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Scientists successfully attacked cancer with rabies, built an artificial eagle eye from 3D-printed cameras the size of a grain of salt and tapped MIT students to make their scheduling AI smarter. Scheduling? Now that’s a real head-scratcher.
A Wild Way To Treat Cancer With Rabies
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An illustration of the rabies virus. Image credit: Getty Images
Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea, have engineered tiny gold rods that look the same as the rabies virus and used them to attack brain cancer. The rabies virus can easily to slip through the blood-brain barrier — the same obstacle that prevents medicine from entering the brain — and infect nerve cells. According to the journal Science, “the particles don’t carry any drugs, but the tiny gold rods readily absorb laser light, which heats them up and kills surrounding tissue.” In tests with mice, the team turned on a laser emitting near-infrared light, shined it through the animal’s skin and heated the gold rods to almost 50 degrees Celsius. “The light harmlessly passed through skin and bone, but heat from the gold particles radiated outward, effectively cooking nearby cancer cells,” according to the magazine. The results were published in the journal Advanced Materials.
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Top and above: Engineers at the University of Stuttgart in Germany have used a 3D printer to build a tiny multi-camera array that — like the eye of an eagle — combines a wide-angle view with a long focal length. Image credit: University of Stuttgart
Engineers at the University of Stuttgart in Germany have used a 3D printer to build a tiny multi-camera array that — like the eye of an eagle — combines a wide-angle view with a long focal length. The entire system is only several square millimeters in diameter, and each of the four lenses is no larger than an average grain of salt. “A small computer program composes the image in such a way that the high-resolution image of the telephoto lens is displayed in the center and the image of the wide-angle lens on the outside,” according to a news release. The array comes with a miniature computer chip and an IP address and can connect to a smartphone. Its applications could range from endoscopy to surveillance. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
Got A Complex Planning Problem? Feed It To This AI
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MIT researchers are trying to improve automated planners by giving them the benefit of human intuition. By encoding the strategies of high-performing human planners in a machine-readable form, they could improve the performance of competition-winning planning algorithms by between 10 and 15 percent on a challenging set of problems. Image credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT
When it comes to figuring out a logistical problem like scheduling all the world’s flights with maximum efficiency, the best people to call on might be the students walking the halls of MIT. So that’s who researchers looked to in an effort to train a computer planner that uses artificial intelligence to solve complex problems. They are trying to improve the work of automated planners, which are already pretty good, but not as good as humans with a particular aptitude for problem-solving. After testing 36 MIT students, the researchers translated insights into aviation and autonomous satellite planning into a machine-readable logic that imparted more human intuition into the AI. The upgrade improved the AI planner’s performance by up to 15 percent in completing intricate tasks like creating flight plans for planes at a certain number of airports with a specific number of travelers that minimized fuel consumption and flight time while also ensuring the aircraft departed and arrived on time. Mark another step forward for our robot overlords.
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The new robot prosthetic is controlled by sensor, which sits firmly on the patient’s pectoral muscle. Courtesy: Imperial College London
In an amazing feat of biomedical engineering and surgery, scientists may have found a way to make robotic prosthetic arms much more functional. Current models receive commands when a user twitches muscles in the shoulder or arm of the amputated limb. Unfortunately, the muscle and nerves in these areas are often damaged from the injury or the amputation surgery, meaning that users can often only perform one or a few moves. This overly basic functionality now causes up to 50 percent of robotic-arm users to abandon the prosthetic globally. But a team has shown that they could reroute the nerves of the peripheral nervous system — those that take signals from the brain and spinal cord out into the extremities. By wiring the nerves that normally send movement commands to the amputated arm to the pectoral muscle in the chest or the bicep in the arm, they could get much clearer signals than what normally comes through the damaged tissue.
The Power Of Terahertz At Your Fingertips
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Princeton University researchers have drastically shrunk the equipment for producing terahertz — an electromagnetic pulse lasting one millionth of a millionth of a second — from a tabletop setup with lasers and mirrors to a pair of microchips small enough to fit on a fingertip. The simpler, cheaper generation of terahertz has potential for advances in medical imaging, communications and drug development. Image credit: Frank Wojciechowski, Princeton University.
A new generation of medical imaging, security and communications equipment is coming thanks to terahertz radiation. At wavelengths between 0.1 and 1 millimeter, electromagnetic radiation passes harmlessly through nonconductive material without causing damage to delicate DNA. But the equipment now used to produce such wavelengths is big and expensive. Now Princeton University engineers say they have successfully shrunk tabletop and larger terahertz generators down to the size of a pair of microchips. The decrease also means that production costs are dramatically lower. This improvement opens more possibilities to use terahertz not just to look out for weapons hidden under clothing but also to characterize chemicals for making new drugs and to improve communications technologies. “The system is realized in the same silicon chip technology that powers all modern electronic devices from smartphones to tablets, and therefore costs only a few dollars to make on a large scale,” said Princeton electrical engineer and lead researcher Kaushik Sengupta.