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Mar 4, 2020

Filipino siblings invent lamp that runs on just water and salt—and it can last for 8 hours straight!

Posted by in categories: computing, engineering

Electric supply is one of the lacking necessity in certain parts of the world even until today. Thinking to overcome this problem, these three siblings from the Philippines came out with one genius invention.

Aisa Mijeno is a computer engineering graduate who came out with the idea to make a lamp that runs on salt water together with her brothers Ralph Mijeno and Oscar Bryan Magtibay.

Aisa Mijeno is currently a member of the engineering faculty of the De La Salle University in Lipa, Batangas.

Mar 4, 2020

Trump administration expands reach of EPA secret science proposal

Posted by in category: science

Revised version greatly expands reach of controversial rule, analysts say.

Mar 4, 2020

An emerging virus is killing farmed fish, but breeders can help them fight back

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Random outbreak at research center points to tilapia variants that can resist the deadly virus.

Mar 4, 2020

Researchers catalog dozens of mutations in crucial brain development gene

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, neuroscience

An international team of researchers that pooled genetic samples from developmentally disabled patients from around the world has identified dozens of new mutations in a single gene that appears to be critical for brain development.

“This is important because there are a handful of that are recognized as ‘hot spots’ for causing ,” said lead author Debra Silver, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology in the Duke School of Medicine. “This gene, DDX3X, is going to be added to that list now.”

An analysis led by the Elliott Sherr lab at the University of California-San Francisco found that half of the DDX3X mutations in the 107 children studied caused a loss of function that made the gene stop working altogether, but the other half caused changes predicted to disrupt the function of the gene.

Mar 4, 2020

A new AI chip can perform image recognition tasks in nanoseconds

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

The news: A new type of artificial eye, made by combining light-sensing electronics with a neural network on a single tiny chip, can make sense of what it’s seeing in just a few nanoseconds, far faster than existing image sensors.

Why it matters: Computer vision is integral to many applications of AI—from driverless cars to industrial robots to smart sensors that act as our eyes in remote locations—and machines have become very good at responding to what they see. But most image recognition needs a lot of computing power to work. Part of the problem is a bottleneck at the heart of traditional sensors, which capture a huge amount of visual data, regardless of whether or not it is useful for classifying an image. Crunching all that data slows things down.

A sensor that captures and processes an image at the same time, without converting or passing around data, makes image recognition much faster using much less power. The design, published in Nature today by researchers at the Institute of Photonics in Vienna, Austria, mimics the way animals’ eyes pre-process visual information before passing it on to the brain.

Mar 4, 2020

Gene Therapy Is Successfully Treating a Common Form of Inherited Blindness

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

This month, K.L. became one of the first patients to receive a new experimental gene therapy for children with a severe form of inherited vision loss. The treatment, currently not yet named, targets young men who are susceptible to a particularly vicious genetic disorder that gradually destroys the light-sensing portion of their eyes.

Within a month following a single injection, “my vision was beginning to return in the treated eye. The sharpness and depth of colors I was slowly beginning to see were so clear and attractive,” said K.L.

The trial, a first-in-human case for X-linked Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), was led by Dr. Robert MacLaren at the University of Oxford but spanned multiple centers including the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami, which previously championed Luxterna, the first FDA-approved gene therapy for a type of inherited blindness. The results are some of the first targeting a particularly difficult gene prone to mutation in humans. Amazingly, despite some inflammation in early stages, the therapy provided massive improvements in eyesight as early as two weeks following treatment.

Mar 4, 2020

Man paralyzed from neck down walks again, credits neurosurgeon from Michigan

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

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Michigan-native doctor was honored in his hometown for making national headlines after helping a paralyzed man walk again.

Mar 4, 2020

Musician uses algorithm to generate every possible melody to prevent copyright lawsuits

Posted by in category: information science

Catalogue of 68 billion tunes contains ‘every melody that’s ever existed and ever can exist’

Mar 4, 2020

Our eye movements help us retrieve memories, suggests new study

Posted by in categories: innovation, neuroscience

In a recent study, scientists at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute (RRI) found that research participants moved their eyes to determine whether they had seen an image before, and that their eye movement patterns could predict mistakes in memory. They obtained these results using an innovative new eye tracking technique they developed.

“Our findings indicate that eye movements play a functional role in retrieval,” says Dr. Jennifer Ryan, senior scientist at the RRI and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory. “They can tell us a lot about someone’s memory.”

This study builds on previous Baycrest research examining the link between eye movements and memory, including the role of our eye movements in memorization and the weakening connection between our eye movements and our brain activity as we age.

Mar 4, 2020

High energy Li-Ion battery is safer for electric vehicles

Posted by in categories: energy, engineering, transportation

A lithium-ion battery that is safe, has high power and can last for 1 million miles has been developed by a team in Penn State’s Battery and Energy Storage Technology (BEST) Center.

Electric vehicle batteries typically require a tradeoff between safety and . If the has and , which is required for uphill driving or merging on the freeway, then there is a chance the battery can catch fire or explode in the wrong conditions. But materials that have low energy/power density, and therefore high safety, tend to have poor performance. There is no material that satisfies both. For that reason, battery engineers opt for performance over safety.

“In this work we decided we were going to take a totally different approach,” said Chao-Yang Wang, professor of mechanical, chemical and materials science and engineering, and William E. Diefenderfer Chair in Mechanical Engineering, Penn State. “We divided our strategy into two steps. First we wanted to build a highly stable battery with highly stable materials.”