New diet craze:
This article explores how low-carb and ketogenic diets affect the brain.
What Are Low-Carb and Ketogenic Diets?
Although there is a lot of overlap between low-carb and ketogenic diets, there are also a few important differences.
To solve some of the world’s toughest computing problems, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a boost from the human brain.
The U.S. government lab will begin testing on Thursday a $1 million computer, the first of its kind, packed with 16 microprocessors that are designed to mimic the way the brain works.
The chip called TrueNorth, introduced by International Business Machines Corp. in 2014, is radically…
Hmmm;
Researchers are testing mild electrical stimulation to improve brain function and mental health, but warn do-it-yourselfers to be wary of treating themselves with models available online.
Dr. Fidel Vila-Rodriguez, director of the Non-Invasive Neurostimulation Therapies (NINET) Lab at the University of B.C., is starting to lend devices for home use to people with Parkinson’s disease and depression that will deliver a weak electrical current through electrodes placed on their temples.
The machines in his experiments can’t be adjusted above two milliamps — similar to the power created by two AA batteries. In contrast, some unregulated brain stimulators sold online can deliver about 10 times that amount of current, something he calls “worrisome.” It is an amount of electricity still small enough that users might not notice an immediate effect — or danger.
U.S. Navy Admiral Michael S. Rogers, who serves as Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, Director of the National Security Agency, and Chief of the Central Security Service, secretly visited Israel last week, according to Israel-based Haaretz.
The visit’s purpose was to reinforce ties with Intelligence Corps Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), particularly against cyber attacks by Iran and Hezbollah, according to Haaretz.
Israel has been the target of cyber attacks since the summer of 2014, but attacks have lately intensified. The U.S. too appears to have been victimized by Iran, with a federal court indicting a seven Iranians last week – said to be working for the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guards – on charges of carrying out attacks against financial institutions and a dam in New York.
DARPA’s new “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge” with a $2million prize for who can motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum.
WASHINGTON, March 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — On March 23rd, 2016 DARPA announced its next Grand Challenge at the International Wireless Conference Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Program Manager, Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), made the announcement to industry leaders following the conferences Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Summit. The challenge will motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum and has been named the “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.” A top prize of $2million dollars has been announced.
While mostly transparent to the typical cell phone or Wi-Fi user, the problem of spectrum congestion has been a long standing issue for both the commercial sector and Department of Defense. The insatiable appetite for wireless connectivity over the last 30 years has grown at such a hurried pace that within the RF community the term spectrum scarcity has been coined. RF bandwidth, the number of frequencies available to communicate information over, is a relatively fixed resource, and advanced communication systems like LTE and military communications systems consume a lot of it. As spectrum planners prepare for the next big wave of connected devices, dubbed the Internet of Things, they wonder where they will find the spectrum bandwidth they need to support these billions of new devices. Equally challenging, is the military’s desire to connect every soldier on the battlefield, while using these very same frequencies.
DARPA has chosen Barone Consulting to help develop the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge to address these critical infrastructure and military operation needs. In the tradition of other DARPA Grand Challenges, the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge provides an opportunity for experts across a wide variety of disciplines to devise groundbreaking strategies and systems and compete in open competition to win prizes, while advancing the state-of-the-art and seeding new technology communities. For the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, the tasks are to combine distributed sensing techniques, innovative RF transmit and receive technologies, and cutting edge machine learning algorithms to create radio networks capable of learning to collaborate with other unknown radio networks, in real time.
Looking for partners.
[Via Satellite 03-28-2016] The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is reviving its in-orbit servicing efforts through a new public-private partnership program called Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS). Under the RSGS vision, the partners would join a DARPA-developed modular toolkit, including hardware and software, to a privately developed spacecraft to create a commercially owned and operated Robotic Servicing Vehicle (RSV). DARPA would contribute the robotics technology, such as the previously developed Front End Robotic Enabling Near-Term Demonstration (FREND) robotic arm, expertise, and a government-provided launch. The commercial partner would contribute the satellite to carry the robotic payload, integration of the payload, and the mission operations center and staff.
DARPA seeks to develop and demonstrate the RSV on orbit within the next five years. The agency’s goals include demonstrating safe, reliable, useful and efficient operations in or near Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), demonstrating on live GEO satellites in collaboration with commercial and U.S. government spacecraft operators, and supporting the development of a servicer spacecraft with sufficient propellant and payload robustness to enable dozens of missions over several years.
Awesome!
Even the simplest networks of neurons in the brain are composed of millions of connections, and examining these vast networks is critical to understanding how the brain works. An international team of researchers, led by R. Clay Reid, Wei Chung Allen Lee and Vincent Bonin from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Harvard Medical School and Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF), respectively, has published the largest network to date of connections between neurons in the cortex, where high-level processing occurs, and have revealed several crucial elements of how networks in the brain are organized. The results are published in the journal Nature.
“This is a culmination of a research program that began almost ten years ago. Brain networks are too large and complex to understand piecemeal, so we used high-throughput techniques to collect huge data sets of brain activity and brain wiring,” says R. Clay Reid, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “But we are finding that the effort is absolutely worthwhile and that we are learning a tremendous amount about the structure of networks in the brain, and ultimately how the brain’s structure is linked to its function.”
“Although this study is a landmark moment in a substantial chapter of work, it is just the beginning,” says Wei-Chung Lee, Ph.D., Instructor in Neurobiology at Harvard Medicine School and lead author on the paper. “We now have the tools to embark on reverse engineering the brain by discovering relationships between circuit wiring and neuronal and network computations.”
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