Researchers at the University of Hertfordshire have developed a prototype of a social robot that supports independent living for the elderly, working in partnership with their relatives or carers.

Farshid Amirabdollahian, a senior lecturer in Adaptive Systems at the university, led a team of nine partner institutions from five European countries as part of the €4,825,492 project calledACCOMPANY (Acceptable Robotics Companions for Ageing Years).

“This project proved the feasibility of having companion technology, while also highlighting different important aspects such as empathy, emotion, social intelligence as well as ethics and its norm surrounding technology for independent living,” Amirabdollahian said.

Investigators at Nationwide Children’s Hospital say they have developed an optimized analysis “pipeline” that slashes the time it takes to search a person’s genome for disease-causing variations from weeks to hours.

An open-access preview article describing the ultra-fast, highly scalable software was published in the latest issue of Genome Biology.

“It took around 13 years and $3 billion to sequence the first human genome,” says Peter White, PhD, principal investigator and director of the Biomedical Genomics Core at Nationwide Children’s and the study’s senior author.

“Now, even the smallest research groups can complete genomic sequencing in a matter of days. However, once you’ve generated all that data, that’s the point where many groups hit a wall. … Scientists are left with billions of data points to analyze before any truly useful information can be gleaned for use in research and clinical settings.”

Whole genome sample in 90 minutes

To overcome the challenges of analyzing that large amount of data, White and his team developed a computational pipeline called “Churchill.” By using novel computational techniques, Churchill allows efficient analysis of a whole genome sample in as little as 90 minutes, the researchers claim.

“Churchill fully automates the analytical process required to take raw sequence data through a series of complex and computationally intensive processes, ultimately producing a list of genetic variants ready for clinical interpretation and tertiary analysis,” White explains. “Each step in the process was optimized to significantly reduce analysis time, without sacrificing data integrity, resulting in an analysis method that is 100 percent reproducible.”

The output of Churchill was validated using National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) benchmarks. In comparison with other computational pipelines, Churchill was shown to have the highest sensitivity at 99.7 percent, highest accuracy at 99.99 percent, and the highest overall diagnostic effectiveness at 99.66 percent, according to the researchers.

Population-scale genomic analysis

“At Nationwide Children’s we have a strategic goal to introduce genomic medicine into multiple domains of pediatric research and healthcare. Rapid diagnosis of monogenic disease can be critical in newborns, so our initial focus was to create an analysis pipeline that was extremely fast, but didn’t sacrifice clinical diagnostic standards of reproducibility and accuracy” says Dr. White. “Having achieved that, we discovered that a secondary benefit of Churchill was that it could be adapted for population-scale genomic analysis.”

By examining the computational resource use during the data analysis process, Dr. White’s team was able to demonstrate that Churchill was both highly efficient (>90 percent resource utilization) and scaled very effectively across many servers. Alternative approaches limit analysis to a single server and have resource utilization as low as 30 percent. This efficiency and capability to scale enables population-scale genomic analysis to be performed.

The Churchill algorithm was licensed to Columbus-based GenomeNext LLC.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a nano-sized optical antenna that can greatly enhance the spontaneous emission of light from atoms, molecules and semiconductor quantum dots.

That opens the door to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that can replace lasers for short-range optical communications, including optical interconnects for microchips and a host of other potential applications.

“Since the invention of the laser, spontaneous light emission has been looked down upon in favor of stimulated light emission” (as in lasers), says Eli Yablonovitch, an electrical engineer with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division. “However, with the proper optical antenna, spontaneous emission can actually be faster than stimulated emission.”

Boosting light emitted by doped nanorods

Yablonovitch led a team that used an antenna made from gold to effectively boost the spontaneous light emission of a nanorod made from Indium Gallium Arsenide Phosphide (InGaAsP) by 115 times. This is approaching the 200-fold increase that is considered the landmark in speed difference between stimulated and spontaneous emissions. When a 200-fold increase is reached, spontaneous emission rates will exceed those of stimulated emissions.

“With optical antennas, we believe that spontaneous emission rate enhancements of better than 2,500 times are possible while still maintaining light emission efficiency greater than 50 percent,” Yablonovitch says. “Replacing wires on microchips with antenna-enhanced LEDs would allow for faster interconnectivity and greater computational power.”

In the world of high technology lasers are ubiquitous, the reigning workhorse for high-speed optical communications. Lasers, however, have downsides for communications over short distances (one meter or less): they consume too much power and take up too much space. LEDs would be a much more efficient alternative but have been limited by their spontaneous emission rates.

Creating an optical antenna

“Spontaneous emission from molecular-sized radiators is slowed by many orders of magnitude because molecules are too small to act as their own antennas,” Yablonovitch says. “The key to speeding up these spontaneous emissions is to couple the radiating molecule to a half-wavelength antenna. Even though we’ve had antennas in radio for 120 years, somehow we’ve overlooked antennas in optics. Sometimes the great discoveries are looking right at us and waiting.”

For their optical antenna, Yablonovitch and his colleagues used an arch antenna configuration. The surface of a square-shaped InGaAsP nanorod was coated with a layer of titanium dioxide to provide isolation between the nanorod and a gold wire that was deposited perpendicularly over the nanorod to create the antenna. The InGaAsP semiconductor that served as the spontaneous light-emitting material is a material already in wide use for infrared laser communication and photo-detectors.

In addition to short-distance communication applications, LEDs equipped with optical antennas could also find use in photodetectors, imaging, bio-sensing, and data storage applications.

The open-access results of this study are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Yablonovitch also holds a faculty appointment with the University of California (UC) Berkeley where he directs the NSF Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), and is a member of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at Berkeley (Kavli ENSI).

This research was supported by E3S, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Results of a new study by UCLA researchers suggest that meditation may help preserve the brain’s gray matter, the tissue that contains neurons.

The researchers cautioned, however, that they cannot draw a direct, causal connection between meditation and preserving gray matter in the brain. Too many other factors may come into play, including lifestyle choices, personality traits, and genetic brain differences.

Since 1970, life expectancy around the world has risen dramatically, with people living more than 10 years longer. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that starting when people are in their mid-to-late-20s, the brain begins to wither — its volume and weight begin to decrease.

As baby boomers have aged and the elderly population has grown, the incidence of cognitive decline and dementia has increased substantially as the brain ages.

“In that light, it seems essential that longer life expectancies do not come at the cost of a reduced quality of life,” said Dr. Eileen Luders, first author and assistant professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “While much research has focused on identifying factors that increase the risk of mental illness and neurodegenerative decline, relatively less attention has been turned to approaches aimed at enhancing cerebral health.”

As this occurs, the brain can begin to lose some of its functional abilities. Although people are living longer, the years they gain often come with increased risks for mental illness and neurodegenerative disease.

So building on their earlier work that suggested people who meditate have less age-related atrophy in the brain’s white matter, the scientists have now looked specifically at the association between age and gray matter.

Widespread apparent effects of meditation on the brain

The researchers compared 50 people who had mediated for years and 50 who didn’t. Each group in the study was made up of 28 men and 22 women ranging in age from 24 to 77. Those who meditated had been doing so for four to 46 years, with an average of 20 years.

The participants’ brains were scanned using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging.

Although the researchers found a negative correlation between gray matter and age in both groups of people — suggesting a loss of brain tissue with increasing age — they also found that large parts of the gray matter in the brains of those who meditated seemed to be better preserved, Kurth said.

Florian Kurth, PhD, a co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, said the researchers were surprised by the magnitude of the difference.

“We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating,” he said. “Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain.”

“Our results are promising,” Luders said. “Hopefully they will stimulate other studies exploring the potential of meditation to better preserve our aging brains and minds. Accumulating scientific evidence that meditation has brain-altering capabilities might ultimately allow for an effective translation from research to practice, not only in the framework of healthy aging but also pathological aging.”

The paper appears in the current online edition of the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology.

The research was supported by the Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization, the Robson Family and Northstar Fund, the Brain Mapping Support Foundation, the Pierson‐Lovelace Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Tamkin Foundation, the William M. and Linda R. Dietel Philanthropic Fund at the Northern Piedmont Community Foundation, the Jennifer Jones‐Simon Foundation, the Capital Group Companies Foundation and an Australian Research Council fellowship (120100227). Nicolas Cherbuin of the Australian National University was also an author of the study.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meditation-associated-with-slower-age-related-loss-of-gray-matter-in-the-brain

Ultra-high-efficiency multi-junction solar cells similar to those used in space or electric utilities may now be possible on your rooftop thanks to a new microscale solar-concentration technology called concentrating photovoltaic (CPV)developed by an international team of researchers.

The new CPV systems use inexpensive optics to concentrate sunlight,” said Noel C. Giebink, assistant professor of electrical engineering, Penn State. “Current CPV systems are the size of billboards and have to be pointed very accurately to track the sun throughout the day. You can’t put a system like this on your roof.”

Fortunately, the falling cost of typical silicon solar cells — from about 20 percent for silicon to more than 40 percent with the new CPV — is making them a smaller and smaller fraction of the overall cost of solar electricity (which includes permitting, wiring, installation and maintenance).

Adapting CPV for rooftops

To enable CPV on rooftops, the researchers combined miniaturized gallium-arsenide photovoltaic cells, 3D-printed plastic lens arrays, and a moveable focusing mechanism. That combination reduces the size, weight and cost of the CPV system, allowing it to be installed on the south-facing side of a building’s roof.

They reported their results Thursday (Feb. 5) in Nature Communications.

“We partnered with colleagues at the University of Illinois because they are experts at making small, very efficient multi-junction solar cells,” said Giebink. “These cells are less than 1 square millimeter, made in large, parallel batches, and then an array of them is transferred onto a thin sheet of glass or plastic.”

To focus sunlight on the array of cells, the researchers embedded them between a pair of 3D-printed plastic lenslet arrays. Each lenslet in the top array acts like a small magnifying glass and is matched to a lenslet in the bottom array that functions like a concave mirror. With each tiny solar cell located in the focus of this duo, sunlight is intensified more than 200 times. To track the Sun over the course of a day, the middle solar cell sheet slides laterally in between the two lenslet arrays.

Previous attempts at such translation-based tracking have only worked for about two hours a day because the focal point moves out of the plane of the solar cells, leading to loss of light and a drop in efficiency. By sandwiching the cells between the lenslet arrays, the researchers solved this problem and enabled efficient solar focusing for a full eight hour day with only about 1 centimeter of total movement needed for tracking.

To lubricate the sliding cell array and also improve transmission through the lenslet sandwich, they used an optical oil, which allows for small motors using a minimal amount of force for mechanical tracking.

“The vision is that such a microtracking CPV panel could be placed on a roof in the same space as a traditional solar panel and generate a lot more power,” said Giebink. “The simplicity of this solution is really what gives it practical value.”

Because the total panel thickness is only about a centimeter and 99 percent of it — everything except the solar cells and their wiring — consists of acrylic plastic or Plexiglas, this system has the potential to be inexpensive to produce.

Direct sunlight required

Giebink cautions, however, that CPV only makes sense in areas with lots of direct sunlight, like the American Southwest. “In cloudy regions like the Pacific Northwest, CPV systems can’t concentrate the diffuse light and they lose their efficiency advantage.”

The researchers tested their prototype concentrator panel outside over the course of a day in State College, Penn. Even though the printed plastic lenses were not up to specification, they were able to demonstrate more than 100 times solar concentration.

Researchers at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and LUXeXcel Group B.V., The Netherlands were also involved. The U.S. Department of Energy funded this research.

The first transistors made of silicene, the world’s thinnest silicon material, have been developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering. The new material may allow for building dramatically faster, smaller, energy-efficient computer chips.

Made of a one-atom-thick layer of silicon atoms, silicene has outstanding electrical properties but has until now proved difficult to produce and work with.

Deji Akinwande, an assistant professor in the Cockrell School’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his team, including lead researcher Li Tao, solved one of the major challenges surrounding silicene by demonstrating that it can be made into transistors.

Thinnest semiconductor material

These first-of-their-kind devices rely on the thinnest of any semiconductor material, a long-standing dream of the chip industry. Their work was published this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Until a few years ago, human-made silicene was a purely theoretical material. Looking at carbon-based graphene, another atom-thick material with promise for chip development, researchers speculated that silicon atoms could be structured in a broadly similar way.

“Silicene, with its close chemical affinity to silicon, suggests an opportunity in the roadmap of the semiconductor industry,” Akinwande said. “The major breakthrough here is the efficient low-temperature manufacturing and fabrication of silicene devices for the first time.”

Despite its promise for commercial adaptation, silicene has proved extremely difficult to create and work with because of its complexity and instability when exposed to air.

How to fabricate silicene

To work around these issues, Akinwande teamed with Alessandro Molle at the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Agrate Brianza, Italy, to develop a new method for fabricating the silicene that reduces its exposure to air.

To start, the researchers let a hot vapor of silicon atoms condense onto a crystalline block of silver in a vacuum chamber. They then formed a silicene sheet on a thin layer of silver and added a nanometer-thick layer of alumina on top. Because of these protective layers, the team could safely peel it of its base and transfer it silver-side-up to an oxidized-silicon substrate. They were then able to gently scrape some of the silver to leave behind two islands of metal as electrodes, with a strip of silicene between them.

In the near-term, Akinwande will continue to investigate new structures and methods for creating silicene, which may lead to low-energy, high-speed digital computer chips.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Army Research Office, the Cockrell School’s Southwest Academy of Nanoelectronics and the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies Programme funded Akinwande’s research.