Scientists Have Created an Artificial Retina Implant That Could Restore Vision to Millions

Scientists have developed a retinal implant that can restore lost vision in rats, and are planning to trial the procedure in humans later this year.
The implant, which converts light into an electrical signal that stimulates retinal neurons, could give hope to millions who experience retinal degeneration -including retinitis pigmentosa -in which photoreceptor cells in the eye begin to break down, leading to blindness.
The retina is located at the back of the eye, and is made up of millions of these light-sensitive photoreceptors. But mutations in any one of the 240 identified genes can lead to retinal degeneration, where these photoreceptor cells die off, even while the retinal neurons around them are unaffected.

Because the retinal nerves remain intact and functional, previous research has looked at treating retinitis pigmentosa with bionic eye devices that stimulate the neurons with lights, while other scientists have investigated using CRISPR gene editing to repair the mutations that cause blindness.

Now, a team led by the Italian Institute of Technology has developed a new approach, with a prosthesis implanted into the eye that serves as a working replacement for a damaged retina.

The implant is made from a thin layer of conductive polymer, placed on a silk-based substrate and covered with a semiconducting polymer.

The semiconducting polymer acts as a photovoltaic material, absorbing photons when light enters the lens of the eye. When this happens, electricity stimulates retinal neurons, filling in the gap left by the eye’s natural but damaged photoreceptors.

To test the device, the researchers implanted the artificial retina into the eyes of rats bred to develop a rodent model of retinal degeneration -called Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) rats.

After the rats had healed from the operation 30 days later, the researchers tested how sensitive they were to light -called the pupillary reflex -compared to healthy rats and untreated RCS rats.

At the low intensity of 1 lux -a bit brighter than the light from a full moon -the treated rats weren’t much more responsive than untreated RCS rats.

But as the light increased to around 4–5 lux -about the same as a dark twilight sky -the pupillary response of treated rats was largely indistinguishable from healthy animals.

When they retested the rats at six and 10 months after surgery, the implant was still effective in the rats -although all the rats in the tests (including the treated rats, the healthy animals, and the RCS controls) had suffered minor vision impairment due to being older.

Using positron emission tomography (PET) to monitor the rats’ brain activity during the light sensitivity tests, the researchers saw an increase in the activity of the primary visual cortex, which processes visual information.

Based on the results, the team concludes that the implant directly activates “residual neuronal circuitries in the degenerate retina”, but further research will be required to explain exactly how the stimulation works on a biological level.

“[T]he detailed principle of operation of the prosthesis remains uncertain,” they explain in their paper.

While there are no guarantees that the results seen in rats will translate to people, the team is hopeful that it will -and from the sounds of things, it won’t be too long until we find out.

“We hope to replicate in humans the excellent results obtained in animal models,” says one of the researchers, ophthalmologist Grazia Pertile from the Sacred Heart Don Calabria in Negrar, Italy.

“We plan to carry out the first human trials in the second half of this year and gather preliminary results during 2018. This [implant] could be a turning point in the treatment of extremely debilitating retinal diseases.”

The findings are reported in Nature Materials.

This never-before-seen extra from White Rabbit Project with actual cyborg Angel Giuffria

This never-before-seen extra from White Rabbit Project is from the afternoon Grant Imahara spent with actual cyborg Angel Giuffria.

Angel also showed off some of her attachments, like one that allows her to shoot a bow and arrow.

White Rabbit Project:
https://www.netflix.com/title/80091245

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVW57u6XYxI.

Walt Disney’s & Salvador Dali Short-Animation – Destino

The film tells the story of Chronos, the personification of time and the inability to realize his desire to love for a mortal. The scenes blend a series of surreal paintings of Dali with dancing and metamorphosis. 

The target production began in 1945, 58 years before its completion and was a collaboration between Walt Disney and the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí. Salvador Dali and Walt Disney Destiny was produced by Dali and John Hench for 8 months between 1945 and 1946. Dali, at the time, Hench described as a “ghostly figure” who knew better than Dali or the secrets of the Disney film. For some time, the project remained a secret. The work of painter Salvador Dali was to prepare a six-minute sequence combining animation with live dancers and special effects for a movie in the same format of “Fantasia.” 

Dali in the studio working on The Disney characters are fighting against time, the giant sundial that emerges from the great stone face of Jupiter and that determines the fate of all human novels. Dalí and Hench were creating a new animation technique, the cinematic equivalent of “paranoid critique” of Dali. Method inspired by the work of Freud on the subconscious and the inclusion of hidden and double images.

Dalí said: “Entertainment highlights the art, its possibilities are endless.” The plot of the film was described by. Dalí as “A magical display of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time.” Walt Disney said it was “A simple story about a young girl in search of true love.”

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GFkN4deuZU.

Global housing prices index

The Economist published their most recent global housing prices report, which shows that housing prices in the U.S. have recovered to a new high (albeit marginal), while Spain and Ireland are seeing increases again and the Commonwealth is continuing to see prices increase in recent years. 

Some of these rises can be attributed to the influence of foreign money, some attributable to the $1.3 trillion that has exited China and found its way into residential markets in the most valuable cities in the world. 

In the U.S., Chinese investors bought some 29,000 homes in the 12 months to March 2016 with a total value of $27bn, according to the National Association of Realtors. Much of this money is focused on a handful of cities: Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Miami. Foreign money has helped propel skyrocketing prices in other places, too. In Vancouver, home values have risen by 47% in four years; in London they have risen by 54%; and in Auckland the rise has been a whopping 75%. The influence of foreign capital flows on housing markets is being scrutinised, particularly as affordability becomes ever more stretched. 

The Economist measures house prices against two metrics: rents and income. If, over the long run, prices rise faster than the revenue a property might generate or the household earnings that service a mortgage, they may be unsustainable.

On this basis homes are fairly valued in America by an average of our two measures. But across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent, Britain, they look severely overpriced. Policymakers may well be left scratching their heads, however: increasing housing affordability for citizens and encouraging investment from foreigners are likely to be irreconcilable goals.

The Economist also publishes interactive house-price guides to American cities and British regions.

Robert Kelly’s live BBC interview gatecrashed by his kids!

This professor’s kids hilariously interrupted his live interview!

Daddy’s working! Brilliant moment a BBC expert’s live interview is gatecrashed by his curious children and a VERY stressed woman

Robert Kelly is being interviewed on South Korea when his elder child dances in Marion, four, is followed by her baby brother, James, who enters the room under his own power in his walker His wife Jung-a Kim then comes skidding into the room and frantically drags them out Both parties manage to keep their cool and promptly continue the debate Kelly is a Ohio State and Miami University graduate who specializes in US foreign policy in Korea

Live television always leaves room for hilarious gaffes – which is exactly what happened when a BBC debate on South Korea was interrupted by the interviewee’s children.

The hilarious footage shows expert Robert Kelly, an associate professor of Political Science at Pusan National University in Busan, handling serious questions on the country’s president, Park Geun-hye, being ousted from power. But suddenly, a toddler bursts into the room in a bright yellow top and performs a comical dance behind the Cleveland, Ohio, native.

Kelly, 44, who was born and studied in the US before moving to Korea as a political science professor, focuses entirely on the camera as he attempts to blindly hand off his daughter, who is clearly curious as to who he is talking to. And his parental problems soon double as a baby also excitedly makes his way into the room under his own power in a walker. To complete the farce, his wife Jung-a Kim then comes skidding through the threshold. She grabs the two youngsters and attempts to drag them out of the door, but one of them can be heard wailing and the baby’s walker suddenly won’t fit back through the door.

Eventually, she manages to get them both out, and the interview continues. When the interview finishes, broadcaster James Mernendez says: ‘There’s a first time for everything. I think you’ve got some children who need you!’ And after the segment had finished, the presenter admitted on Twitter that he had struggled to keep it together. He posted a link to the video, with the words: ‘Hard to keep a straight face.’ Afterwards, he added: ‘It was the desperate reach for the door at the end that nearly did it for me.’

The hilarious footage was first tweeted by BBC producer Julia MacFarlane, who promptly deleted it 20 minutes later. She wrote: ‘When the kids interrupt you in the middle of live TV…A lovely moment and masterfully handled by our guest this morning on South Korea’. A BBC spokesman told MailOnline: ‘We’re really grateful to Professor Kelly for his professionalism. This just goes to show that live broadcasting isn’t always child’s play.’ A highly respected expert on South Korean politics, Prof Kelly has written for outlets including Foreign Affairs, The European Journal Of International Relations and The Economist.
He earned his bachelors degree in political science from the University of Miami and completed his PhD at Ohio State. Kelly moved to Korea in 2008, and married Jung-a Kim, a former yoga teacher who is now a stay-at-home mother to their two children, Marion, four, and James, nine-months.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh4f9AYRCZY. 

IBM has figured out how to store data on a single atom

Big things really can come in small packages.

IBM announced it has managed to successfully store data on a single atom for the first time. The research, carried out at the computing giant’s Almaden lab in Silicon Valley, was published in the scientific journal Nature March 8, and could have massive implications for the way we’ll store digital information in the future.

Computers process bits, pieces of information that have two states—on or off, interpreted as 1s and os by the machine. Every computer program, tweet, email, Facebook, and Quartz post, is made up of some long series of 1s and 0s. When information is stored on a computer, it’s generally saved on a hard drive that encodes that same series of 1s and 0s on a magnetic disk or electrical cells. As IBM states in its release, the average hard drive uses about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit of information using traditional methods.

IBM’s researchers found a way to magnetize individual atoms of the rare earth element holmium and use the two poles of magnetism—north and south, as you’d see on a compass—as stand-ins for the 1s and 0s. The holmium atoms are attached to a surface of another material, magnesium oxide, which holds them in place, at a chilly 5 kelvin (-450°F). Using essentially what is a very accurate, sharp, and small, needle, the researchers can pass an electrical current through the holmium atoms, which causes their north and south poles to flip, replicating the process of writing information to a traditional magnetic hard drive. The atoms stay in whatever state they’ve been flipped into, and by measuring the magnetism of the atoms at a later point, the scientists can see what state the atom is, mirroring the way a computer reads information it’s stored on a hard drive.

IBM says the researchers used a single iron atom to measure the magnetic field of the holmium atoms—turning it to measure what states the holmium atoms were in, like a tiny compass—and a scanning tunneling microscope, a powerful microscope developed by IBM (which won its inventors Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer the Nobel Prize for physics in 1986) to image the surface of individual atoms. The needle tip of the microscope was what researchers used to pass current through the atoms.

“Magnetic bits lie at the heart of hard-disk drives, tape, and next-generation magnetic memory,” Christopher Lutz, nanoscience researcher at IBM’s Almaden lab, said in a release. “We conducted this research to understand what happens when you shrink technology down to the most fundamental extreme—the atomic scale.”

While the feat is exceedingly impressive, much like IBM’s announcement in 2015 that it had created a minuscule semiconductor that would likely eventually form the backbone of the smallest, fastest computer processor in the world, it’s only the beginning of the work. This is just the first step in proving what might be possible with atomic-level computing, as now researchers, and later, chip manufacturers, need to show the technologies can be scaled.

A future where infinitely more massive hard drives are commonplace—IBM envisions the entirety of iTunes’ 35 million-song music library on a drive the size of a credit card—would make computers, phones, drones, and just about anything else that needs to store information considerably thinner and lighter. Now all that remains is to see if that’s feasible, and affordable.

But given IBM’s 19 consecutive quarters of declining revenue, anything that could reinvigorate the company to its former heights could well be existential. Earlier this week, IBM turned another one of its long-term research projects, quantum computing, into its own business unit, in the hopes of finding clients to dream with Big Blue on the promise of how powerful quantum computers could potentially be—even if they aren’t right now.

This article originally appeared at: https://qz.com/927923/ibm-has-figured-out-how-to-store-data-on-a-single-atom/.

What You Can Learn From the Success of the Sharing Economy

The sharing economy, or collaborative consumption, has quickly overtaken many business sectors. Most people have, or know someone who has, tried Airbnb, Uber, Etsy or another share-based business. To be successful in the sharing economy, your brand must be efficient, trustworthy, innovative and community-centric.

These principles aren’t just indicative of successful share-based businesses; they also play an important part of any successful entrepreneur.
Always strive for better efficiencies.
The most obvious example of the sharing economy using increased efficiencies to dominate a market is Uber. Uber entered the commuting sector in 2009 and focused on improving the inefficiencies that existed with taxi cabs.

Taxis have a limited inventory of cabs, so Uber developed a way for any qualified person to sign up as an Uber driver, aiming to eliminate inventory deficits. Uber also created an intuitive and data-based pricing model to solve issues with outdated taxi fare estimates. Uber continues to use technology to make it easier to pay, hail a ride and increase the overall user experience. By focusing on being more efficient, Uber has built one of the most recognizable brands in the transportation industry.

While you might not be running a disruptive business like Uber, you can still look for inefficiencies in your business or industry. One common problem with a lot of entrepreneurs is an inefficient use of technology. There is a technological solution for almost every day-to-day operation. However, many entrepreneurs struggle to invest in technology because they fear the upfront cost. Keep in mind, spending a few thousand dollars on a new technology to increase your total output or cut down your lead time can save you much more money over the life of your company.

If you operate a brick-and-mortar store or office, you can increase employee efficiency by improving the workplace environment. Work can be exhausting mentally and physically, so simple tweaks like rearranging the office for improved air-flow can make your employees more productive and improve their health and satisfaction.
Trust is key.
For the sharing economy to work, trust must be established between the buyer and seller. This can be extremely difficult because most sharing-based businesses simply facilitate the transaction and do not control the inventory or seller.

Take Airbnb for example. They have a network of rental properties throughout the world that are all controlled by individual homeowners or renters. This no-inventory model serves as a marketplace for managing all elements of the transaction between supplier and purchaser. To accomplish this, Airbnb must establish trust in the platform that will also be transferred to each supplier.

Fortunately, most entrepreneurs manage their product or service directly and don’t have to transfer trust from their brand to individual suppliers. This makes it easier for you to build and maintain a trusting relationship with your customers. The first step to building trust is to understand your customers. Spend time collecting information about your current clientele so you can mold your communication to speak directly to that consumer profile. You can also improve trust with customers through marketing and advertising. If you’re bootstrapped, there are several affordable ways to use digital marketing to increase consumer trust.

Trust isn’t just administered from business to customer, you must also work to develop trust with your employees. Great entrepreneurs are leaders in the workplace. They are willing to get their hands dirty and coach their team. A title or job description isn’t enough to warrant trust from your employees; you must earn it through hard work.
Don’t be afraid to innovate.
Innovation is an important characteristic of successful companies in the sharing economy, but it is also a critical part of traditional businesses. In fact, many companies use innovation as the framework for their brand identity — think Apple.

Not all innovation requires a brand new idea. In fact, you can use resources and knowledge from other industries to innovate within your sector.

For instance, Ofo is a Chinese bike-sharing startup trying to innovate the way people commute in big cities. By using a mobile app, consumers can locate, unlock and ride available bikes anytime. The business model isn’t much different from Airbnb or Uber, and using bikes to commute in the city isn’t unique. However, its ease, affordability and convenience make this idea noteworthy.

Innovation keeps your company relevant in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. You’d be hard-pressed to find many successful companies that don’t innovate. Even local restaurants are working on new recipes for their menu.

As an entrepreneur, you must not be afraid to try and fail. Look for blue oceans with minimal competition that you can enter and control. Think of solutions to relevant problems in your industry, look at your product from different vantage points, and think outside the box to find opportunities to grow your product. Innovation requires versatility and risk. Don’t be afraid of it.
Build an active community.
If there is one element you take away from successful businesses in the sharing economy, a thriving community should be it. The share-based business model is built around dissemination and scalability, which isn’t possible without an active community. They created a platform and marketplace that is designed to recruit, vet, satisfy and retain a community of suppliers and buyers. They are successful at community development because they use due diligence, a communication feedback loop, marketing and data-based strategic decisions.

As an entrepreneur, you should focus on building an active and stable community of customers and leads. Obsess over customer satisfaction and retention. It’s estimated that acquiring new customers can cost upwards of five times that of retaining an existing customer. Customer retention will increase the customer lifetime value, which will result in more revenue and increased business.

One of the easiest ways for entrepreneurs to build a community is through active engagement online. Use platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat to grow and interact with your community. Remember, the communication shouldn’t be one direction. Encourage questions and handle customer issues when they arise. If you can convince customers to invest themselves into your brand, you’ll develop an active and thriving community.

Trust can help you get users into the door; an active community is what keeps them coming back.

The sharing economy is a thriving ecosystem that affects us as entrepreneurs and customers. The most successful sharing-based businesses have focused a lot of their efforts on improving efficiencies, building trust, growing their community and innovating. These four basic principles should be at the top of your priorities list as an entrepreneur.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289157

How Facebook, fake news and friends are warping your memory

Strange things have been happening in the news lately. Already this year, members of US President Donald Trump’s administration have alluded to a ‘Bowling Green massacre’ and terror attacks in Sweden and Atlanta, Georgia, that never happened.

The misinformation was swiftly corrected, but some historical myths have proved difficult to erase. Since at least 2010, for example, an online community has shared the apparently unshakeable recollection of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, despite the fact that he lived until 2013, leaving prison in 1990 and going on to serve as South Africa’s first black president.

Memory is notoriously fallible, but some experts worry that a new phenomenon is emerging. “Memories are shared among groups in novel ways through sites such as Facebook and Instagram, blurring the line between individual and collective memories,” says psychologist Daniel Schacter, who studies memory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The development of Internet-based misinformation, such as recently well-publicized fake news sites, has the potential to distort individual and collective memories in disturbing ways.”

Collective memories form the basis of history, and people’s understanding of history shapes how they think about the future. The fictitious terrorist attacks, for example, were cited to justify a travel ban on the citizens of seven “countries of concern”. Although history has frequently been interpreted for political ends, psychologists are now investigating the fundamental processes by which collective memories form, to understand what makes them vulnerable to distortion. They show that social networks powerfully shape memory, and that people need little prompting to conform to a majority recollection — even if it is wrong. Not all the findings are gloomy, however. Research is pointing to ways of dislodging false memories or preventing them from forming in the first place.

To combat the influence of fake news, says Micah Edelson, a memory researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, “it’s important to understand not only the creation of these sites, but also how people respond to them”.

All together now

Communication shapes memory. Research on pairs of people conversing about the past shows that a speaker can reinforce aspects of an event by selectively repeating them1. That makes sense. Things that get mentioned get remembered — by both speaker and listener. There’s a less obvious corollary: related information that goes unmentioned is more likely to fade than unrelated material, an effect known as retrieval-induced forgetting.

These cognitive, individual-level phenomena have been proposed as a mechanism for memory convergence — the process by which two or more people come to agree on what happened. But in the past few years, clues have emerged that group-level forces influence convergence, too. In 2015, psychologists Alin Coman at Princeton University in New Jersey and William Hirst of the New School for Social Research in New York City reported that a person experiences more induced forgetting when listening to someone in their own social group — a student at the same university, for example — than if they see that person as an outsider2. That is, memory convergence is more likely to occur within social groups than between them — an important finding in light of survey data suggesting that 62% of US adults get their news from social media, where group membership is often obvious and reinforced3.

Groups can also distort memories. In 2011, Edelson, then at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, showed 30 volunteers a documentary. They watched the film in groups of five and, a few days later, answered questions about it individually. One week after the viewing session, participants answered questions again — but only after seeing answers that members of their group had supposedly given. When most of the fabricated responses were false, participants conformed to the same false answer about 70% of the time — despite having initially responded correctly. But when they learnt that the answers had been generated randomly, the participants reversed their incorrect answers only about 60% of the time4. “We found that processes that happen during initial exposure to erroneous information make it more difficult to correct such influences later,” says Edelson.

Studying those processes as they happen — as collective memories are shaped through conversation — has been difficult to do in large groups. Five years ago, monitoring communication in groups of ten or more would have required several rooms for private conversations, many research assistants and lots of time. Now, multiple participants can interact digitally in real time. Coman’s group has developed a software platform that can track exchanges between volunteers in a series of timed chats. “It takes one research assistant 20 minutes and one lab room,” Coman says.

Last year, the group used this software to ask, for the first time, how the structure of social networks affects the formation of collective memories in large groups. The researchers fed information about 4 fictional Peace Corps volunteers to 140 participants from Princeton University, divided into groups of 10. First, the participants were asked to recall as much information as they could on their own. Then, they took part in a series of three conversations — online chat sessions lasting a few minutes each — with other members of their group, in which they recalled the information collaboratively. Finally, they tried to recall the events individually again.

The researchers investigated two scenarios — one in which the group formed two sub-clusters, with almost all conversations taking place within the sub-clusters, and one in which it formed one large cluster (see ‘Hello operator’). Although people in the single cluster agreed on the same set of information, says Coman, those in the two sub-clusters generally converged on different ‘facts’ about the fictional volunteers5.

This effect is evident in real-world situations. Palestinians living in Israel and those in the West Bank, who were separated by force during the Arab–Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967, have gravitated to different versions of their past, despite a shared Arab–Palestinian identity6. Similarly divergent truths emerged after the erection of the Berlin Wall.

In the lab, Coman can manipulate social networks and look at the memories that form. His comparison of the two scenarios revealed the importance of ‘weak links’ in information propagation. These are links between, rather than within, networks — acquaintances, say, rather than friends — and they help to synchronize the versions held by separate networks. “They are probably what drives the formation of community-wide collective memories,” he says.

One function of those weak links might be to remind people of information expunged through the processes of memory convergence. But timing is important. In unpublished work, Coman has shown that information introduced by a weak link is much more likely to shape the network’s memory if it is introduced before its members talk among themselves. Once a network agrees on what happened, collective memory becomes relatively resistant to competing information.

Read the rest of this article at: http://www.nature.com/news/how-facebook-fake-news-and-friends-are-warping-your-memory-1.21596.