Lifeboat Foundation

A group of neuroscience and neurotechnology researchers have conducted extensive research and developed a new brain imaging technology in two EU projects led by Aalto University. As a result of the successful research, a new project funded by Business Finland just started with the aim of making the devices usable for patients. The project’s budget is one million euros.

“More accurate measurements can be helpful in locating epileptic brain activity before surgery. The new device is also expected to help distinguish brain tumours from healthy tissue more accurately prior to cancer surgery. In addition, the device will increase our understanding of the connections between the different brain regions. This will help us understand abnormal brain activity in connection with, for example, depression or the progress of Alzheimer’s disease,” explains Professor Risto Ilmoniemi, Head of Aalto University Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering.

The improved accuracy can also be useful in the study of stroke, autism and brain injuries; and especially as part of basic brain research.

Dreams of human immortality may remain so, but extending our lives beyond 100, even 150 years, can soon become a reality. ‘The Future is Now’ explores ground-breaking technology that might help us to slow down the ageing process and overcome our physical limitations.

3D-printing of brand new human organs, controlling bionic prosthetics with your mind, or invading your body with disease-fighting microrobots. Hosts Kate and Talish bring you the latest developments in biomedical engineering.

Continue reading “The Future is Now. Biomedical advances that will change the human body” »

Over the past decade or so, researchers worldwide have developed increasingly advanced techniques to enable robot navigation in a variety of environments, including on land, in the air, underwater or on particularly rough terrains. To be effective, these techniques should allow robots to move around in their surroundings both safely and efficiently, saving as much energy as possible.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in India have recently developed a new approach to achieve efficient path planning in mobile robots. Their method, presented in a paper published in Springer Link’s Nature-Inspired Computation in Navigation and Routine Problems, is based on the use of a flower pollination algorithm (FPA), a soft computing-based tool that can identify ideal solutions to a given problem by considering a number of factors and criteria.

“Flower pollination algorithms (FPAs) have shown their potential in various engineering fields,” Atul Mishra, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “In our study, we used the algorithm to solve the problem of path planning for mobile robots. Our prime objective was to plan, in the least time possible, the most optimal path in terms of minimum path length and energy consumption, with maximum safety.”

A Washington State University research team has found that nanoscale particles of the most commonly used plastics tend to move through the water supply, especially in fresh water, or settle out in wastewater treatment plants, where they end up as sludge, in landfills, and often as fertilizer.

Neither scenario is good.

“We are drinking lots of plastics,” said Indranil Chowdhury, an assistant professor in WSU’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who led the research. “We are drinking almost a few grams of plastics every month or so. That is concerning because you don’t know what will happen after 20 years.”

A happy accident in the laboratory has led to a breakthrough discovery that not only solved a problem that stood for more than half a century, but has major implications for the development of quantum computers and sensors. In a study published today in Nature, a team of engineers at UNSW Sydney has done what a celebrated scientist first suggested in 1961 was possible, but has eluded everyone since: controlling the nucleus of a single atom using only electric fields.

“This discovery means that we now have a pathway to build quantum computers using single-atom spins without the need for any oscillating magnetic field for their operation,” says UNSW’s Scientia Professor of Quantum Engineering Andrea Morello. “Moreover, we can use these nuclei as exquisitely precise sensors of electric and magnetic fields, or to answer fundamental questions in quantum science.”

That a nuclear spin can be controlled with electric, instead of magnetic fields, has far-reaching consequences. Generating magnetic fields requires large coils and high currents, while the laws of physics dictate that it is difficult to confine magnetic fields to very small spaces—they tend to have a wide area of influence. Electric fields, on the other hand, can be produced at the tip of a tiny electrode, and they fall off very sharply away from the tip. This will make control of individual atoms placed in nanoelectronic devices much easier.

Power systems and communication networks are increasingly interdependent, which can affect the response and recovery times when problems occur.

Today’s smart grid involves components that talk to each other, sending signals over communication networks to keep power flowing smoothly and efficiently. But what happens when the “conversation” goes quiet?

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the Illinois Institute of Technology recently explored the literature on this link between the power system and its communication networks, finding that many studies do not adequately consider the two-way nature of this relationship and its impact on grid resilience. Their paper, “Electric Power Grid Resilience with Interdependencies between Power and Communication Networks—A Review,” was recently published in IET Smart Grid, a journal from the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Another important question is the extent to which continued increases in computational capacity are economically viable. The Stanford Index reports a 300,000-fold increase in capacity since 2012. But in the same month that the Report was issued, Jerome Pesenti, Facebook’s AI head, warned that “The rate of progress is not sustainable…If you look at top experiments, each year the cost is going up 10-fold. Right now, an experiment might be in seven figures but it’s not going to go to nine or 10 figures, it’s not possible, nobody can afford that.”

AI has feasted on low-hanging fruit, like search engines and board games. Now comes the hard part — distinguishing causal relationships from coincidences, making high-level decisions in the face of unfamiliar ambiguity, and matching the wisdom and commonsense that humans acquire by living in the real world. These are the capabilities that are needed in complex applications such as driverless vehicles, health care, accounting, law, and engineering.

Despite the hype, AI has had very little measurable effect on the economy. Yes, people spend a lot of time on social media and playing ultra-realistic video games. But does that boost or diminish productivity? Technology in general and AI in particular are supposed to be creating a new New Economy, where algorithms and robots do all our work for us, increasing productivity by unheard-of amounts. The reality has been the opposite. For decades, U.S. productivity grew by about 3% a year. Then, after 1970, it slowed to 1.5% a year, then 1%, now about 0.5%. Perhaps we are spending too much time on our smartphones.

Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking are not alone in their calls for humanity to become a multi-planetary species. But they certainly are the most visible advocates for space colonization. And while the moon might be the most obvious jumping off point to the solar system and beyond, nothing stands out as a potential site for long term settlement more than Mars.

But just how realistic is sending astronauts to the Red Planet anytime soon–let alone colonizing it permanently? The obstacles are many, and aerospace engineering may well be the least of them. The human biological, psychological tolss and survival strategies–radiation, low gravity, isolation and the marshalling air, water, and food resources–all stand in the way. And then there is the economic cost and the political and public will. In this edition of Seeking Delphi,™ I talk to former NASA Mars mission navigator, Moriba Jah, about the many challenges of leaving of our home planet.

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.