pH sensors at either end of a fungal network in soil to send messages.

Liquids are applied to change the pH of the system, which can be picked up at the other end of the soil bed. The pH levels are read as digital signals, with pH levels either side of neutral reading as high and low bits. pH sensors can be expensive, so [Julian] chose the cheapest available, and tapped into their LCD display lines to read their output into an microcontroller. The system displays data using commonly available OLED displays, and hobby servo motors are used to control the dispensing of liquid.

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Up until now, it was still infamously difficult to include sensors in 3D designs.

Engineers might be able to create smart hinges that can detect when a door has been opened or gears inside motors that can communicate their rotational speed to a mechanic by integrating sensors into rotational systems.

Even while improvements in 3D printing allow for the quick manufacture of rotational devices, it is still infamously difficult to include sensors in the designs.

MIT

With 3D printing, MIT engineers have now created a method for quickly integrating sensors into these devices.

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