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Rat walk: Electrodes stimulated the spinal nerves

Image: EFPL

Issue no. 16, 2012 Published: Jun 01, 2012
Rehab robot helps paralysed rats walk again
Giant telescope to explore far reaches of cosmos
Power from cellphone towers keeps vaccines cool
Mind-reading robot teachers keep students focused
Chemical analysis can predict volcanic eruptions
Tomato genome project bears fruit
Bacterial trick keeps robots in sync
Images stored in box of vapour

Rehab robot helps paralysed rats walk again
Rats paralysed by severe spinal cord injuries have recovered the ability to walk, sprint and even climb stairs, thanks to a rehabilitating robot and a chocolate treat. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland previously restored movement to rats with spinal injuries, by using a cocktail of chemicals and direct stimulation of spinal nerves. The team injected chemicals similar to those released in a healthy rat by the brainstem pathways that activate nerves controlling lower body movement. The team then stimulated the spinal cord using electrodes which send a continuous electrical signal to nerves that control rhythmic leg movement. This allowed the animals to walk supported on a treadmill just one week after their injury. Now the team have replaced the treadmill with a robotic harness that holds the rat up on its hind legs, supporting it when it falls over but otherwise allowing it to stand and move independently. They also added a chocolate treat just out of reach of the rats. This encouraged each rat to send messages from its brain to its legs, willing them to move. This top-down motivation appeared to kick-start the spinal nerves' growth. After two to three weeks the rats were able to make their first voluntary steps. A further few weeks saw the rats walking voluntarily on their hind legs for extended periods of time. The rats saw a four-fold increase in nerve fibres throughout their brain and spine, with the new fibres bypassing the original injury and allowing signals from the brain to reach the spine. In comparison, rats given the same chemical and electrical treatment but trained on a treadmill were unable to move voluntarily as there was no regrowth of nerve fibres.
New Scientist / Science May 31, 2012	back to top

Giant telescope to explore far reaches of cosmos
The world's biggest and most advanced radio telescope, capable of detecting signs of extraterrestrial life in the far reaches of the universe, will be located in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The first phase of construction is set to start in 2016 and completion is pencilled in for 2023. When completed the 'Square Kilometre Array' (SKA) radio telescope will be made up of 3,000 dishes, each 15 metres wide, together with many more antennae, that will give a receiver surface area of a square kilometre. Scanning the sky 10,000 times faster and with 50 times the sensitivity of any other telescope, it will be able to see 10 times further into the universe and detect signals that are 10 times older. It will be used to study the origins of the universe and will be able to detect very weak signals that could indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life. The SKA is more than just a scientific bauble. Global tech companies are already earmarking development funds linked to the project, which will rely on computing technology that does not even exist yet to process the flood of data it will collect. The engineering and computing challenges are significant, not least the provision of power to run the array and the supercomputers in remote locations away from the radio interference of towns and cities. IBM and Astron, the Netherlands institute for radio astronomy, announced in April a EUR 33m, five-year deal to develop extremely fast computer systems with low power requirements for the SKA project. Other companies that have signed partnership agreements with the project include Nokia-Siemens, BAE Systems PLC, Cisco Systems Inc and Selex Galileo.
Reuters May 25, 2012	back to top

Power from cellphone towers keeps vaccines cool
Staff at Morganster Hospital, which serves a remote community in Zimbabwe's Masvingo province, used to sleep fitfully. If the power failed and a back-up generator was offline - common problems in the impoverished nation - they would have to jump out of bed and drive for 26 km to stash their stock of life-saving vaccines in a fridge in the provincial capital. But those days are over, thanks to a pilot project that is testing a simple idea floated in the pages of New Scientist in 2010. In that article the authors suggested using surplus power from cellphone towers to run the refrigerators needed to keep perishable vaccines cool. Their idea is now being tried out at 10 hospitals across Zimbabwe with the backing of Econet Wireless, a cellphone provider based in Johannesburg. Cellphones have overtaken landlines in developing countries. To keep their towers working reliably in areas where the power often fails, or the masts are off the grid, cellphone firms have installed generators, and sometimes solar panels. Surplus power can then be used to chill vaccines, maintaining the cold chain, the weakest link in efforts to immunise children against diseases like polio, measles and diphtheria. To be sure that power glitches wouldn't cause problems, the team used fridges that can keep cool for 10 days without power, even in temperatures above 40 °C. The fridges have sensors to monitor temperature both inside and out, and to detect when the door is opened. This data is relayed back via the cellphone network, allowing Econet to know immediately if anything goes wrong. The fridges are either housed in a shelter beneath the cellphone tower, or in a nearby hospital.
New Scientist May 31, 2012	back to top

Mind-reading robot teachers keep students focused
Intelligent tutoring systems that use virtual teachers to interact with students could play a crucial role in the expanding field of online education. The trouble with online courses is that it is usually impossible to know whether the student is concentrating and engaging with the lesson. Unlike virtual teachers, human teachers have a series of tricks for keeping their classes focused. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison wanted to find out whether a robot could use some of the same techniques to improve how much a student retains. The pair programmed a Wakamaru humanoid robot to tell students a story in a one-on-one situation and then tested them afterwards to see how much they had remembered. Engagement levels were monitored using a EEG sensor to monitor the FP1 area of the brain, which manages learning and concentration. When a significant decrease in certain brain signals indicated that the student's attention level had fallen, the system sent a signal to the robot to trigger a cue. The robot teacher first told a story about the animals that make up the Chinese zodiac, in order to get a baseline EEG reading. Next, it told a longer 10-minute Japanese folk tale, which the student was unlikely to have heard before. During this story the robot raised its voice or used arm gestures to regain the student's attention if the EEG levels dipped. These included pointing at itself or towards the listener - or using its arms to indicate a high mountain, for example. Two other groups were tested but the robot either gave no cues, or sprinkled them randomly. As expected, the students who were given a cue by the robot when their attention was waning were much better at recalling the story afterwards than the other two groups, answering an average of 9 out of 14 questions correctly, as compared with just 6.3 when the robot gave no cues at all.
New Scientist May 29, 2012	back to top

Chemical analysis can predict volcanic eruptions
Examining crystals formed deep within volcanoes could give a year's warning of impending eruptions, say scientists from the University of Bristol. The researchers used forensic-style chemical analysis to link seismic observations of the deadly 1980 Mount St Helens eruption to crystal growth within the magma chamber, the large underground pool of liquid rock beneath the volcano. Specifically, the team studied zoned crystals, which grow concentrically like tree rings within the magma body. Individual zones have subtly different chemical compositions, which reflect the physical changes within the magma chamber and can thus indicate what volcanic processes are going on and the timescales over which they take place. Peaks in the growth of iron- and magnesium-rich crystals were found to correlate with increased seismicity and gas emissions in the months running up to an eruption. In the case of Mount St Helens, the crystals indicated that pulses of magma were flowing into a growing chamber within the volcano. This forensic approach can be applied to other active volcanoes to improve forecasting of future eruptions.
TG Daily May 25, 2012	back to top

Tomato genome project bears fruit
An international team of scientists has cracked the genetic code of the domesticated tomato and its wild ancestor, an achievement which should help breeders identify the genes needed to develop tastier and more nutritious varieties. The full genome sequence of a tomato breed known as Heinz 1706, and a draft sequence for its closest wild relative Solanum pimpinellifolium, were published this week in Nature. Researchers who carried out the work said that together the sequences provide the most detailed look yet at the functional parts of the tomato genome and show order, orientation, types and relative positions of all of its 35,000 genes. The sequences should help researchers find the links between certain tomato genes and the characteristics they determine, and will also extend scientists' understanding of how genetic and environmental factors affect the health of a crop. The tomato is also a good model to investigate the process of fruit ripening, so understanding its genome should help reveal the molecular circuits that make fruits ripen and give them their health-promoting properties, the team said. The research also offers some insight into how the tomato and its relatives diversified and adapted to new environments over the years. The scientists said the findings show the tomato genome expanded abruptly about 60 million years ago. Some of the genes generated during that expansion were involved in the development and control of ripening, making them particularly interesting to tomato breeders.
Reuters May 30, 2012	back to top

Bacterial trick keeps robots in sync
You don't have to watch Dancing with the Stars to know that keeping in sync is tough - and even more so for a robot. A new approach keeps several robots in step, and even enables a dancing robot that loses its footing to seamlessly rejoin its synchronised peers. One way to synchronize a group of robots is for each to communicate with one another about their positions, but distance between the robots can lead to time delays. And when many robots are involved, the complexity of this communication network grows. To skirt such problems, researchers from MIT have taken inspiration from bacteria that synchronise their behaviour not by checking in with each other, but by checking in with their environment. Synchronising robots this way might work well in rescue operations where robots are damaged and need to be replaced. Many bacteria coordinate via a process called quorum sensing, releasing a steady stream of signalling molecules into the environment and also sensing the signalling molecules. When enough bacteria are around that the local concentration of these molecules soars, it is time for group action: Genes get turned on, molecular switches are flipped and the bacteria all change their behaviour in sync. Similarly, the MIT team coordinated the behaviour of eight dancing robots by having the bots send information to - and get information from - an external server. The robots go through cycles of prescribed actions and send the server information about where they are in these cycles. The server then sends the average of this information back to all the robots. So a robot joining its dancing peers will check in with the server about what the other robots are doing. It can then calculate what the next movement is in the synchronised cycle and rejoin the group. Information about the music is also embedded in the information sent back to the robots.
Science News / arXiv.org May 24, 2012	back to top

Images stored in box of vapour
Giving a different meaning to data storage in the cloud, scientists at NIST's Joint Quantum Institute have succeeded in storing a miniature movie in a room-temperature atomic vapour. The researchers have stored two letters of the alphabet in a small cell filled with rubidium (Rb) atoms, tailored to absorb and later re-emit messages on demand. It is the first time two images have simultaneously been reliably stored in a non-solid medium and then played back. Stretching a definition just a little, the researchers say that because they can store and replay two separate images, or 'frames', a few micro-seconds apart, the whole sequence can qualify as a feat of cinematography. The team believes that its atomic method will be useful for storing and processing quantum information. The atomic storage medium is a narrow cell some 20 centimetres long, needed for a quantum process called gradient echo memory (GEM), a protocol for storage that was pioneered at the Australian National University. The image is stored by being absorbed in atoms at any one particular place in the cell, depending on whether those atoms are exposed to three carefully tailored fields: the electric field of the signal light, the electric field of another 'control' laser pulse, and a magnetic field adjusted to be different along the length of the cell. This makes the Rb atoms - each behaving like a magnet itself - move about. When the image is absorbed into the atoms in the cell, the control beam is turned off. Image readout occurs in a sort of reverse process. The magnetic field is flipped to a contrary orientation, the control beam turned back on, and the atoms start to precess in the opposite direction. Eventually those atoms reemit light, thus reconstituting the image pulse, which proceeds on its way out of the cell.
TG Daily May 30, 2012	back to top