Stanford physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has begun developing “biotic games” involving paramecia and other living organisms. He hopes the games lead to advances in education and crowd-sourcing of laboratory research while helping to raise the level of public discourse on bio-related issues.
[Youtube]
Geeks are Sexy reader Jenn H. sent us a picture of the pretty awesome Yoshi cake she had at her birthday a few weeks ago. Check it out:
The cake was made by Perfection Confection in Gray, TN.
Thanks Jenn!
This amazing piece of geek art comes from the mind of artist Mushir Hoda and is called Link’s Evolution.
[Source: Mushir Hoda | Via Geektyrant]
Thanks to a recent development in optigenetics research, mice are teaching us about our own brains… by letting us control theirs. Christian Wentz from MIT has designed a mind-controlling hat for mice; the contraption is built of a pair of circuit boards, an antenna, and some advancements in remote battery tech, which allows a set of flashing LEDs to control the neural impulses of lab mice.
Optigenetics is the a relatively new field of study; using a combination of genetics, virology and optics, researchers are able to instantaneously activate or silence specific groups of neurons within circuits using flashes of light. It works like this: Neurons are injected with a light-sensitive protein that, essentially, turns the cells into switches–no light equals off, flash of light equals on. An “on” switch in a neuron makes it fire, thereby creating an action in the brain’s neural network.
Being able to control which neurons fire and when allows researchers to investigate nearly limitless aspects of brain function. The field, though young, has far-reaching implications for science, as it can answer age-old questions and long-standing debates about how and when the brain does what, information necessary for treating diseases like Parkinson’s or developing work-around techniques that would allow for increased functionality in a damaged brain.
There have been issues, though, regarding the feasibility of devices used to create the flashes of light necessary to conduct research. A battery source powerful enough to control to panel of LEDs is both cumbersome and heat-generating–roadblocks for studying test subjects without interfering in their mobility. That’s where Christian Wentz’s invention comes in.
Previously, subject mice were tethered to fiber optic cables. The setup worked for controlling brain impulses but caused issues with the mouse’s mobility and the range of studies that could be conducted; cables get tangled, can easily break, and create obstructions to natural activity that affect study results. The new design, shown above, operates on a wireless transmitter that is located near the mouse; any time the hat is within range, the transmitter charges the 16-LED panel used to send optic charges into the gatekeeper proteins loaded into the mouse’s neurons.
Ed Boyden, one of the founders of optogenetics and the leader of this study, discusses the device and its potential.:
The problem is that light sources are quite energy-inefficient; LEDSs and lasers dissipate a lot of their energy in heat, so you need quite high currents or power levels in order to get them to go…. For these experiments, you need enormously high amounts of power but only for brief amounts of time, [so] the system stores the extra when there’s extra around and lets it out when there’s demand, like the power grid for regular electricity. If you’ve got a cable attached to an animal, that would essentially ruin the experiment. Here you can pop on this little tiny device and it’ll enable all sorts of things.
And though the device is infact very small, in terms of hat-to-mouse ratio it could be smaller.
The device is really small, and we have even smaller versions now, down to about a gram. Nearly all of the underlying technologies enabling this device are being improved daily… By riding technology development curves, the system described here may eventually be miniaturized to a few square millimetres.
Boyden’s study and Wentz’s design open up the possibility for less invasive and larger-scale studies, improvements in research that could put a kind of running start on developing treatments for diseases that impact neuron function.
Why is it that every time you see videos featuring creepy-ass inventions on the web, overwhelming odds are that these inventions will come from Japan?
What type of emotions could be obtained if you were able to hug yourself? When we hug someone, we feel a sense of ease coming from emotions such as belief, security and love. However, it is not possible to hug oneself, who is the closest person. To experience this situation, we proposed a tactile device called the Sense-Roid. The system is composed of a lay figure with tactile sensors to detect the user’s caressing motion, and a tactile jacket with vibrators and artificial muscles to reflect the caressing motion to the user. As a result, users caress themselves through our Sense-Roid. We believe that this self-caressing experience will enlighten people about the value of caressing.
[Via Topless Robot]
[Via]
IBM has published a paper on drift-tolerant multilevel phase-change memory. That may not sound exciting, but it could mean memory chips that have all the benefits of flash memory, but work far quicker and last far longer. If that proves the case, the chips could become useful for business machines.
The basic concept of phase change memory is that data is stored via a type of material named chalcogenide compounds. To put things in a very simplified form, the application of heat switches the material from a crystal state to an amorphous state: the technique is also used in rewriteable optical disks.
What makes chalcogenide compounds so suited to the task is that the difference between the two states is very distinct, to the extent that it’s possible to identify two “stopping off points” during the transition. This means a total of four identifiable “positions” for each storage unit, thus increasing the amount of data that can be stored.
Another benefit is that the process doesn’t require old data to be erased before new data is written to the same space, thus speeding up performance.
The problem to date has been that not only does the level of resistance of the material drift randomly over time, but the amount of drift varies depending on the particular state (crystal or amorphous) that a storage point is in. The difficulty of keeping track of this drift and adjusting to meet it has meant the material has a limited lifespan when it comes to being used for data storage.
The image above, taken from the IBM paper, shows the effects of the drift on a collection of 200 cells: figure a is the point at which data is written, figure b is 40 microseconds later (forty-millionths of second), figure c is one thousand seconds later and figure d is 46,000 seconds (just under 13 hours) later. Again put very simply, the practical effect of what’s represented by the collapse of the red line is increasing difficulty in reliably reading the stored data.
The IBM paper discusses the discovery that although the beginning of such drift is random, the way in which it spreads across the material can be predicted with an algorithm. That makes the adjustment process simpler, meaning the material can be used longer before keeping track of the drift becomes impractical.
The upshot is that phase change memory using this system should be able to last long enough to be written to five million times. By comparison, existing flash memory usually lasts for between 5,000 and 10,000 write cycles when produced in a way that makes it affordable for consumer products.
Our pals at Evil Mad Scientist Labs have built what has to be the geekiest footstool we’ve ever seen. The stool is modeled after a 555 timer chip and is 30 times the size of the actual chip. They even provide some basic instructions if you’re interested in building one for yourself.
