Couple days ago I saw a video posted of Derek Jacobys TEDxVictoria talk on Hackerspaces and Biology, at first glance I was really happy to see the two terms in the same sentence. Hackerspaces, HackerHouses, or the more media-friendly, MakerSpaces, have been popping up exponentially everywhere in the last 10 years.  It’s a fantastic movement in bringing like-minded individuals of all sorts of walks of life, professions, trade and hobby together to talk shop, network, and divulge into interests, experiments or take part in large scale projects.  Mixing know how, resource and project management they are hyper-generators...incubators even of ideas and sometimes...game changers.

Like when you are able to put the words Biology and Hackerspaces in the same sentence.

Biohacking.

This is where the real magic starts happening. Man/Woman will always be curious. It’s how we create. It’s how we thrive.  It’s how we evolve.  With technology decreasing in not only price, but also in scale, we begin to be able to brush the threshold of the very building blocks that make you and me what we are. I previously had no idea that by the end of 2012 it will only cost $1,000 to sequence an entire human genome. 300gb of DNA code.  Less than $3.50 per gigabyte of your human DNA decoded. The kicker is that price is down from $10,000,000 in 2005.

There are however the caveats, the ethical boundaries.  Where would they lay?  Designer babies are already possible. We can take cells and replicate them to create entire organs using organ scafolding structures.   But these are the questions people will be asking very soon.  And all and all, it’s exciting that we get to see these human innovations of direction and stride.  We just need to make sure all our hands are on the reigns, not necessarily to hold back...but to hold on tight.

Elizabeth Gilberts TED talk in Longbeach CA is at the top of my list for not only unexpected favorite speakers, but also of all time. She urges society to TRULY encourage and nurture creativity of all types and to empathize with the meaning of the time in-between moments of genius and what the so called “conduit” is going through and to be more aware of the pressures we might expect of them and put on their shoulders.

She goes on to base this very loose and metaphoric hypothesis on the last 500 years, which was when the west began to refer to the genius as themselves and not an external entity, and the decline of the artist, and how so may artists succumb to their own wits, and sometimes even by their own hands.

It doubles as words of encouragement to creative types, reaffirming that there are two parts to the creative process, your hard work and those "moments of genius". Keep doing your part, and let those moments come and go as they please.

90% perspiration and 10% inspiration creates 100% creativity.

New research in the European Journal of Pediatrics has found that breast feeding children increases IQ. In the study, conducted by Wieslay Jedrychowski and colleges, 468 babies born to non-smoking mothers were tested five times at regular intervals through preschool age. The study found that children breast fed scored significantly higher than their bottle fed counter parts. The increase in IQ was also proportionate to the length of time the children were breast fed. There was an increase of 2.1 points for three months, 2.6 points for four to six months, and 3.8 points for longer than six months.

The question to answer now is why? Researchers believe that there is nothing in the breast milk itself that causes the increase in IQ, but instead it is the interaction with the mother. When breast feeding the child participates in more than just nourishment, they are also participating in a dynamic, bidirectional, biological dialogue, says Tonse Raju, a pediatrician and noenatalogist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the current issue of Breastfeeding Medicine.

There is more research being done on this subject that takes into account the changes in brain white matter as children develop. There are also questions as to how much of a role parental verbal affection plays in normal development.

Source

Carrie Dykes M.A. Psychology, School Counselling Writer/Commentator

Carrie has obtained a M.A. in School Counseling with a minor in religion/philosophy from Washington State University. She plans to continue her education in the years to come

Einsteins Reprieve:

The leading theories disclaiming the OPERA team’s faster than light neutrinos.

In the past few weeks the Physics community has been in an uproar over the announcement that the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) team had discovered that Neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. A plethora of papers have been written to explain away these findings, and most of them attribute it to an error in measurement.

There are however two theories that seem to be gaining popularity amongst all the ideas flying around. The first one has to do with Gravity, and how it effects clocks. Carlo R. Contaldi, in his paper “The Opera neutrino velocity results and the synchronisation of clocks”1 poses the question as to whether or not the OPERA team has properly taken into account the differences in clocks between one site and the other. There is a small difference that is due to  gravity. According to Contaldi, “One-way speed measurements such as these inevitably require a convention for the synchronisation of clocks in non-inertial frames since the Earth is rotating.”

Basically what this article is saying, is they use once clock to record the start time, and another clock to record the end time, while the two clocks themselves have not been properly synchronized with each other. Because the Earth is rotating, it means that the two clocks are in a state of constant acceleration. This means that the reference frame is non-inertial. According to the Theory of Relativity which this experiment has threatened, only observers in an inertial (IE non-accelerating) frame are equivalent.

The OPERA team attempted to solve this issue by using a single GPS clock to time stamp both clocks at either end, and then used a second atomic clock transported from one site to the other to calibrate the difference in time signals. The problem with this as stated by Contaldi is that in essence, a single GPS satellite is only accurate within 100 ns on average. The traveling clock which they use to attempt to get a more accurate reading is traveling in an accelerating frame, which like the baseline clocks themselves, is due to the rotation of the Earth. The details of the issues with this can be read in the original article, but in summery the three relativistic time distortions are due to moving the clock through a non-uniform gravitational potential, a Doppler like effect due to the velocity of the traveling clock with respect to the rotating Earth, and lastly the Sagnac2 effect also due to the rotation of the Earth.

These are some pretty hefty claims, and it will be interesting to see if the OPERA team responds to them. The other big article that has some pretty legitimate claims is one that does not point to any error, but rather the lack of specific findings that should be seen if the neutrinos truly were traveling faster than light. Specifically the paper3 by Andrew G. Cohen, and Sheldon L. Glashow says that if the neutrinos were indeed traveling at that speed that they would undergo severe energy loss, “..causing the beam to be depleted of higher energy neutrinos”. 

These two papers are just a small fraction of the responses that continue to come in about the neutrino results. There will be a lot of information and data that will need to be gone through before OPERA can confirm their results. If they do it will be a shattering blow to modern physics. 

1 http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6160v2 

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagnac_effect

3 http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6562v1

Chris Birkinbine is a Senior Physics Student at University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. His Applied Physics curriculum combines Physics, Electrical and Mechancial Engineering, and Material Science, as well as a personal interest in Information Technology. You can follow Chris Birkinbine at his personal site www.cbirkinbine.net, or his twitter feed cbirkinbine you can email him at cbirkinbine@gmail.com

It only seems fitting that IBM (in conjuction with 5 other major universities and DARPA), the company that brought us Jeopardy champ, artificial intelligence computer, Watson, would be who brings us something straight out of science fiction novels.  

The NeuroSynaptic Chip

The first of its kind to process in the same fashion as the brain does; a “neurosynaptic core” with integrated memory (replicated synapses), computation (replicated neurons) and communication (replicated axons), all in one chip.  It’s like taking computer computation from 2-Dimentions into full 3-Dimentional space.  This attempts to overcome what is know as the “von Neumann paradigm”, the current way our present day’s computer architecture is ruled by.  Von Neumann introduced the architecture of the processer and the memory being two separate pieces of hardware in the 1940s.   By integrating the memory into the same hardware as the processor you begin to see context dependant processes in an energy efficient manor PLUS eliminating the bottle neck of the Bus…just like a brain.  

And that seems to be one of the driving forces behind IBMs new chip, is the energy efficiency, and rightly so.  They can already slap together simulate synapses and firing neuron simulations into a super computer.  But even as powerful and helpful as a super computer can be, its downfall is its size, its upkeep, its administration and the amount of energy it takes to drive.  

But as Dr. Dharmendra Modha, head of the SyNAPSE project (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics), says, the brain is not a neural network, it’s a synaptic network, if you look at the junctions between neurons (called synapses’) you would see that they outnumber the number of neurons by a factor of 10,000” What DARPA has asked the team was to demonstrate at a nano scale, low power material that captures the function of the synapse.  A calculate size of 1 picojoule fitting 10,000,000,000 single synapses’ inside the space of 1 square centimeter

This interview which explains more that Dr. Modha did with Fast Company is fantastic and highly suggested.

That alone was 3 years ago.

Fast forward to today they have 2 working prototype designs, both at 45 total nanometers a piece and currently contain 256 neurons.  One core contains 262,144 programmable synapses and the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.  3 years ago, it was an idea, today, it is quite the reality.  What do you think 20 – 50 years will look like from now?

Sources IBM Press Release

Video: Fast Company interview IBM's "Brain" Guy

Images: IBM Research - Almaden

This may seem as no surprise at first glance; however, the difference is this time around University of Florida researchers actually monitored and collected activity data. In a news report released by University of Florida News, this new research improves on previous studies by recording the actual energy expended, as well as monitoring the consumption of oxygen molecules in almost 200 people of average age to 75. 

This is a major improvement from previous methods which relied on a self reporting technique in which researchers simply asked how much activity a person had on a daily basis. The method was prone to error because people may forget some of the activities that they had participated in, or exaggerated how much activity they have in a day. It also tended to be more sports related activity and less walking around the house and other common day to day activities; even small daily chores add up on the energy consumption chart and help in fighting off the decline of cognitive abilities.

This research along with others shows that physical activity could not only prevent, but also possibly treat cognitive impairment. The link between the two was found to be stronger with this scientifically collected data than it was with the self-report data collected previously, which just goes to show that you should never skimp out on the science.

Sources: [University of Florida News  | Archives of Internal Medicine (full report)]
Image Source: [Beth's Brain Injury Blog]

In mid-June, Professor Brian Pollard of Manchester spoke to the European Anesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam regarding a 3D real time representation of changes in electricity in the brain as it slips from consciousness using a light weight machine that can fit on a small push cart called fEITER ("functional electrical impedance tomography by evoked response) in which has the capability of scanning the brain at 100 images a second, or 100fps.

As far as I have seen, this is the first time this type of real-time scan movie capture has been possible. Iva also mentioned on Facebook how this further proves Professor Susan Greenfield of Oxfords theory of the multiple levels and layers of conscience.

The images and video Professor Pollards assistant sent to me after emailing the professor last night after the conference. This video is not ours, but was given to us by the Professors Assistant when asked for it.

According to an article written on The Physics arXiv Blog entitled “Human Brain Limits Twitter Friends to 150” , your brain restricts you to on average 150 friends. 

The article explains this prediction made by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the early 90’s after monitoring social interactions amongst primates. He theorized that the volume of the brain is directly linked to the amount of people you can maintain social contact with. Obviously, when we say friend, we are not referring to everyone who “follows” you or “friends” you in social networks, but people in which you actually have a deep link with.

Bruno Goncalves and some colleagues from Indiana University were given access to Twitter for 6 months during which they reviewed 3 million Twitter users over the course of 4 years 

Their results? The average of those users monitored could keep meaningful social interactions with between 100 and 200 people, which roughly agrees with the Dunbar number of 150.

After reading the original research paper (which I encourage everyone to do) and corresponding data, I found I am curious about some of the conclusions, namely dealing with the weight (designated as ω out) as a representation of how strong a friendship is. It is calculated by a formula that takes into consideration the number of replies between 2 people in a conversation. The higher the weight, the stronger the friendship.

As seen in the graph, a maximum weight is achieved when a user has between 100 and 200 outgoing links, or simply, when a user responds to 100-200 people regularly.

In looking at the interval between 0 and 100 in which the average weight of each connection is between 5 and 6, it is interesting to see the weight seems to increase over the initial period as a user gains more contacts. This could just be an artifact of a “new user effect”, or a learning curve when a new user first starts using Twitter and not an actual result of social interaction of people with less than 100 friends.

The range of 100-200 friends is also interesting in that it just barely passes the peak weight of 6. Afterwards, the weight does not drop below 5 until almost 350 outgoing contacts, and it doesn’t stay below 5 significantly until about 500 outgoing contacts. While the peak relations as defined by the study do indeed occur between 100 and 200 friends, there is still a substantial amount of people maintaining almost as strong connections with up to 500 people.

Still, in the end the research seems to be well done, and it is interesting to see how close the Dunbar prediction is to real life scenarios. The question remains however, is this a maximum number restricted by our brains as Dunbar predicts, or will new technology and time slowly expand our social abilities?

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Chris Birkinbine is a writter and contributor for Cerebralhack and you can find his personal blog Here

Thanks to a friend at CES looks like Mattel has found good fortune using NeuroSkyS Think Gear Technology. We were sent pictures from CES 2011 of what looks to be the ultimate battle of the minds: Mind Flex DUAL!

We have a video too but are waiting for the upload. No further information has been given yet, will update more as I find out :)

So it looks like after many months the Beta SDK for the (once OCZ now) BCInet NIA (Neural Impulse Actuator) has finally been released. When going to the site http://cortex.in/hr3oPx you will see the following message: Thank you for your interest in the Windows SDK. Due to popular response, our open beta test has reached capacity. If you are still interested in participating, please mail us at sdk@bcinet.com with your name, company, title, phone number and SDK interest, and we’ll contact you directly. 

For those already participating in the beta test, you will be kept informed of updates via e-mail. –The BCInet Team In essence what this means is that a bunch of knuckleheads have been using fake email addresses to apply for the Beta SDK. All you have to do is use your real email address and the rest of the noted information necessary and you will be emailed the location where to download it from. Happy Hacking!