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Cotton Candy May be the Key to Creating Artificial Organs

Cotton Candy’s new inspiration.


Scientists are now able to spin a three-dimensional slab of gelatin that contains a microvascular network, something very like our capillaries, using a cotton candy-esque machine.

What do cotton candy and artificial organs have in common? More than you might think.

Leon Bellan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University, is using a cotton candy machine to spin out networks of tiny threads comparable in size, density, and complexity to the patterns formed by capillaries.

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Betting on the bots

This is wonderful program for students wanting to learn robotics. I do believe for real AI/ traditional Robotics (not referring to nanobots or microbots) to truly accelerate in capabilities; it will require technology like Quantum.


Two young engineering students are making robotics more accessible to enthusiasts across the country

A spartan apartment at a nondescript housing society in Pashan is filled with robots of all shapes and sizes. Among the curious looking machines are two robotic hands that mimic the movement of a human body and a large quadcopter that looks as if it’s ready to fly. This is the working space of College of Engineering, Pune (CoEP) alumni Amol Gulhane and Pratik Pravin Deshmukh — the 20-something founders of Robolab, a venture that’s making robotics accessible to the masses by building robotics labs across the country.

“We were inspired to start Robolab because of two reasons. Being members of the Robot Study Circle, a college group dedicated to robotics at CoEP, we were passionate about building robots. Although we were specialising in electronics and telecommunications, robotics brought out the best in us. When the time approached for graduation in 2013, the thought of having to give up our hobby was depressing. So, the idea to start Robolab in November 2013 was born out of the desire to stay true to our calling,” said Deshmukh. The second reason, revealed the youngsters, was more idealistic. In the course of launching Robolab, the duo conducted a survey to find out the number of colleges in India having labs dedicated to robotics. “We found out there were just a handful of colleges like the IITs who had such labs. Since not many people can make it to the IITs, we decided to take robotics to the masses with Robolab.”

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Mind Uploading

Minduploading.org is a collection of pages and articles designed to explore the concepts underlying mind uploading. The articles are intended to be a readable introduction to the basic technical and philosophical topics covering mind uploading and substrate-independent minds. The focus is on careful definitions of the common terms and what the implications are if mind uploading becomes possible.

Mind uploading is an ongoing area of active research, bringing together ideas from neuroscience, computer science, engineering, and philosophy. This site refers to a number of participants and researchers who are helping to make mind uploading possible.

Realistically, mind uploading likely lies many decades in the future, but the short-term offers the possibility of advanced neural prostheses that may benefit us.

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Wirelessly supplying power to brain

Human and animal movements generate slight neural signals from their brain cells. These signals obtained using a neural interface are essential for realizing brain-machine interfaces (BMI). Such neural recording systems using wires to connect the implanted device to an external device can cause infections through the opening in the skull. One method of solving this issue is to develop a wireless neural interface that is fully implantable on the brain.

However, the neural interface implanted on the brain surface should be of small size and minimally invasive. Furthermore, it requires the integration of a power source, antenna for wireless communication, and many functional circuits.

Now, a research team at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology has developed a wafer-level packaging technique to integrate a silicon large-scale integration (LSI) chip in a very thin film of a thickness 10 µm (Sensors, “Co-design method and wafer-level packaging technique of thin-film flexible antenna and silicon CMOS rectifier chips for wireless-powered neural interface systems”).

Wirelessly Supplying Power To Brain

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Mental Miscues

Very interesting discovery about how our brain thinks; our brain isn’t always 100% error proof according to this report from Carnegie Mellon University. Therefore, when researchers are mapping the brain plus mimicking human brain functions; what is the tolerance level for error allowed then?


(Source: Carnegie Mellon University)A study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University investigated the brain’s neural activity during learned behavior and found that the brain makes mistakes because it applies incorrect inner beliefs, or internal models, about how the world works. The research suggests that when the brain makes a mistake, it actually thinks that it is making the correct decision—its neural signals are consistent with its inner beliefs, but not with what is happening in the real world.

“Our brains are constantly trying to predict how the world works. We do this by building internal models through experience and learning when we interact with the world,” said Steven Chase, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. “However, it has not yet been possible to track how these internal models affect instant-by-instant behavioral decisions.”

The researchers conducted an experiment using a brain-machine interface, a device that allows the brain to control a computer cursor using thought alone. By studying the brain’s activity, the researchers could see how the brain thinks an action should be performed. The researchers report that the majority of errors made were caused by a mismatch between the subjects’ internal models and reality. In addition, they found that internal models realigned to better match reality during the course of learning. “To our knowledge, this is the most detailed representation of a brain’s inner beliefs that has been identified to date,” said Byron Yu, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

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Princeton research benefits sustainability, cybersecurity and other societal goals

I shared this same point of view yesterday; and glad to see Princeton shares the same perspective on Quantum and it’s abundant capabilities. Again; Quantum is going to truly change (if not everything) almost everything that we consume, use, and interact with even in raw material enrichment will benefit from Quantum.


Claire White, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, studies ways to make building materials more sustainable. It turns out that cement production creates a lot of carbon dioxide, so much that it accounts for roughly 5 to 8 percent of man-made carbon dioxide emissions globally. White and her team are developing new types of cement using industrial byproducts such as coal fly ash and blast-furnace slag. They make these materials more durable by adding nanoparticles.

Watch Assistant Professor Claire White explain her research on a more sustainable type of cement.

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Neural Engineering System Design (NESD)

REMINDER: DARPA’s Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) Program Proposers Days is tomorrow and Wed. (February 2–3, 2016) at The Westin Gateway Hotel, 801 N. Glebe Road, Arlington, VA 22203. This is part of the Brain Mind Interface development work. Good thing that the research on Graphene came out recently showing that it is a viable substance for BMIs.


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Nanotechnology in Manufacturing: The Future is Now (Part 1)

The burgeoning field of nanotechnology promises an indefinite range of capabilities in medicine, optics, communications, and other facets of applied science and engineering. On that front, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Atoms 2 Products program (A2P) is funding 10 companies, universities, and institutions to develop mass-manufacturing techniques and technologies for functional products made up of nanoscale constituents. The project demonstrates a mere slice of the contributions in the mass movement to make nanotechnology a part of our everyday lives.

The following gallery highlights the work of five DARPA-funded projects in the program. The slides describe an atomic calligraphy technique for 2D atomic printing, a manufacturing method for producing high-frequency “Nanolitz” wires, the construction of pop-up sensors for laparoscopy, and a conjunct effort to use micro-robotics to build the assemblers of nanodevices.

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