Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are

By Amy Cuddy,

Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how "power posing" -- standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don't feel confident -- can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success.

Paralyzed Woman Uses Thought-Controlled Robotic Arm

The BrainGate implantable microelectrode array

Cathy Hutchinson has been unable to move her own arms or legs for 15 years. But using the most advanced brain-machine interface ever developed, she can steer a robotic arm towards a bottle, pick it up, and drink her morning coffee. The interface includes a sensor implanted in Cathy’s brain, which ‘reads’ her thoughts, and a decoder, which turns her thoughts into instructions for the robotic arm. In this video, watch Cathy control the arm and hear from the team behind the pioneering study.

The trial was a collaborative effort of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Brown University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It had two participants – the woman and a 66 year-old man, identified only as S3 and T2, respectively. Both of them had lost the use of their limbs years ago, due to brainstem strokes. They manipulated two different robotic arms, designed by the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, and DEKA Research and Development Corp.

The business end of BrainGate, however, is a silicon microelectrode array that was implanted in each subject’s motor cortex (a part of the brain that’s associated with voluntary movement). That array is described as being about the size of a baby Aspirin, and contains 96 separate electrodes. An output cable leads from that array, to an external port on top of the user’s head.

Read the original research paper: Reach and grasp by people with tetraplegia using a neurally controlled robotic arm.

Via: “GizMag”

Ancient Egyptian Fake Toes Earliest Prosthetic Devices In Existence

Two ancient Egyptian wooden toes have been confirmed as the world's oldest prosthetics, according to scientific tests.

"A brief paper was published in the Lancet in February 2011, but it did not contain the data from the study," Jacqueline Finch, a researcher at the University of Manchester’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology, said in a statement.

Discovered in the necropolis of Thebe near present-day Luxor, the two artificial toes -- the so-called Greville Chester toe housed in the British Museum and the Tabaketenmut toe at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo -- have been called by several experts the earliest prosthetic devices in existence.

Exquisitely crafted from cartonnage (a sort of papier maché mixture made using linen, glue and plaster) the Greville Chester toe dates from before 600 BC and comes in the shape of the right big toe and a portion of the right foot.

The other false toe, a three-part wood and leather artifact dating from between 950 to 710 B.C., was found attached to the right toe of a mummy identified as Tabaketenmut. She was a priest's daughter who might have lost her toe following gangrene triggered by diabetes.

"There are many instances of the ancient Egyptians creating false body parts for burial, but the wear, plus their design, both suggest they were used by people to help them to walk," Finch said.

"To try to prove this has been a complex and challenging process involving experts in not only Egyptian burial practices, but also in prosthetic design and in computerized gait assessment," she added.

According to the pressure measurements, there were no overly high pressure points in both volunteers, indicating that the false toes were comfortable and not causing any tissue damage.

The performance and perceived comfort of this replacement means that "nascent prosthetic science may have been emerging in the Nile Valley as early as 950 to 710 B.C.," Finch and colleague Ann Rosalie David, professor of biomedical Egyptologyat the University of Manchester, wrote.

The three-part example pre-dates by some 400 years what is currently thought to be the oldest, although untested, prosthetic device. This is a Roman leg made out of bronze and wood in around 300 B.C, known as the Capua leg.

Via: "Discovery News"

Introducing 'Bi-Fi' - The Biological 'Internet'

The researchers, Monica Ortiz, a doctoral candidate in bioengineering, and Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering, have parasitized the parasite and harnessed M13's key attributes -- its non-lethality and its ability to package and broadcast arbitrary DNA strands -- to create what might be termed the biological Internet, or "Bi-Fi." Their findings were published online Sept. 7 in the Journal of Biological Engineering.

Using the virus, Ortiz and Endy have created a biological mechanism to send genetic messages from cell to cell. The system greatly increases the complexity and amount of data that can be communicated between cells and could lead to greater control of biological functions within cell communities. The advance could prove a boon to bioengineers looking to create complex, multicellular communities that work in concert to accomplish important biological functions.

Medium and Message

M13 is a packager of genetic messages. It reproduces within its host, taking strands of DNA -- strands that engineers can control -- wrapping them up one by one and sending them out encapsulated within proteins produced by M13 that can infect other cells. Once inside the new hosts, they release the packaged DNA message.

The M13-based system is essentially a communication channel. It acts like a wireless Internet connection that enables cells to send or receive messages, but it does not care what secrets the transmitted messages contain.

"Effectively, we've separated the message from the channel. We can now send any DNA message we want to specific cells within a complex microbial community," said Ortiz, the first author of the study.

It is well-known that cells naturally use various mechanisms, including chemicals, to communicate, but such messaging can be extremely limited in both complexity and bandwidth. Simple chemical signals are typically both message and messenger -- two functions that cannot be separated.

"If your network connection is based on sugar then your messages are limited to 'more sugar,' 'less sugar,' or 'no sugar'" explained Endy.

Cells engineered with M13 can be programmed to communicate in much more complex, powerful ways than ever before. The possible messages are limited only by what can be encoded in DNA and thus can include any sort of genetic instruction: start growing, stop growing, come closer, swim away, produce insulin and so forth.

Rates and Ranges

In harnessing DNA for cell-cell messaging the researchers have also greatly increased the amount of data they can transmit at any one time. In digital terms, they have increased the bit rate of their system. The largest DNA strand M13 is known to have packaged includes more than 40,000 base pairs. Base pairs, like 1s and 0s in digital encoding, are the basic building blocks of genetic data. Most genetic messages of interest in bioengineering range from several hundred to many thousand base pairs.

Ortiz was even able to broadcast her genetic messages between cells separated by a gelatinous medium at a distance of greater than 7 centimeters.

"That's very long-range communication, cellularly speaking," she said.

Down the road, the biological Internet could lead to biosynthetic factories in which huge masses of microbes collaborate to make more complicated fuels, pharmaceuticals and other useful chemicals. With improvements, the engineers say, their cell-cell communication platform might someday allow more complex three-dimensional programming of cellular systems, including the regeneration of tissue or organs.

"The ability to communicate 'arbitrary' messages is a fundamental leap -- from just a signal-and-response relationship to a true language of interaction," said Radhika Nagpal, professor of computer science at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, who was not involved in the research. "Orchestrating the cooperation of cells to form artificial tissues, or even artificial organisms is just one possibility. This opens a door to new biological systems and solving problems that have no direct analog in nature."

Ortiz added: "The biological Internet is in its very earliest stages. When the information Internet was first introduced in the 1970s, it would have been hard to imagine the myriad uses it sees today, so there's no telling all the places this new work might lead."

Via: "Science Daily"

Paralyzed Woman Uses Thought-Controlled Robotic Arm

Cathy Hutchinson has been unable to move her own arms or legs for 15 years. But using the most advanced brain-machine interface ever developed, she can steer a robotic arm towards a bottle, pick it up, and drink her morning coffee. The interface includes a sensor implanted in Cathy's brain, which 'reads' her thoughts, and a decoder, which turns her thoughts into instructions for the robotic arm. In this video, watch Cathy control the arm and hear from the team behind the pioneering study.

The trial was a collaborative effort of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Brown University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It had two participants – the woman and a 66 year-old man, identified only as S3 and T2, respectively. Both of them had lost the use of their limbs years ago, due to brainstem strokes. They manipulated two different robotic arms, designed by the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, and DEKA Research and Development Corp.

The BrainGate implantable microelectrode array

The business end of BrainGate, however, is a silicon microelectrode array that was implanted in each subject’s motor cortex (a part of the brain that’s associated with voluntary movement). That array is described as being about the size of a baby Aspirin, and contains 96 separate electrodes. An output cable leads from that array, to an external port on top of the user’s head.

Read the original research paper: Reach and grasp by people with tetraplegia using a neurally controlled robotic arm.

Via: "GizMag"

The Architecture Of Memory

Most of us think of memory as a chamber of the mind, and assume that our capacity to remember is only as good as our brain. But according to some architectural theorists, our memories are products of our body’s experience of physical space. Or, to consolidate the theorem: Our memories are only as good as our buildings.

In the BBC television series “Sherlock,” the famous detective’s capacious memory is portrayed through the concept of the “mind palace“—what is thought to be a sort of physical location in the brain where a person stores memories like objects in a room. Describing this in the book A Study in Scarlet, Holmes says, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose…”

The mind palace—also known as the memory palace or method of loci—is a mnemonic device thought to have originated in ancient Rome, wherein items that need to be memorized are pinned to some kind of visual cue and strung together into a situated narrative, a journey through a space. The science writer and author Joshua Foer covered this technique in depth in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, in which he trained for and ultimately won the U.S. Memory Championship. To memorize long lists of words, a deck of cards, a poem, or a set of faces, mental athletes, as they’re called, fuse a familiar place—say, the house they grew up in—with a self-created fictional environment populated by the objects in their list. In an excerpt from his book published in the New York Times, Foer describes his own palace construction:

I was storing the images in the memory palace I knew better than any other, one based on the house in Washington in which I grew up. Inside the front door, the Incredible Hulk rode a stationary bike while a pair of oversize, loopy earrings weighed down his earlobes (three of clubs, seven of diamonds, jack of spades). Next to the mirror at the bottom of the stairs, Terry Bradshaw balanced on a wheelchair (seven of hearts, nine of diamonds, eight of hearts), and just behind him, a midget jockey in a sombrero parachuted from an airplane with an umbrella (seven of spades, eight of diamonds, four of clubs). I saw Jerry Seinfeld sprawled out bleeding on the hood of a Lamborghini in the hallway (five of hearts, ace of diamonds, jack of hearts), and at the foot of my parents’ bedroom door, I saw myself moonwalking with Einstein (four of spades, king of hearts, three of diamonds).

According to Foer, in order for this technique to work, the features of the memory palace must be hyperreal, exaggerating the edges of normalcy in order to stand out in the mind. Whether the palace is a modernist bungalow or a faux-Italianate McMansion or a mobile home doesn’t matter, so long as it is memorable, which is to say, so long as it is a place.

The philosopher Edward S. Casey defines a “place”—as distinct from a “site”—as a physical location where memories can be contained and preserved. An empty lot, for example, would be considered a site—a generic, boundless locale which “possesses no points of attachment onto which to hang our memories, much less retrieve them.” By contrast, a place is “full of protuberant features and forceful vectors—and distinct externally from other places…We observe this when an indifferent building lot, easily confused with other empty lots, is transformed into a memorable place by the erection of a distinctive house upon it.”

From an architect’s perspective, the transformation of a site (or you could call it a space) into a place is a two-way process. Erecting a structure enables the space to contain memories, and the installation of memories turns that structure into a place. In his essay in the book Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, UC Berkeley architecture professor Donlyn Lyndon explains, ”‘Place,’ as I understand it, refers to spaces that can be remembered, that we can imagine, hold in the mind, and consider.”

Lyndon argues that “Good places are structured so that they attract and hold memories; they are sticky—or perhaps you would rather say magnetic.” He suggests that buildings which try too hard to control the experience of the user ultimately fail to become true places. “Seeking to make each place a singular, memorable work of art often makes the insistence of its vocabulary resistant to the attachment of memories—to the full engagement of the people who use and live with the building.”

This is perhaps why, when building a mind palace, we are told to enhance and distort the standard features of our design. As we add character and color, our own emotions and reactions become the plaster between the walls of our palace and the hooks on which we hang the ace of hearts or the Prince of Wales or the breakfast cereal. Just as we usually think of memory as the property of the head, we often place emotion in the heart and reaction in the gut, and suddenly through this process, the whole physical body becomes integrated into memorization.

In another essay in Spatial Recall, Finnish architecture professor Juhani Pallasmaa asserts, “Human memory is embodied, skeletal and muscular in its essence, not merely cerebral,” later punctuating his point with a quote from Casey, the philosopher: “[B]ody memory is…the natural center of any sensitive account of remembering.”

In other words, while the mind palace technique may seem charmingly counterintuitive to the average rememberer of grocery lists, it is probably the most innate method of recall we have, if we learn how to use it. Which is, of course, why Sherlock Holmes was able to mentally reconstruct crimes in order to solve mysteries, and why Joshua Foer had a relatively short road to becoming a national memory champion.

Via: "Smithsonian Mag"

FDA OK’s Ingestible Sensor Chip

Proteus Digital Health, Inc. announced Monday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared its ingestible sensor for marketing as a medical device.

The ingestible sensor (formally referred to as the Ingestion Event Marker or IEM) is part of the Proteus digital health feedback system, an integrated, end-to-end personal health management system designed to help improve patients’ health habits and connections to caregivers.

“The FDA validation represents a major milestone in digital medicine,” said Dr. Eric Topol, professor of genomics at The Scripps Research Institute and author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Healthcare. Directly digitizing pills, for the first time, in conjunction with our wireless infrastructure, may prove to be the new standard for influencing medication adherence and significantly aid chronic disease management,”

The Proteus ingestible sensor can be integrated into an inert pill or other ingested products, such as pharmaceuticals. Once the ingestible sensor reaches the stomach, it is powered by contact with stomach fluid and communicates a unique signal that determines identity and timing of ingestion.

This information is transferred through the user’s body tissue to a patch worn on the skin that detects the signal and marks the precise time an ingestible sensor has been taken. Additional physiologic and behavioral metrics collected by the patch include heart rate, body position and activity.

The patch relays information to a mobile phone application. With the patient’s consent, the information is accessible by caregivers and clinicians, helping individuals to develop and sustain healthy habits, families to make better health choices, and clinicians to provide more effective, data-driven care.

Via: "Kurzweil AI"

Blueprint For The Brain

How can three pounds of jelly inside our skulls enable us to do everything that makes us human?

For centuries, scientists have been fascinated and puzzled by the mysterious workings of the brain.

Now, for the first time, they can re-create in the computer the shapes of every one of the billions of nerve cells that make up our brains, the component parts of the intricate neural circuits that allow us to move, see and hear, to feel and to think.

Armed with this new tool, scientists are beginning to decipher the secrets of the brain’s architecture, which may one day enable us to build smart technologies that surpass the capabilities of anything we have today.

This video is based on "One Rule to Grow Them All: A General Theory of Neuronal Branching and Its Practical Application," a paper published by neuroscientist Hermann Cuntz and colleagues in the online journal PLoS Computational Biology.

Brain Wiring A No-Brainer

No tangles! The human brain's connections turn out to be a an orderly 3D grid structure with no diagonals.

2D sheets of parallel fibers cross at right angles -- " like the warp and weft of a fabric."

The first pictures from the most powerful brain scanner of its kind reveal an "astonishingly simple architecture."

This diffusion spectrum image of a whole human brain came from the new Connectom scanner, part of the NIH's Human Connectome Project. Source: Van Wedeen, M.D., Martinos Center and Dept. of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University Medical School



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