Lifeboat Foundation

Biomedical and electrical engineers at UNSW Sydney have developed a new way to measure neural activity using light—rather than electricity—which could lead to a complete reimagining of medical technologies like nerve-operated prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces.

Professor François Ladouceur, with UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, says the multi-disciplinary team has just demonstrated in the lab what it proved theoretically shortly before the pandemic: that sensors built using liquid crystal and integrated optics technologies—dubbed “optrodes”—can register nerve impulses in a living animal body.

Not only do these optrodes perform just as well as conventional electrodes—that use electricity to detect a nerve impulse—but they also address “very thorny issues that competing technologies cannot address,” says Prof. Ladouceur.

For the first time, a group of researchers from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, IBM, ETH Zurich, MIT and Harvard University have observed topological phases of matter of quantum states under the action of temperature or certain types of experimental imperfections. The experiment was conducted using quantum simulator at IBM.

Quantum simulators were first conjectured by the Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman in 1982. Ordinary classical computers are inefficient at simulating systems of interacting quantum particles These new simulators are genuinely quantum and can be controlled very precisely. They replicate other quantum systems that are harder to manipulate and whose physical properties remain very much unknown.

In an article published in the journal Quantum Information, the researchers describe using a quantum simulator with superconducting qubits at IBM to replicate materials known as topological insulators at finite temperature, and measure for the first time their topological quantum phases.

10 years ago we saw a breakthrough in modern biology.

An American scientist discovered that manipulation of the Cas9 protein resulted in a gene technology worthy of a sci-fi film: CRISPR.

Think of it as a pair of molecular scissors capable of cutting and editing the DNA of humans, animals, plants, bacteria and viruses.

Understanding the neural mechanisms of conscious and unconscious experience is a major goal of fundamental and translational neuroscience. Here, we target the early visual cortex with a protocol of noninvasive, high-resolution alternating current stimulation while participants performed a delayed target–probe discrimination task and reveal dissociable mechanisms of mnemonic processing for conscious and unconscious perceptual contents. Entraining β-rhythms in bilateral visual areas preferentially enhanced short-term memory for seen information, whereas α-entrainment in the same region preferentially enhanced short-term memory for unseen information. The short-term memory improvements were frequency-specific and long-lasting. The results add a mechanistic foundation to existing theories of consciousness, call for revisions to these theories, and contribute to the development of nonpharmacological therapeutics for improving visual cortical processing.

Brain scans reveal that some people who can’t speak or move are aware of the world around them.

By Jan Claassen, Brian L. Edlow

By:Jan Claassen

Join this session to hear from a panel of distinguished technical leaders as they talk about Universal Scene Description (USD) as a standard for the 3D evo.

Watch this video to see the beauty of Bashgram, a unique bamboo village located in Tripura, that aims to promote sustainability and eco-tourism, as well as the importance of bamboo in the local culture.

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ARTIFICIAL intelligence has predicted what “the last human on Earth” will look like.

The U.S. Sun asked DALL·E, an artificially intelligent software, to make the prediction and it came up with some rather creepy results.

DALL·E is a machine learning model that was created by OpenAI to conjure up unusual images from keyword prompts.

The volcano has been in a state of “heightened unrest” for more than a month, with the number of earthquakes rising from between 10 and 20 per day to 40 to 50 per day, likely due to an increase in magma inside the volcano, according to the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.

The strongest was a 5.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the Big Island two weeks ago, although local officials said it did not cause major damage or injuries.