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--- Citar ---Neuralink Shows First Brain-Chip Patient Playing Online Chess Using His Mind
Posted by BeauHD on Thursday March 21, 2024 @03:00AM from the mind-blowing dept.
Neuralink, the brain-chip startup founded by Elon Musk, showed its first patient using his mind to play online chess. Reuters reports:
--- Citar ---Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts. Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.
"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk's social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments. I had basically given up playing that game," Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilization VI, "you all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight."
Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said that it is "not perfect" and they "have run into some issues." "I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life," he added.
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Neuralink | Neuralink Live Update - March 2024
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--- Citar ---Researchers Develop New Material That Converts CO2 into Methanol Using Sunlight
Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday March 30, 2024 @01:34PM from the fun-with-photocatalysis dept.
"Researchers have successfully transformed CO2 into methanol," reports SciTechDaily, "by shining sunlight on single atoms of copper deposited on a light-activated material, a discovery that paves the way for creating new green fuels."
--- Citar ---Tara LeMercier, a PhD student who carried out the experimental work at the University of Nottingham, School of Chemistry, said: "We measured the current generated by light and used it as a criterion to judge the quality of the catalyst. Even without copper, the new form of carbon nitride is 44 times more active than traditional carbon nitride. However, to our surprise, the addition of only 1 mg of copper per 1 g of carbon nitride quadrupled this efficiency. Most importantly the selectivity changed from methane, another greenhouse gas, to methanol, a valuable green fuel."
Professor Andrei Khlobystov, School of Chemistry, University of Nottingham, said: "Carbon dioxide valorization holds the key for achieving the net-zero ambition of the UK. It is vitally important to ensure the sustainability of our catalyst materials for this important reaction. A big advantage of the new catalyst is that it consists of sustainable elements — carbon, nitrogen, and copper — all highly abundant on our planet." This invention represents a significant step towards a deep understanding of photocatalytic materials in CO2 conversion. It opens a pathway for creating highly selective and tuneable catalysts where the desired product could be dialed up by controlling the catalyst at the nanoscale.
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"The research has been published in the Sustainable Energy & Fuels journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the article.
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--- Citar ---Method identified to double computer processing speeds
David Danelski · 2024.03.21
Imagine doubling the processing power of your smartphone, tablet, personal computer, or server using the existing hardware already in these devices.
Hung-Wei Tseng, a UC Riverside associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has laid out a paradigm shift in computer architecture to do just that in a recent paper titled, “Simultaneous and Heterogeneous Multithreading”.
Hung-Wei Tseng
Tseng explained that today’s computer devices increasingly have graphics processing units (GPUs), hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), or digital signal processing units as essential components. These components process information separately, moving information from one processing unit to the next, which in effect creates a bottleneck.
In their paper, Tseng and UCR computer science graduate student Kuan-Chieh Hsu introduce what they call “simultaneous and heterogeneous multithreading” or SHMT. They describe their development of a proposed SHMT framework on an embedded system platform that simultaneously uses a multi-core ARM processor, an NVIDIA GPU, and a Tensor Processing Unit hardware accelerator.
The system achieved a 1.96 times speedup and a 51% reduction in energy consumption.
“You don’t have to add new processors because you already have them,” Tseng said.
The implications are huge.
Simultaneous use of existing processing components could reduce computer hardware costs while also reducing carbon emissions from the energy produced to keep servers running in warehouse-size data processing centers. It also could reduce the need for scarce freshwater used to keep servers cool.
Tseng’s paper, however, cautions that further investigation is needed to answer several questions about system implementation, hardware support, code optimization, and what kind of applications stand to benefit the most, among other issues.
The paper was presented at the 56th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture held in October in Toronto, Canada. The paper garnered recognition from Tseng’s professional peers in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, who selected it as one of 12 papers included in the group’s “Top Picks from the Computer Architecture Conferences” issue to be published this coming summer.
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--- Citar ---Microsoft and Quantinuum Say They've Ushered in the Next Era of Quantum Computing
Posted by msmash on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @11:20AM from the moving-forward dept.
Microsoft and Quantinuum today announced a major breakthrough in quantum error correction. Using Quantinuum's ion-trap hardware and Microsoft's new qubit-virtualization system, the team was able to run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error. From a report:
--- Citar ---This new system also allowed the team to check the logical qubits and correct any errors it encountered without destroying the logical qubits. This, the two companies say, has now moved the state-of-the-art of quantum computing out of what has typically been dubbed the era of Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers.
"Noisy" because even the smallest changes in the environment can lead a quantum system to essentially become random (or "decohere"), and "intermediate scale" because the current generation of quantum computers is still limited to just over a thousand qubits at best. A qubit is the fundamental unit of computing in quantum systems, analogous to a bit in a classic computer, but each qubit can be in multiple states at the same time and doesn't fall into a specific position until measured, which underlies the potential of quantum to deliver a huge leap in computing power.
It doesn't matter how many qubits you have, though, if you barely have time to run a basic algorithm before the system becomes too noisy to get a useful result -- or any result at all. Combining several different techniques, the team was able to run thousands of experiments with virtually no errors. That involved quite a bit of preparation and pre-selecting systems that already looked to be in good shape for a successful run, but still, that's a massive improvement from where the industry was just a short while ago.
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Further reading: Microsoft blog.
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--- Citar ---Groundbreaking Trial To Grow 'Mini Liver' From Patient's Own Lymph Node
Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @11:30PM from the one-of-a-kind-trials dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering:
--- Citar ---A Pittsburgh-based biotech company has started a one-of-a-kind trial in a patient with a failing liver. Their goal is to grow a functional second liver within the patient's body -- something never achieved before. If effective, it might be a life-saving therapy for those who require liver transplants but have to wait months for a compatible donor organ. LyGenesis is currently carrying out a trial in only one patient with end-stage liver disease (ESLD) to test the efficacy of their allogenic regenerative cell therapy. As per Nature, the experimental procedure was conducted in Houston on March 25. The report also states that the patient is "recovering well" after receiving the treatment. However, the formation of the new liver-like organ in the lymph node may take several months. Moreover, the individual will be kept on immunosuppressive drugs to prevent any initial rejection of the donor cells. The physicians will continue to monitor the patient's health closely.
In this trial, scientists prepared donated hepatocyte cells for transplantation by suspending them in a solution. These cells were then transplanted into the patient's upper abdominal lymph nodes, which are tiny bean-shaped structures. These structures are an essential immune system component and filter waste from the body. Apart from the abdomen, lymph nodes are also found in the neck and chest. The team opted for a minimally invasive approach to inject the cells into the patient's lymph node via a catheter in the neck. "The lymph nodes then act as in vivo bioreactors, helping the hepatocytes to engraft, proliferate, and generate functional ectopic liver tissue," the press release noted. In simplest terms, these cells have the ability to multiply over the next several months. In a person with a failing liver, lymph nodes might operate as a second liver-like organ.
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