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Category: engineering – Page 223

4D Camera to Improve Machine Vision for Robots and Virtual Reality

A new type of camera built by Stanford engineers and funded by the NSF and Intel generates a four dimensional image that is capable of capturing nearly 140 degrees of information.

The 4D camera, built by Donald Dansereau, a postdoctoral fellow in electrical engineering and Gordon Wetzstein, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, along with colleagues from the University of California, San Diego is the first single-lens, wide field of view, light field camera ever made.

With current cameras robots have to change position to get multiple perspectives of their surroundings in order to maneuver in complex environments and understand the objects within those environments.

Floating City Project Wants To Make An ‘Unregulated’ Hub Of Scientific Research

In the hopes of rising above the laws and regulations of terrestrial nations, a group of Silicon Valley millionaires has bold plans to build a floating city in Tahiti, French Polynesia. It sounds like the start of a sci-fi dystopia (in fact, this is the basic premise behind the video game Bioshock), but the brains behind the project say their techno-libertarian community could become a paradise for technological entrepreneurship and scientific innovation.

The Seasteading Institute was set up in 2008 by billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel and software engineer, poker player, and political economic theorist Patri Friedman. Both ardent libertarians, their wide-eyed mission is to “establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”

“Seasteading will create unique opportunities for aquaculture, vertical farming, and scientific and engineering research into ecology, wave energy, medicine, nanotechnology, computer science, marine structures, biofuels, etc,” their website reads.

How Aliens Might Use ‘Network Theory’ For Galactic Communications

Advanced technological civilizations looking for efficient communication from one end of a galaxy to another would best be served by tapping into a network of transiting extrasolar earths. That is, extrasolar earths capable of being observed transiting across the face of their parent stars. Or so says an exoplanet researcher in the U.K.

Kepler-type space observatories out looking for transits of extrasolar earths, could also look for the telltale signatures of optical lasers or even alien macro-engineering projects that might be manipulated to signal another civilization.

Re-engineering Macrophages to Eat Cancer Cells

Re-engineered macrophages to treat cancer.

Today we have a new study where researchers have created immune cells that ignore the way cancer tries to hide from detection.

Hiding in plain sight

The Macrophages are one of the types of immune cell and are responsible for dealing with dangerous cells, such as those which have become cancerous. The problem is most cancer cells bypass the immune system by fooling the immune cells into leaving them alone. Cancer cells present certain molecules on their surface that act like a “do not eat me” signal to macrophages which would otherwise engulf and digest them.

Rice team developing flat microscope for the brain

HOUSTON – (July 12, 2017) – Rice University engineers are building a flat microscope, called FlatScope TM, and developing software that can decode and trigger neurons on the surface of the brain.

Their goal as part of a new government initiative is to provide an alternate path for sight and sound to be delivered directly to the brain.

The project is part of a $65 million effort announced this week by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a high-resolution neural interface. Among many long-term goals, the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program hopes to compensate for a person’s loss of vision or hearing by delivering digital information directly to parts of the brain that can process it.

New 3D chip combines computing and data storage

As embedded intelligence is finding its way into ever more areas of our lives, fields ranging from autonomous driving to personalized medicine are generating huge amounts of data. But just as the flood of data is reaching massive proportions, the ability of computer chips to process it into useful information is stalling.

Now, researchers at Stanford University and MIT have built a new chip to overcome this hurdle. The results are published today in the journal Nature, by lead author Max Shulaker, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Shulaker began the work as a PhD student alongside H.-S. Philip Wong and his advisor Subhasish Mitra, professors of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford. The team also included professors Roger Howe and Krishna Saraswat, also from Stanford.

Computers today comprise different chips cobbled together. There is a chip for computing and a separate chip for data storage, and the connections between the two are limited. As applications analyze increasingly massive volumes of data, the limited rate at which data can be moved between different chips is creating a critical communication “bottleneck.” And with limited real estate on the chip, there is not enough room to place them side-by-side, even as they have been miniaturized (a phenomenon known as Moore’s Law).

How Will We Stop Hackers From Invading Our Brains Once We’re Cyborgs?

Rapid developments in brain-machine interfacing and neuroprosthetics are revolutionizing the way we treat paralyzed people, but the same technologies could eventually be put to more generalized use—a development that’ll turn many of us into veritable cyborgs. Before we get to that point, however, we’ll need to make sure these neural devices are safe, secure, and as hacker-proof as possible.

In anticipation of our cyborg future, researchers from the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva Switzerland have published a new Policy Forum paper in Science titled, “Help, hope, and hype: Ethical dimensions of neuroprosthetics.” The intent of the authors is to raise awareness of this new breed of neurotechnologies, and the various ways they can be abused. Importantly, the researchers come up with some ways to mitigate potential problems before they arise.