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Google helps map one cubic millimeter of human brain tissue
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This sample tissue was anonymously donated from patients that have undergone surgery to treat epilepsy at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (MGH). It was then given to researchers at Harvardâs Lichtman laboratory.
The Harvard researchers cut the tissue into ~5300 individual 30 nanometer sections using an automated tape collecting ultra-microtome, mounted those sections onto silicon wafers, and then imaged the brain tissue at 4 nm resolution in a customized 61-beam parallelized scanning electron microscope for rapid image acquisition.
The end result was 225 million individual 2D images that Google then computationally stitched and aligned into a 3D volume with thousands of Google Cloud TPUs were leveraged in the process. This human brain map is now accessible through Googleâs web-based Neuroglancer visualization tool.
New universal law of human mobility
Mapping how humans move will help in future pandemics.
How people move around cities follows a predictable and universal pattern, scientist say, which will be crucial not only for urban planning but also controlling pandemics.
By analysing mobile-phone tracking data from across four continents, the team confirmed that people visit places more often when they donât have to travel far to get there.
âWe might shop every day at a bakery a few hundred metres away, but weâll only go once a month to the fancy boutique miles away from our neighborhood,â says project leader Carlo Ratti, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
COVID-19 can infiltrate insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, study suggests
The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can infect insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, reducing their ability to secrete insulin and sometimes causing cell death, a new study suggests.
Damaging these insulin-producing cells, known as beta cells, can potentially worsen symptoms of diabetes, particularly type 1 diabetes, wherein the pancreas already makes little to no insulin, according to the study authors. âIf you imagine that there are some patients who already have diabetes, if the virus comes in and nails the remaining beta cells you have, thatâs not good,â said co-senior author Peter Jackson, a professor in the department of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Tesla files trademark for restaurant services
Tesla has filed a new trademark for its brand under restaurant services as the automaker is expected to expand amenities around its charging infrastructure, including actual restaurants.
At face value, Tesla doesnât seem to have much to do with the restaurant industry, but the automaker has actually been talking about going into the food industry for a while.
In 2018, CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla plans to open an âold-school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in Los Angeles.â
Deepfake maps could really mess with your sense of the world
Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions.
Other aerial imagesâof nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in North Korea, for exampleâhave had a similar impact on world events. Now, image-manipulation tools made possible by artificial intelligence may make it harder to accept such images at face value.
In a paper published online last month, University of Washington professor Bo Zhao employed AI techniques similar to those used to create so-called deepfakes to alter satellite images of several cities. Zhao and colleagues swapped features between images of Seattle and Beijing to show buildings where there are none in Seattle and to remove structures and replace them with greenery in Beijing.