Brain-machine interfaces could someday be used routinely to help paralyzed patients and amputees control prosthetic limbs with just their thoughts. Now, University of Florida researchers have devised a way for computerized devices not only to translate brain signals into movement, but also to evolve with the brain as it learns.

“The status quo of brain-machine interfaces that are out there have static and fixed decoding algorithms, which assume a person thinks one way for all time,” said Justin C. Sanchez, a UF assistant professor of pediatric neurology. Sanchez and his colleagues developed a system based on setting goals and giving rewards. Fitted with electrodes in their brains to capture signals for the computer to unravel, three rats were taught to move a robotic arm toward a target with just their thoughts. “We think this dialogue with a goal is how we can make these systems evolve over time,” Sanchez said.

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Researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have developed a hand gesture recognition system, called Gestix, that enables doctors to manipulate digital images during medical procedures by motioning instead of touching a screen, keyboard or mouse, which compromises sterility and could spread infection.

Helman Stern, a principal investigator on the project and a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at BGU, said that Gestix requires initial calibration where the machine recognizes the surgeons’ hand gestures. A second calibration stage requires surgeons to learn and implement eight navigation gestures, by rapidly moving the hand away from a “neutral area”, and back again.

Lead researcher Juan P. Wachs, a recent Ph.D. recipient from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at BGU, added, “A sterile human-machine interface is of supreme importance because it is the means by which the surgeon controls medical information, avoiding patient contamination. This could replace touch screens now used in many hospital operating rooms which must be sealed to prevent accumulation or spreading of contaminants, and requires smooth surfaces that must be thoroughly cleaned after each procedure – but sometimes aren’t.”

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Purdue University researchers are developing a miniature refrigeration system small enough to fit inside laptops and personal computers, a cooling technology that would boost performance while shrinking the size of computers. Unlike conventional cooling systems, which use a fan to circulate air through heat sinks attached to computer chips, the miniature refrigerator would dramatically increase how much heat could be removed, according to Suresh Garimella, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Cooling Technologies Research Center at Purdue.

The Purdue researchers are focusing on learning how to design miniature compressors and evaporators, critical for refrigeration systems. The researchers developed an analytical model for designing tiny compressors that pump refrigerants using penny-size diaphragms and validated the model with experimental data. “One challenge is that it’s difficult to make a compressor really small that runs efficiently and reliably,” said Garimella.

New types of cooling systems will be needed for future computer chips that will likely generate ten times more heat than today’s microprocessors, especially in small “hot spots,” noted Garimella. The ability to cool below ambient temperature could result in smaller, more powerful computers and improve reliability by reducing long-term heat damage to chips.

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NASA researchers and scientists from the United States, Germany and Japan have found a new mineral in material they believe came from a comet. The mineral, a manganese silicide named Brownleeite, was discovered within an interplanetary dust particle, or IDP, that appears to have originated from comet 26P/Grigg- Skjellerup. The comet originally was discovered in 1902 and reappears every 5 years.

Scott Messenger, a space scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston, predicted comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup was a source of dust grains that could be captured in Earth’s stratosphere at a specific time of the year. In response to his prediction, NASA performed stratospheric dust collections using an ER-2 high-altitude aircraft flown from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. The aircraft collected IDPs from this particular comet stream in April 2003. The new mineral was found in one of those particles.

To determine the mineral’s origin and examine other dust materials, a powerful new transmission electron microscope was installed in 2005 at Johnson. The mineral was surrounded by multiple layers of other minerals that also have been reported only in extraterrestrial rocks. There have been 4,324 minerals identified by the International Mineralogical Association. This find adds one more to that list.

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A new low-power microchip developed at the University of Michigan uses 30,000 times less power in sleep mode and 10 times less in active mode than comparable chips currently on the market. The Phoenix Processor, as it’s called, sets a low-power record and is intended for use in cutting-edge sensor-based devices such as medical implants, environment monitors or surveillance equipment. The chip, which measures one square millimeter, consumes just 30 picowatts during sleep mode. A picowatt is one-trillionth of a watt.

To achieve such low power, Phoenix engineers focused on sleep mode, where sensors can spend more than 99 percent of their lives. Sensors wake only briefly to compute at regular intervals, so the system defaults to sleep. A low-power timer acts as an alarm clock on perpetual snooze, waking Phoenix every ten minutes for 1/10th of a second to run a set of 2,000 instructions. The list includes checking the sensor for new data, processing it, compressing it into a sort of short-hand, and storing it before going back to sleep.

Another interesting aspect of the Phoenix is that it is the same size as its thin-film battery. Normally, batteries are much larger than the processors they power, drastically expanding the size and cost of the entire system. The battery in a laptop computer, for example, is about 5,000 times larger than the processor and it provides only a few hours of power. Theoretically, the energy stored in a watch battery would be enough to run the Phoenix for 263 years.

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