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Here is a concept; “could VR be used to rehabilitate criminals to experience through VR what their victims have experienced?” I do know in the recent 20 yrs a part of rehabilitation has included the criminal facing their victims so that the criminal develops a new level of empathy. However, could VR be a better solution? And, should it be?

LONDON, Feb. 15 (UPI) — Depression patients who interacted with characters in a virtual reality environment were less critical and more compassionate toward themselves, researchers found in a small study in England.

Researchers at University College London found some of the self-directed negativity of people feel in depression can be mitigated through role-playing in virtual reality.

Dropping people into an immersive electronic world using a virtual reality headset gives them an opportunity to experience different scenarios — in this case, by embodying either somebody comforting a distressed child or by receiving the comfort as the distressed child.

Continue reading “Virtual reality treatment helps depression patients in study” | >

People may soon use virtual reality to treat their depression and to be less critical and more compassionate towards themselves, a new study shows. A new virtual reality therapy has effectively reduced depressive symptoms of patients with some reporting significant drop in depression severity.

In the study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry Open, patients claim virtual reality therapy changed their response to real-life situations in which they would previously have been self-critical.

The findings come from the analysis of the effect of the therapy to 15 depression patients, aged 23 to 61. Researchers, from University College London (UCL) and ICREA-University of Barcelona, asked the participants to wear a virtual reality headset to see from the perspective of a life-size “avatar” or virtual body.

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Russia is getting closer in perfecting Quantum Processors.

A team of physicists including Russian researchers succeeded in conducting an experiment in which, for the first time in history, control over ultrafast motion of electrons down to three attoseconds (one attosecond refers to a second as one second refers to the lifetime of the Universe) was proved possible (“Coherent control with a short-wavelength free-electron laser”). This fact paves a way to new directions of research that seemed improbable before. The experiment was conducted with the help of the free-electron laser FERMI located at the “Elettra Sincrotrone” research center in Trieste, Italy.

The speed of chemical, physical and biological processes is extremely high, atomic bonds are broken and restored within femtoseconds (one millionth of one billionth of a second). The Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail was the first to succeed in observing the dynamics of chemical processes, which made him a winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Nevertheless, nature can operate even faster. While atomic motions within a molecule can be measured with femtosecond resolution, the dynamics of electrons, which define the nature of chemical bonds, happens a thousand times faster — within tens and hundreds of attoseconds.

The only tools appropriate for studying such processes are so-called x-ray free-electron lasers. In “conventional” gas, liquid and solid-state lasers, excitation of electrons in the bound atomic state serves as the source of photons. In contrast, free-electron lasers operate with the help of a high-quality electron beam wiggling along a sinusoidal path under the effect of a ray of magnets. During that process electrons lose energy by producing radiation.

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Very interesting since many complex neural diseases also have ties to the brain stem such as Dystonia.

Feb. 22, 2016 — There is a new ground zero for Alzheimer’s Disease, according to a new discovery of a critical but vulnerable region in the brain that appears to be the first place affected by late onset Alzheimer’s disease. It also may be more important for maintaining cognitive function in later life than previously appreciated.

The locus coeruleus is a small, bluish part of the brainstem that releases norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter responsible for regulating heart rate, attention, memory, and cognition. Its cells, or neurons, send branch-like axons throughout much of the brain and help regulate blood vessel activity, says a new review of the scientific literature.

Its high interconnectedness may make it more susceptible to the effects of toxins and infections compared to other brain regions, said lead author Mara Mather.

Continue reading “Ground Zero for Alzheimer’s Disease found at base of brainstem” | >

On Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mark Zuckerberg partook in what he thought would be a “fireside chat” with Wired’s Jessi Hempel but which was verifiably not fireside, and was, actually, a keynote.

Inverse picked out the best nine moments of this interview.

1.) Zuck doesn’t know that Aquila will meet regulations but is just confident that it’ll work out

Zuck reported that Aquila, Facebook’s casual wifi-beaming, solar-powered drone project, is coming along well. A team is currently constructing the second full-scale drone — which has the wingspan of a 747, is only as heavy as a car, and will be able to stay aloft for as long as six months — and another team is testing large-but-not-full-scale models every week. These drones will transmit high-bandwidth signals via a laser communications system, which, he says, require a degree of accuracy on par with hitting a quarter on the top of the Statue of Liberty with a laser pointer in California. The goal, he added, is to get these drones beaming wifi that’s 10 to 100 times faster than current systems. Facebook will roll out its first full-scale trials later this year, and Zuck expects that within 18 months, Aquila will be airborne.

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Yesterday LG and Samsung, two of the world’s largest consumer technology companies, announced the release of consumer-priced 360 cameras that will make it possible for millions of people to create their own virtual reality & 360 videos. Ceci Mourkogiannis, a co-founder of Metta — the first video platform dedicated to user-generated 360 & VR content — looks back to a time just a few months ago when the options for creating 360 videos were limited, and ponders the future of user-generated 360 video in 2016.

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On the heels of the MindMaze round of $100 million, it is clear that Swiss tech is booming and beginning to tickle the curiosity of international investors.

The startup had already closed an angel funding round of $10 million and recently announced the opening of their Series A round at a $1 billion valuation. The lead investor is multinational conglomerate Hinduja Group, with participation from family offices that haven’t been disclosed yet.

MindMaze is a neuro-rehabilitation platform that helps stroke victims to recover faster by “fooling” the brain through VR/AR technology.

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