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Unlocking the Future of Asset Management with Agile Mobile Robots.

Wednesday, november 3rd at 11 AM ET

What if you could have 100x more data insights? Agile mobile robots like Spot bring sensors to industrial assets, collecting critical information at the source. By combining your Industry 4.0 investments with more frequent autonomous inspections, you will collect the volume of data your artificial intelligence programs need for advanced predictive maintenance.

It probably didn’t feel like much, but that simple kind of motion required the concerted effort of millions of different neurons in several regions of your brain, followed by signals sent at 200 mph from your brain to your spinal cord and then to the muscles that contracted to move your arm.

At the cellular level, that quick motion is a highly complicated process and, like most things that involve the human brain, scientists don’t fully understand how it all comes together.

Now, for the first time, the neurons and other cells involved in a region of the human, mouse and monkey brains that controls movement have been mapped in exquisite detail. Its creators, a large consortium of neuroscientists brought together by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative, say this brain atlas will pave the way for mapping the entire mammalian brain as well as better understanding mysterious brain diseases — including those that attack the neurons that control movement, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

A new method – which has been dubbed “light beads microscopy” – is described in the journal Nature. This offers a creative solution that pushes the limits of imaging speed and is limited only by the physical nature of fluorescence itself. It eliminates the “deadtime” between sequential laser pulses when no neuroactivity is recorded and at the same time the need for scanning.

The technique breaks one strong pulse into 30 smaller sub-pulses, each at a different strength, which dive into 30 different depths of scattering but induce the same amount of fluorescence at each depth. This is accomplished with a cavity of mirrors that staggers the firing of each pulse in time and ensures that they can all reach their target depths via a single microscope focusing lens. Using this approach, the only limit to the rate at which samples can be recorded is the time it takes the fluorescent tags to flare. That means broad swathes of the brain can be recorded within the same time it would take a conventional two-photon microscope to capture a much smaller network of brain cells.

Scientists at Rockefeller University, New York, integrated their new system into a microscopy platform with access to a large brain volume. This enabled the recording of activity in more than a million neurons across the entire cortex of a mouse brain for the first time.

SpaceX is about to double the size of its fleet of Crew Dragon spaceships. The company is debuting a new spacecraft for a NASA launch later this month, and is building a fourth human-rated capsule that should be ready for flight early next year, a SpaceX official said Wednesday.

Sarah Walker, director of SpaceX’s Dragon mission management office, confirmed Wednesday the company is readying a fourth Crew Dragon spacecraft for an inaugural flight next year. SpaceX and NASA officials previously announced that the next NASA crew mission, known as Crew-3, scheduled for liftoff Oct. 30 will use a new vehicle.

“It’s really exciting to introduce another Crew Dragon to our fleet to support our human spaceflight manifest,” Walker said. “We’ve got another one in the production line now. It should be ready in the spring to support more human spaceflight missions.”

Rocket Lab USA Incsoared higher in after-hours trading Wednesday, following an announcement that the company has been chosen to fly an experimental solar sail into space.

NASA signed on with Rocket Lab RKLB, +10.43% to demonstrate the U.S. agency’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, or ACS3. The solar sail will be launched into space to demonstrate the efficacy of a technology that could be an alternative to satellites for specific duties.