Like many, I was curious to see if microdosing is as miraculous of a mood booster as it is hyped up to be. As I was already tracking my moods daily, I decided to experiment and try microdosing on mushrooms to see how it would alter my mood long-term.
While hoping for a happier self, I tracked my mood over the months before, during and after. Note that during this time period, I was not on any other drug, natural or synthetic, and used the app Daylio for tracking.
Before
Mood: Most months, my mood stayed fairly stable with one or two dips, which may just be my female hormones. This was my typical pattern before microdosing, therefore my ‘baseline’. However, my life was clearly mundane, given how mediocre my mood was most of the month.
Mood chart, April 2020
Life status: I was working a job I didn’t like and felt unfulfilled. I felt the need to make changes but I just didn’t know what or how yet.
During
Mood: More ups and downs. I was essentially feeling my feelings much more intensely — my life was no longer mundane! The days I was microdosed were uplifting but the more frequent downs were slightly disruptive. Occasionally, I felt I was just too emotionally sensitive during this time.
Mood Chart, June 2020
Life: I was able to see all that was ‘not right’ in my life during this period and took major initiatives towards a career change. I also had enhanced intuition during this time, leading to greater awareness of my patterns and habits. In terms of productivity, I did not notice a major difference.
Dosage: 0.30 g, with 2–3 days gap in between. On taking 0.45 g one time I even had visuals, so I’d say I’m very sensitive to small dosages. After the first few times I lowered my dosage to 0.15 g.
Why I stopped: Mushrooms and LSD mimic serotonin function in the brain by attaching to serotonin receptors, which may demote natural serotonin production temporarily. I felt this ‘withdrawal’ may have been causing the frequent downs I was experiencing and it’s possible that longer gaps between doses could’ve reduced this effect. This may not affect everyone as intensely, but was a major reason why I stopped.
Right after
Mood: The period following when I stopped was the roughest, but in hindsight the most healing. I was easily anxious and overall just in a bad state of mind. But you need to break down the old structures to build the new. That’s exactly what happened here — a lot of ‘breakdowns’.
Mood Chart, July 2020
Life: I had a lot of deep subconsciously suppressed issues come to surface that I was forced to work through. And it wasn’t pretty. But in the end, I came out of this phase with significant personal growth and understanding of self.
Eventually
Mood: Now I’m all stabilized, I like to think. I definitely haven’t had such sustained good mood in a very long time. Overall, I feel more in touch with my intuition and more in control of my emotions.
Mood Chart, August 2020
Life: I have an easier time letting go and focusing within. I feel more compassionate, understanding and grounded. I find myself to be more creative, productive and motivated in general. Additionally, I’ve started actively pursuing my ideal career and reading a lot on spirituality.
Overall
Mood Chart Over 6 months
Result: While I had improved moods, I clearly had more ‘downs’ during the microdosing period and right after. But It’s especially great to see how less mediocre my life has become over time. Also, I did reach my goal of sustained improved mood by microdosing for just two months.
This process did reset my brain and for me, it wasn’t the easiest. But healing often isn’t. Just like physical wounds can hurt when healing, so can emotional and psychological wounds. Through a cycle of awareness, healing and renewal, my experience was gradual, yet incredibly significant.
Are Radioactive Diamond Batteries a Cure for Nuclear Waste?
Researchers are developing a new battery powered by lab-grown gems made from reformed nuclear waste. If it works, it will last thousands of years.
A prototype of Arkenlight’s carbon-14 diamond betavoltaic battery. COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
IN THE SUMMER of 2018, a hobby drone dropped a small package near the lip of Stromboli, a volcano off the coast of Sicily that has been erupting almost constantly for the past century. As one of the most active volcanoes on the planet, Stromboli is a source of fascination for geologists, but collecting data near the roiling vent is fraught with peril. So a team of researchers from the University of Bristol built a robot volcanologist and used a drone to ferry it to the top of the volcano, where it could passively monitor its every quake and quiver until it was inevitably destroyed by an eruption. The robot was a softball-sized sensor pod powered by microdoses of nuclear energy from a radioactive battery the size of a square of chocolate. The researchers called their creation a dragon egg.
Dragon eggs can help scientists study violent natural processes in unprecedented detail, but for Tom Scott, a materials scientist at Bristol, volcanoes were just the beginning. For the past few years, Scott and a small group of collaborators have been developing a souped-up version of the dragon egg’s nuclear battery that can last for thousands of years without ever being charged or replaced. Unlike the batteries in most modern electronics, which generate electricity from chemical reactions, the Bristol battery collects particles spit out by radioactive diamonds that can be made from reformed nuclear waste.
Earlier this month, Scott and his collaborator, a chemist at Bristol named Neil Fox, created a company called Arkenlight to commercialize their nuclear diamond battery. Although the fingernail-sized battery is still in a prototyping phase, it’s already showing improvements in efficiency and power density compared to existing nuclear batteries. Once Scott and the Arkenlight team have refined their design, they’ll set up a pilot facility to mass produce them. The company plans for its first commercial nuclear batteries to hit the market by 2024—just don’t expect to find them in your laptop.
Conventional chemical or “galvanic” batteries, like the lithium-ion cells in a smartphone or the alkaline batteries in a remote, are great at putting out a lot of power for a short amount of time. A lithium-ion battery can only operate for a few hours without a recharge, and after a few years it will have lost a substantial fraction of its charge capacity. Nuclear batteries or betavoltaic cells, by comparison, are all about producing tiny amounts of power for a long time. They don’t put out enough juice to power a smartphone, but depending on the nuclear material they use, they can provide a steady drip of electricity to small devices for millennia.
“Can we power an electric vehicle? The answer is no,” says Morgan Boardman, Arkenlight’s CEO. To power something that energy hungry, he says, means “the mass of the battery would be significantly greater than the mass of the vehicle.” Instead, the company is looking at applications where it is either impossible or impractical to regularly change a battery, such as sensors in remote or hazardous locations at nuclear waste repositories or on satellites. Boardman also sees applications that are closer to home, like using the company’s nuclear batteries for pacemakers or wearables. He envisions a future in which people keep their batteries and swap out devices, rather than the other way around. “You’ll be replacing the fire alarm long before you replace the battery,” Boardman says.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many people don’t relish the idea of having something radioactive anywhere near them. But the health risk from betavoltaics are comparable to the health risk of exit signs, which use a radioactive material called tritium to achieve their signature red glow. Unlike gamma rays or other more dangerous types of radiation, beta particles can be stopped in their tracks by just a few millimeters of shielding. “Usually just the wall of the battery is sufficient to stop any emissions,” says Lance Hubbard, a materials scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who is not affiliated with Arkenlight. “The inside is hardly radioactive at all, and that makes them very safe for people.” And, he adds, when the nuclear battery runs out of power, it decays to a stable state, which means no leftover nuclear waste.Most Popular
The first betavoltaics hit the scene in the 1970s, but until recently no one had much use for them. They were initially used in pacemakers, where a faulty power pouch can mean the difference between life and death, until they were eventually replaced with cheaper lithium-ion alternatives. Today, the proliferation of low-power electronics heralds a new era for nuclear batteries. “These are a great power option for very small amounts of power— we’re talking microwatts or even picowatts,” says Hubbard. “The internet of things was a driver for the renaissance of these power sources.”
A typical betavoltaic cell consists of thin, foil-like layers of radioactive material sandwiched between semiconductors. As the nuclear material naturally decays, it emits high-energy electrons or positrons called beta particles that knock electrons loose in the semiconductor material to create an electric current. In this sense, a nuclear battery is similar to a solar panel, except that its semiconductors soak up beta particles rather than photons.
And like solar panels, there’s a hard limit on how much power can be squeezed from a nuclear battery. Their power density drops off the further the radioactive source is from the semiconductor. So if the layers of the battery are more than a few microns thick, the power of the cell will plummet. Moreover, beta particles are randomly emitted in all directions, which means only a fraction of them will actually hit the semiconductor, and only a fraction of those will be converted into electricity. In terms of how much radiation a nuclear battery is able to convert into electricity, Hubbard says “around 7 percent efficiency is state of the art.”
One of Arkenlight’s “Betalight” voltaic batteries integrated with a sensor package. Unlike the carbon-14 cells, the Betalight is a conventional “sandwich” nuclear battery made with tritium.COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
That’s far from the theoretical maximum efficiency of nuclear batteries, which is around 37 percent. But that’s where a radioactive isotope called carbon-14 may be able to help. Best known for its role in radiocarbon dating, which allows archaeologists to estimate the age of ancient artifacts, it can provide a boost to nuclear batteries because it can function both as a radioactive source and a semiconductor. It also has a half-life of 5,700 years, which means a carbon-14 nuclear battery could, in principle, power an electronic device for longer than humans have had written language.
Scott and his colleagues at Bristol grow artificial carbon-14 diamonds by bleeding methane into a hydrogen plasma in a special reactor. As the gases ionize, the methane breaks down and the carbon-14 collects on a substrate in the reactor and begins to grow in a diamond lattice. But rather using this radioactive diamond in a conventional “sandwich” battery configuration, where the nuclear source and semiconductor are discrete layers, Scott and his colleagues patented a method to infuse the carbon-14 directly into a vanilla lab-grown diamond that’s similar to what would be found on a ring. The result is crystal diamond with a seamless structure, which minimizes the distance the beta particles have to travel and maximizes the efficiency of the nuclear battery.
“Up until now, the radioactive source has always been discrete from the diode that receives it and converts it into electricity,” says Boardman. “This is groundbreaking.”
Carbon-14 is naturally formed when cosmic rays strike nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, but it is also produced as a byproduct in the graphite blocks that contain the control rods for a nuclear reactor. These blocks eventually end up as nuclear waste, and Boardman says there are nearly 100,000 tons of this irradiated graphite in the UK alone. The UK’s Atomic Energy Authority recently recovered tritium, another radioactive isotope used in nuclear batteries, from 35 tons of irradiated graphite blocks, and the Arkenlight team is working with the agency to develop a similar process to recover carbon-14 from the graphite blocks.Most Popular
If Arkenlight is successful, it would provide a virtually inexhaustible supply of raw material to create nuclear batteries. The UK’s AEA estimates that fewer than 100 pounds of carbon-14 would be enough for millions of nuclear batteries. Moreover, by removing the radioactive carbon-14 from the graphite blocks, it would downgrade them from high-level nuclear waste to low-level nuclear waste, which makes them easier and safer to handle for long term storage.
Arkenlight hasn’t made a betavoltaic cell using reformed nuclear waste yet, and Boardman says its nuclear diamond battery still has a few more years of refinement in the lab before it’s ready to hit the streets. But the tech is already attracting interest from the space and nuclear industries. Boardman says Arkenlight recently received a contract from the European Space Agency to develop diamond batteries for what he described as “satellite RFID tags,” which would put out a weak radio signal to identify a satellite for thousands of years. And their vision doesn’t stop at nuclear batteries, either. Arkenlight is also in the process of developing gammavoltaic cells, which would soak up the gamma rays emitted by nuclear waste repositories and use them to generate electricity.
A prototype of Arkenlight’s gammavoltaic battery that will convert gamma rays from nuclear waste repositories into electricity.COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
Arkenlight is hardly the only group working on nuclear batteries. American companies like City Lab and Widetronix have been developing commercial betavoltaic cells for decades. These companies are focused on more conventional layered nuclear batteries that use tritium rather than carbon-14 diamonds as their nuclear power source.
Michael Spencer, an electrical engineer at Cornell University and co-founder of Widetronix, says the radioactive material has to be chosen with its application in mind. For example, carbon-14 spits out fewer beta particles than tritium, but has a half-life that is 500 times longer. That’s great if you need something to last forever, but it also means that carbon-14 nuclear batteries have to be significantly larger than tritium batteries to provide the same amount of power. “Isotope choices present a lot of tradeoffs,” says Spencer.
If the nuclear battery was once a fringe technology, it seems poised to break into the mainstream. We don’t necessarily need—or want—all of our electronics to last for thousands of years. But when we do, we’ll have a battery that keeps going and going … and going and going and going.
Image by Delmaine Donson / iStockOur editors have independently chosen the products listed on this page. If you purchase something mentioned in this article, we may earn a small commission.August 31, 2020 — 20:04 PMShare on:
Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a 35% increase in dream recall and a 15% increase in negative dreams, according to researchers from the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center. Many people are referring to these abnormally vivid dreams as pandemic dreams. Since social routines have been disrupted, many of these dreams are centered around relationships.
Dreams are the gateway to our unconscious desires and feelings, so they won’t always align with everyday reality. For example, some people may be having great sex in their dreams, but not in waking life. Others may have stressful dreams about their partner without recognizing trouble spots while awake.
So, are these relationship-focused dreams trying to tell us something deeper? Or are they just pandemic-related anxieties playing themselves out while we sleep?
What are your dreams trying to tell you about your relationship?
Dreams can have many meanings, so there isn’t one clear answer—as much as we’d like for there to be.
The anxious energy built up from quarantine can trigger stress dreams without deeper significance. Whereas, other dreams may be sending messages about what matters and what needs to change.
Dreams that repeat themselves or grab your attention more than others probably fall into the latter group. Pay attention to these, as they are generally sourced from our deeper subconscious.
While dreams vary in details and context there are some common themes. Here are three common relationship dreams, plus what they may be trying to tell you: ADVERTISEMENT
1. Steamy sex dreams
One of the most common relationship-centered dreams is the steamy sex dream, but what does it mean? To better understand, ask yourself:
Are you and your partner having good sex right now?
Distinguishing these two experiences is important. Dreams may reflect built-up and unexpressed desires—especially, if you haven’t been having much sex and wish you were.
If you and your partner feel stressed from COVID-19 and haven’t found time for the bedroom, put a sex date on the calendar. Agree to set up an atmosphere at home that gets you both in the mood, and find ways to build anticipation throughout the week.
That said, sex dreams aren’t always just about sex. These dreams may also stem from a yearning for emotional connection. After all, good sex is born from connection. When was the last time you and your partner slowed down to connect in a meaningful way, or experienced nonsexual touch like hugging, cuddles, and soft arm tickles?
If it’s been a while, make some time to connect with your partner at the end of your day before going to sleep. Share something you enjoyed about your day or something your partner did that you appreciated. Be specific and genuine. This simple act can begin to rebuild emotional intimacy frayed from the pandemic.
2. Conflict and tension dreams
Dreams in which you and your partner are arguing or experiencing tension can usually be explained by two common themes. To understand them, pay attention to the frustrations, fears, and feelings expressed in the dream. It may be possible that those feelings are bubbling under the surface during waking life. Preoccupations with work, childcare, and other day-to-day tasks may be masking these underlying feelings, or simply making it easier to bottle them.
Those unacknowledged feelings may be showing up in the dream since the subtle signs are overlooked while awake. If that’s the case, take some time to journal out your feelings, taking note of feelings that may be stemming from personal needs, as well as needs being unmet by your partner. Addressing these early on can prevent further conflict down the line.
3. Dreams where you’re unable to reach the other person by phone.
The final common relationship dream is a bit more abstract, but may signal a lack of connection with your partner.
Have you had a dream recently where you try to reach your partner on the phone and can’t get through? Sometimes in these dreams, people will dial the numbers but can’t seem to get them right. Others will dial and get through, but their partner can’t hear them on the other side.
This dream may be a sign that you’re feeling underappreciated, undervalued, or ignored in your relationship. These feelings could stem from a struggle with work-life balance, or you or your partner checking out in front of the TV at the end of a work day. If any of these feelings ring true, consider creating a post-work ritual with your partner.
Rituals help align our intentions into action. Committing to a ritual together can empower you both to shift out of work mode and be truly present with each other. This may be a short meditation, lighting or blowing out a candle together, or even changing clothes at the same time.
Bottom Line
Your relationship-themed dreams are a sign that you care—both about yourself and your partner. When you embrace these dreams with a sense of curiosity, rather than judgement, they can become powerful sources of transformation, healing, and change.
Efferocytosis triggers cellular reprogramming, including the induction of mRNA transcripts which encode anti-inflammatory cytokines that promote inflammation resolution. Our current understanding of this transcriptional response is largely informed from analysis of bulk phagocyte populations; however, this precludes the resolution of heterogeneity between individual macrophages and macrophage subsets. Moreover, phagocytes may contain so called “passenger” transcripts that originate from engulfed apoptotic bodies, thus obscuring the true transcriptional reprogramming of the phagocyte. To define the transcriptional diversity during efferocytosis, we utilized single-cell mRNA sequencing after co-cultivating macrophages with apoptotic cells. Importantly, transcriptomic analyses were performed after validating the disappearance of apoptotic cell-derived RNA sequences. Our findings reveal new heterogeneity of the efferocytic response at a single-cell resolution, particularly evident between F4/80+ MHCIILO and F4/80− MHCIIHI macrophage sub-populations. After exposure to apoptotic cells, the F4/80+ MHCIILO subset significantly induced pathways associated with tissue and cellular homeostasis, while the F4/80− MHCIIHI subset downregulated these putative signaling axes. Ablation of a canonical efferocytosis receptor, MerTK, blunted efferocytic signatures and led to the escalation of cell death-associated transcriptional signatures in F4/80+ MHCIILO macrophages. Taken together, our results newly elucidate the heterogenous transcriptional response of single-cell peritoneal macrophages after exposure to apoptotic cells.
Introduction
The clearance of apoptotic cells, termed efferocytosis1, is executed billions of times each day by a diverse spectrum of macrophage (MΦ) subsets in humans2. This process induces an active mRNA transcriptional response within the phagocyte that is necessary to maintain tissue homeostasis and a nonphlogistic milieu3,4. Additionally, efferocytosis within an injured tissue promotes the secretion of anti-inflammatory cytokines5 and pro-resolving mediators6 contributing to protective responses during tissue repair7. However, impaired efferocytosis contributes to failed inflammation resolution and therefore is a significant feature of chronic inflammation diseases8. For instance, in advanced atherosclerosis defective efferocytosis induces plaque necrosis and inflammation leading to subsequent plaque disruption and thrombosis9,10.
Genetic fate-mapping combined with parabiosis and adoptive transfer approaches have revealed that macrophage diversity may originate from two broad ontogenetic categories11,12. This includes (1) embryonic precursors that differentiate into self-renewing tissue-resident macrophages and (2) bone marrow-derived haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that differentiate into blood monocytes11. Specifically within the peritoneum, Cd11b+ F4/80+ large peritoneal macrophages (LPMs) appear to be embryonically-derived, while Cd11c+ MHCII+ small peritoneal macrophages (SPMs) are sourced from adult blood monocytes13,14. Cd11b+ F4/80+ LPMs are dependent on the transcription factor GATA-binding factor 6 (GATA6) for homeostatic cellular maintenance15, while Cd11c+ MHCII+ SPMs require IRF4 for differentiation from monocytic precursors highlighting disparities among peritoneal macrophage subsets13. Moreover, these distinct populations rely on disparate molecular mediators to conduct and respond to efferocytosis16. Consequently, these MΦ populations would display heterogeneous transcriptional signatures that could not be assigned to phagocyte subpopulations after quantitative PCR or bulk sequencing of mixed macrophage cultures. Indeed the transcriptomics of bulk macrophages during efferocytosis has been characterized in detail4,17. Such analyses have defined conserved activation profiles including mobilization of the cytoskeletal network and transcriptional induction of target mRNAs by nuclear receptors, such as Liver X Receptor (LXR)18. Yet, our appreciation of how distinct phagocyte subpopulations may uniquely reprogram in response to apoptotic cells has not yet been resolved at the single cell level.
Herein, we describe the transcriptomic signature of primary single cells during efferocytosis and after exposure to apoptotic cells. To control for apoptotic cell-derived transcripts19, primary macrophages were co-cultivated with apoptotic cells of a separate species. With this experimental design, we are able to discriminate mRNAs derived from the phagocyte versus mRNAs derived from apoptotic cells. In addition, apoptotic cells that expressed a transgenic reporter gene were utilized as a supplemental reporter to track apoptotic cell catabolism. Thus, our results newly elucidate the heterogenous transcriptional response of single-cell peritoneal macrophages, after exposure to apoptotic cells. These data and analyses will be useful for future investigations that seek to determine the unique functional roles of phagocyte subsets during efferocytosis and after exposure to apoptotic cells.
Loneliness is recognized as a serious threat to mental health. Even as our world becomes increasingly connected over digital platforms, young people in our society are feeling a growing sense of isolation. The COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many countries to implement social distancing and school closures, magnifies the need for understanding the mental health consequences of social isolation and loneliness. While research has shown that social isolation during childhood, in particular, is detrimental to adult brain function and behavior across mammalian species, the underlying neural circuit mechanisms have remained poorly understood.
A research team from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has now identified specific sub-populations of brain cells in the prefrontal cortex, a key part of the brain that regulates social behavior, that are required for normal sociability in adulthood and are profoundly vulnerable to juvenile social isolation in mice. The study findings, which appear in the August 31 issue of Nature Neuroscience, shed light on a previously unrecognized role of these cells, known as medial prefrontal cortex neurons projecting to the paraventricular thalamus, the brain area that relays signals to various components of the brain’s reward circuitry. If the finding is replicated in humans, it could lead to treatments for psychiatric disorders connected to isolation.
“In addition to identifying this specific circuit in the prefrontal cortex that is particularly vulnerable to social isolation during childhood, we also demonstrated that the vulnerable circuit we identified is a promising target for treatments of social behavior deficits,” says Hirofumi Morishita, MD, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Ophthalmology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, a faculty member of The Friedman Brain Institute and the Mindich Child Health and Development Institute, and senior author of the paper. “Through stimulation of the specific prefrontal circuit projecting to the thalamic area in adulthood, we were able to rescue the sociability deficits caused by juvenile social isolation.”
Specifically, the team found that, in male mice, two weeks of social isolation immediately following weaning leads to a failure to activate medial prefrontal cortex neurons projecting to the paraventricular thalamus during social exposure in adulthood. Researchers found that juvenile isolation led to both reduced excitability of the prefrontal neurons projecting to the paraventricular thalamus and increased inhibitory input from other related neurons, suggesting a circuit mechanism underlying sociability deficits caused by juvenile social isolation. To determine whether acute restoration of the activity of prefrontal projections to the paraventricular thalamus is sufficient to ameliorate sociability deficits in adult mice that underwent juvenile social isolation, the team employed a technique known as optogenetics to selectively stimulate the prefrontal projections to paraventricular thalamus. The researchers also used chemogenetics in their study. While optogenetics enables researchers to stimulate particular neurons in freely moving animals with pulses of light, chemogenetics allows non-invasive chemical control over cell populations. By employing both of these techniques, the researchers were able to quickly increase social interaction in these mice once light pulses or drugs were administered to them.
“We checked the presence of social behavior deficits just prior to stimulation and when we checked the behavior while the stimulation was ongoing, we found that the social behavior deficits were reversed,” said Dr. Morishita.
Given that social behavior deficits are a common dimension of many neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, identification of these specific prefrontal neurons will point toward therapeutic targets for the improvement of social behavior deficits shared across a range of psychiatric disorders. The circuits identified in this study could potentially be modulated using techniques like transcranial magnetic stimulation and/or transcranial direct current stimulation.
By Emily M. Bender, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington.
Natural language processing (NLP), including text analytics, text as data, etc., involves the application of machine learning and other methods to text (and speech) in some natural language. For the most part, data scientists working with NLP techniques are interested in the information that is stored in written English (or, more rarely, it seems, other languages). However, to get at this information requires building or at least using algorithms that model the structures of language and their relationship to the meanings expressed.
But structure is only part of the equation. In 2019, I teamed up with Alex Lascarides to produce a companion volume, Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing II: 100 Essentials from Semantics and Pragmatics, which similarly provides an overview of how meaning is encoded in human languages and how people use those encoded meanings for communicative ends. Both books follow a format of 100 short vignettes, illustrated with specific examples from many different languages, with the goal of making complex ideas approachable.
Curious what a nonce use is? #30 is where we cover how it is that sentences like The ham sandwich and salad at Table 7 is getting impatient are even ever meaningful. Other vignettes in the book include “#39 Collocations are often less ambiguous than the words taken in isolation”, “#62 Evidentials encode the source a speaker credits the information to and/or the degree of certainty the speaker feels about it”, and “#95 Silence can be a meaningful act”.
Bio:Emily M. Bender (@emilymbender) is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington and the Faculty Director of the Professional Masters in Computational Linguistics (CLMS) program. Her research interests include the interaction of linguistics and NLP, computational semantics, multilingual NLP, and the societal impact of language technology.
The US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application earlier this month from Microsoft that relates to computer graphics systems, and more particularly, to a microLED display system and the color management relating to HMDs and smartglasses.
Microsoft’s HoloLens team appear to have their eye on moving some of their team to developing a next-gen follow-up to HoloLens being smartglasses. This directly puts Microsoft in a race with Apple, amongst others, in bringing a next category of wearables to market in the not-too-distant future.
What caught my eye about this patent application is their explanation as to why they think using microLED displays as lenses is going to be key to their smartglasses. Apple acquired LuxVue back in 2014, an industry leader in microLED technology. Six years later and we still haven’t seen the fruits of that acquisition that may result in future displays for Apple iDevice and perhaps, like Microsoft, use them in smartglasses. Are both Apple and Microsoft on the same wavelength for microLED displays? Only time will tell.
Microsoft notes in their patent background that “One area of computing devices that has grown in recent years is the area of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices, which use a graphics processing unit (GPU) to render graphics from a computing device to a display device.
Such technology may be incorporated into a head-mounted display (HMD) device in the form of Microsoft’s HoloLens, eyeglasses, goggles, a helmet, a visor, or other eyewear.
One challenge with incorporating display devices into HMD or mobile devices is the size constraints that limit some of the optical or display components that can be integrated into the HMD devices while miniaturizing the overall size of the HMD devices to improve user mobility.
Current HMDs usually use illuminated micro displays such as reflective liquid crystal on silicon (hereafter “LCoS”) or digital light processing (DLP) projectors as they provide a high standard of display performance.
These displays offer advantages such as high resolution, a wide color gamut, high brightness and a high contrast ratio. However, such digital projection systems that rely on LCoS or DLP technology require large form factors to create a uniform illumination of panels. This is what Microsoft’s patent application addresses.
Microsoft’s invention provides improvements in presenting images on a display with miniaturized components without compromising the display quality or user experience.
Microsoft begins by noting that “MicroLED arrays offer a small form factor solution for the HMD image sources since they do not need separate illumination optics. Features of a future device like smartglasses includes a MicroLED display system that incorporates a plurality of monochrome projectors (e.g., three MicroLED projectors) to generate three monochrome images (e.g., red, blue, and green images) that are separately input into a single waveguide of the HMD and combined to form an image that is displayed to the user.
By utilizing a single waveguide that includes a plurality of spatially separated input regions (e.g., a region for inputting blue light, a region for inputting red light, and a region for inputting green light), the MicroLED display system used in glasses may reduce the form factor of the HMD device because of the reduced number and/or size of optical components, such as a reduced number of plates that may be required to combine the three monochrome images.
Microsoft’s patent then dives into a number of complicated scenarios of how they could approach a future smartglasses device that could be more appealing to consumers in contrast to their HoloLens HMD that is aimed at education and industry applications.
Microsoft’s patent FIG. 1A below is a schematic diagram of a display device (e.g., HMD device) in the form of smartglasses; FIG. 3 is an example MicroLED display system that incorporate a plurality of monochrome MicroLED projectors to generate three monochrome images that are separately input into a single waveguide of the HMD.
Microsoft’s patent published earlier this quarter by the U.S. Patent Office was originally filed in Q1 2019. The inventors listed are from Microsoft’s HoloLens team.
Microsoft will be introducing a new dual display smartphone branded the Surface Duo in September and next year they intend to launch a dual tablet device under the branding of Surface Neo.
Microsoft is obsessed in bringing innovative hardware to market ahead of Apple. They introduced the Surface Book, a true 2-in-1 notebook where users could detach the display to use as a tablet whenever needed. They introduced Surface Headphones using a touch interface on the cups of the headphones ahead of Apple.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising to see that smartglasses could be on their list of products they’re developing to get ahead of Apple again. Microsoft wants to win back the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of their one-time users that fled to Apple’s iPhone and iPad. The only way to accomplish this is to develop innovative hardware that fans could be thrilled to own that is ahead of Apple.
Whether Microsoft will actually be able to beat Apple to market with Mixed Reality (MR) smartglasses is completely unknown at present. Though Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer, Panos Panay, is passionately driven to make all attempts of doing just that.
To review Apple’s HMD and smartglasses patents, check out our archives here.
50-fold increase in transistor density is possible by 2030
Intel’s Chief Architect, Raja Koduri, has presented a roadmap for increasing the number of transistors able to fit on a chip by a factor of 50.
During a keynote presentation at this year’s Hot Chips conference (held virtually), he described the ways in which computer technology can continue to shrink over the next 10 years – helping to sustain the famous trend known as Moore’s Law.
For many years, analysts have been predicting the end of Moore’s Law, with concerns that the exponential growth in computer processing power may be slowing or about to reach a fundamental limit. However, thanks to new innovations in processor architecture and power consumption, Mr. Koduri is adamant that plenty of life remains in this trend.
Top-of-the-range processors currently hold about 30 to 40 billion transistors. If Mr. Koduri’s prediction is right, the first chips with over a trillion transistors may emerge by the end of this decade (although, strictly speaking, Cerebras Systems achieved that particular milestone last year; their chip is, however, spread over a much larger area than conventional form factors).
“We firmly believe there is a lot more transistor density scaling to come,” said Koduri.
Koduri outlined several key advances that could shape the next 10 years of computer processor development.
The first step would focus on current FinFET transistor technology (10nm), with further improvements in pitch scaling, tripling its density. The FinFET architecture would then morph into nanowire architecture, he explained, doubling the previous transistor count for a combined six-fold increase. NMOS and PMOS nanowires could then be stacked on top of each other, for another doubling, or a cumulative 12-fold increase. These technologies are already being researched, he added.
Regular pitch scaling would no longer be feasible beyond this point. Instead, die stacking and packaging technologies would provide the increased density. So the next step may involve wafer-to-wafer stacking, enabling a further 2x boost in transistor count, or a cumulative 24-fold increase. The final step, Koduri predicted, could be die-to-wafer stacking. This would provide yet another doubling.
All of these five steps are shown in the animation below. Combined, they could increase the number of transistors being placed on computer chips almost 50-fold compared to today.
“I’d like to remind everyone that these are not just cartoons on paper,” said Koduri. “Everything I’ve described here today is happening in labs across the world. The vision will play out over time – maybe a decade or more – but it will play out.”
Last week Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a startup working on creating a brain computer interface (BCI) for consumers, held a “tech demo” to show off the company’s progress over the last year.
Let me sum it up for you: Musk and Neuralink have figured out how to do basic brain surgery. What’s that you say? Humans have been doing basic brain surgery for hundreds of years? Yeah, that’s my point.
Musk got me again. I should have known better. After all, I once believed Tesla would reach level five autonomy (full driverless) by 2020 because Musk swore it would happen. Actually he said there’d be a million fully autonomous vehicles on the road by the end of the year (most experts still think we’re decades away from the first one). And I bought it when he said The Boring Company would revolutionize transportation. Y’all, it’s just a regular tunnel.
So what possessed me to jump on board the Elon Musk hype train when it came to Neuralink? Hope.
Elon Musk preys on the hopeful and optimistic. We say “gosh, wouldn’t it be cool if we could control things with our brains?” and Musk tells us that he’ll not only do just that, but it’ll be better than anyone could dream up. Musk’s a genius and a dreamer right?
The problem is that medical science isn’t held back by a lack of dreams and ambition. The science world wasn’t at a standstill waiting for someone plucky with some money to come along and show the rest of the idiots how fire works.
Science takes time and requires collaboration. Neuralink works in the dark, hoping to hire its way to success like Google or Apple. Don’t get me wrong, those are pretty good role models. But the difference is that Musk makes promises first, then expects someone he pays to come up with the science to make it work.
Neuralink is purported to eventually be capable of curing spinal injuries, autistic spectrum disorder, nuerological disorders, anxiety, depression, pain, unhappiness, and letting you control any gadget with your mind. Most of this is pie-in-the-sky nonsense that we could be centuries away from pulling off and some of it is just flat out nonsense that medical professionals scoff at as absurd (you can’t, for example, cure autistic spectrum disorder because it isn’t a disease).
But that didn’t stop me from getting hyped up to the point of forgetting that Musk is a con-artist at worst and just some dude with a bunch of money and charisma at best. I figured a Neuralink demo would, you know, demonstrate something.
Here’s what we got instead: a pig with a brain implant that triggers a beeping noise every time it “snuffles.” Stop the presses! What’s wrong with me, how could I wait this long to even mention this landmark achievement in scientific endeavor?https://www.youtube.com/embed/iSutodqCZ74?feature=oembed
Yeah, you didn’t miss much.
In all fairness, Musk and Neuralink are on the verge of a breakthrough in medical technology. Of course that breakthrough already happened a couple of decades ago when doctors perfected invasive surgery techniques allowing for specialty devices to be installed in patient’s skulls, but Musk is about to make it a little easier to do with an advanced robot. Yay?
Here’s the one fact you need to know: Neuralink‘s actual device is less capable than similar medical BCIs already on the market. The big claim to fame here is that Neuralink hopes one day to bring this technology to the masses. So, instead of needing to be diagnosed with a serious medical condition, you’ll be able to pay someone to drill into your skull so you can… well, that’s just it. Nobody knows exactly what the capabilities of such a device would be.
Musk and Neuralink have plenty of speculation – you’ll be able to stream music directly to your implant and listen to it in your skull, for example – but the only concrete ability we’ve seen is the device interpreting brainwaves as beeps. And that’s something we can do with stick-on sensors right now.
The future could be bright for Neuralink, perhaps one day it’ll live up to its hype. But it’s doubtful whether that’ll happen in Musk’s lifetime. There’s nothing solid to support the idea that a simple implant can suddenly turn the human brain into an OS-accessible database ready for read/write functionality from a classical computer.
At the end of the day Neuralink is another example of Musk’s hype machine getting everyone excited for science and technology, only to remind us that optimism and money aren’t the only things keeping humans from living in a science fiction utopia.
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