A new prototype scout drone can be printed for less than the cost of the latest iPhone
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For everything from family to computers…
A new prototype scout drone can be printed for less than the cost of the latest iPhone
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Note: The GIF doesn’t do it justice because of the crappy framerate, watch the video. Things get exciting around 0:30 if you absolutely can’t wait.
This is a video of the Berezka Dance Ensemble performing a dance made up of a series of floating steps invented by Nadezhda Nadezhdina, who created the ensemble. They remind me of the little people who come out of a really fancy cuckoo clock when it strikes on the hour. They move so smoothly It’s really hard to believe they aren’t floating at times. Of course the long dresses help too. Or, who knows, maybe they’re all witches. I saw the witch who lives in my building float down the hallway once when she thought nobody was looking. I was looking though the peephole though, because I heard a noise and thought it was the pizza man. I think she was putting a hex on the guy who lives next door to me. She doesn’t like him because he drank beer with her son once a few years ago. Her son is well over 40, by the way. I really want to move but I think there’s a spell stopping me. Long story short if you’re into black magic I could use your help.
Keep going for the video while I practice the worm and crack all my ribs.
Thanks to Sandra, who wants to see them all do the robot.
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In a little corner of the massive convention center where the
is held, a relatively unknown Japanese company revealed a car with some mega-sized claims. The company is called Aspark, and its car is called the Owl, a name that apparently derives from the butterfly doors that representatives said look like an owl’s wings. This electric
seems more like a peregrine falcon than an owl, though. The company claims it can hit 62 mph in just 2 seconds.
According to representatives of the company, this acceleration number was a key focus when developing the car. They considered going for top speed, but felt that ultimate acceleration is something more people could realistically experience. To achieve this, Aspark gave the Owl a carbon fiber body and kept weight to just under 1,900 pounds. It also gave the car two electric motors powering all four wheels that can produce about 429 horsepower. The company also claims a top speed of just under 174 mph. Another interesting aspect of the car is the use of capacitors for storing power — a choice made for rapid discharge of electricity to help achieve the fast acceleration numbers. With ambitious numbers like these, it will be interesting to see how the car compares to other electric supercars such as the
and the
.
Aside from the interesting specs, the car itself looks quite attractive. It has an appearance similar to modern
; long, wide, and oh so low. The height at the roof is a scant 39 inches. the car has impressive fit and finish, with tight panel gaps and crisp lines. The interior is fully furnished and is covered in leather upholstery. It also brings to life the concept dream of cameras as side mirror replacements. The quality of this prototype has us hopeful the company will be able to follow through with its production plans, though we’ll maintain a healthy skepticism until we see it running and driving.
Speaking of which, the company aims to start
in 2019. It will build Owls on a per-order basis. Buyers will have to be quite wealthy as well. Aspark expects to sell each Owl for 3.5 million euros, which comes to $4.16 million at current exchange rates. That’s a lot of money regardless, but especially when considering that
a Bugatti Chiron costs just under $3 million
, and the new
will cost $2.54 million. Even
the upcoming Aston Martin Valkyrie
is expected to cost about $3 million. Of course, none of those cars can claim full electric power.
Related Video:
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Tech visionaries may tantalize us with visions of instant gratification via drone delivery, but Silicon Valley has yet to deliver on such promises. Meanwhile, halfway around the globe in an African country barely the size of Maryland, drone deliveries have already taken flight—with more serious cargo than burritos.
Jeremy Hsu is a science and tech journalist based in New York.
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In October 2016, Rwandan crowds cheered the launch and landing of delivery drones developed and operated by Zipline, a San Francisco-based startup. The locals call the Zipline drones “sky ambulances†as they soar overhead and swoop in low to drop off lifesaving blood supplies by parachute to remote hospitals and clinics located hours outside the Rwandan capital of Kigali. That may sound very different from the PR circus surrounding Google drones testing delivery of Chipotle fare to Virginia Tech college students—and it is. But Zipline and similar delivery drone pioneers have also learned some valuable lessons about what a large-scale delivery drone operation can look like—and whether Silicon Valley can ever realize the dream of drone delivery to your doorstep.
“Countries like Rwanda can make decisions fast and can implement new technologies in concert with new regulations fast, so we’re now in a position where the US is trying to follow Rwanda,†says Keller Rinaudo, CEO and co-founder of Zipline. “They’re not trying to catch up to US infrastructure. They’re just leapfrogging roads and trucks and motorcycles and going to a new type of infrastructure.â€
In early 2018, Zipline will officially kick off the world’s largest delivery drone service in Tanzania, Rwanda’s much larger neighbor. The Tanzanian government aims to use Zipline’s delivery drones to make up to 2,000 deliveries of medical supplies per day. Those deliveries of supplies such as blood products, medicines, and snake antivenom will go to more than 1,000 hospitals and clinics serving 10 million people. An operation at this scale will dwarf anything previously attempted in the drone-delivery universe.
The Tanzania launch will fulfill the dream that led Rinaudo to found Zipline in the first place. In 2014, he met a graduate student named Zac Mtema while visiting the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania. Mtema had created a mobile alert system that could help doctors and nurses text emergency requests for medicines and vaccines to the government. There was just one problem: The government had no way of quickly delivering those medicines and vaccines via the country’s existing roads and distribution networks.
Today, Mtema is helping the Ifakara Health Institute evaluate how Zipline’s service affects health outcomes in Tanzania. Quantifying lives saved and medical conditions treated could go a long way toward convincing Zipline’s deep-pocketed backers in the international aid and development community—such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—that delivery drones can become a global force for humanitarian good. The for-profit startup has already raised at least $41 million in funding from investors.
By focusing on carrying critical medical supplies, Zipline has gotten off the ground faster and in a bigger way than other, more mundane delivery pioneers. It’s a lot easier to convince regulators to tolerate the potential safety risks of delivery drones falling out of the sky when those aircraft are making lifesaving deliveries to hospitals rather than carrying shoes or pizza.
Zipline isn’t the only delivery drone startup to latch onto the idea of carrying high-value packages in difficult terrain. Matternet, a startup in North Fair Oaks, CA, plans to launch a partnership with the Swiss Post before the end of 2017, carrying healthcare supplies between hospitals and labs in Switzerland. “In healthcare we’re targeting over 1,000 hospital groups with three or more facilities in our target markets, which include the main European Union markets, the United States, and Japan,†says Andreas Raptopoulos, Matternet’s CEO. “For the applications we’re pursuing in health care, [delivery drones] are clearly profitable for us while giving a 50 percent saving to hospital systems over the on-demand ground delivery methods they use currently.â€
These drone pioneers have learned that if you’re going to provide reliable service delivering essential, life-saving goods, you may end up with technology that looks very different from the familiar demo videos of consumer delivery by air. All drones must contend with limited battery life or fuel tanks. But many early experiments with delivery drone services used quadcopters or other multi-rotor drone models similar to those available online or on retail store shelves. These designs usually have limited delivery range and speed; their less-than-aerodynamic shapes and vertical lift rotors limit the efficiency of forward flight.
For example, Amazon and Google have been testing delivery drones that usually top out at ranges of 15 miles or less. Shorter delivery ranges limit the number of customers drones can reach, and may also limit the profitability of future delivery drone services. Still, these short-ranged multi-rotor drones are by far the most common choice for drone-delivery innovators, even as some companies have tried creating hybrid drones with both vertical and horizontal rotors to improve flight efficiency. Most delivery drone prototypes still tend to hover like helicopters as they lower a package by cable or take the time to actually land.
That may work for the big city or suburbia. But Zipline needed to provide timely delivery of medical supplies across dozens of miles in Rwanda and Tanzania. So the company’s San Francisco team of engineers—drawn from organizations such as SpaceX, Google, Boeing, and NASA—decided to create the equivalent of small drone airplanes with wings. The current “Zips†in Rwanda can fly at speeds of up to 62 miles per hour and reach destinations within a 46-mile delivery radius.
Zipline’s airplane-style drones don’t waste time or battery power landing at their destinations. Instead, they simply swoop in low to drop off supplies by parachute before winging their way home. That’s easier done in the open grassy areas near remote Rwandan clinics and hospitals than in densely populated city blocks. Still, Amazon alone has several patent ideas around the concept of midair package drops or even folding parachutes within package shipping labels. Both Amazon and rival Walmart have even envisioned the possibility of someday using giant airships as flying warehouses that could deploy glider drones with packages.
It’s easy for almost anyone to create a slick video showing a drone perfectly delivering snacks or tech gadgets for a smiling customer on a sunny day. But when lives hang in the balance, drone deliverers must meet a higher service standard—one more like the US Post Office’s: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.†Mostly, quadcopter-style drones won’t cut it here. Matternet’s Raptopoulos says that a “key challenge is designing a platform that can handle dynamic wind loads during take-off and landing.†The Amazon Prime Air website currently states: “We are currently permitted to operate during daylight hours when there are low winds and good visibility, but not in rain, snow, or icy conditions.â€
By comparison, Zipline’s rugged, fixed-wing drones have already made over 1,400 flights and delivered 2,600 units of blood, even during bad weather conditions involving heavy rain or wind in Rwanda. “Everybody and their grandma has bought an off-the-shelf quadcopter and in perfect weather flown three to four kilometers to deliver something under ideal test conditions,†Rinaudo says. “It’s hard to distinguish between that and a national-scale operation that can fly in any weather.â€
An additional challenge is limiting the human staff needed to oversee the drone swarm. After all, every human engineer or drone operator on staff is another person on salary, points out Gerald Van Hoy, senior research analyst at Gartner. And the promise of delivery drones hinges in large part upon delivering packages more cheaply than today’s hordes of human bike messengers and delivery van drivers. “With delivery drones, if you’re not flying them automated, then it’s probably costing too much,†Van Hoy says.
The most obvious solution is for drones to mostly fly themselves instead of relying upon a human operator. But automation gets complicated quickly when you’re aiming to deliver to the doorsteps of individual home and business addresses. That could require a drone’s computer brain to track other flying objects in order to avoid midair collisions, fly to a random drop-off point where a given customer lives, and avoid getting entangled in tree branches or power lines when landing or lowering a package for delivery.
It’s possible that better artificial intelligence and the growing trend of edge computing could eventually make for smart drones capable of delivering anywhere without human supervision. But until then, delivery drone services will likely have the best luck sticking with pre-planned flight paths and deliveries to set locations. For example, Flytrex, a startup focused on cloud solutions for drone operations, recently started a delivery drone service involving one or two drones making up to 20 flights per day between two set points separated by a large bay in Reykjavik, Iceland. But Yariv Bash, Flytrex’s co-founder and CEO, says his company is working with the Icelandic Ministry Transportation on a next phase that could involve drone deliveries to Reykjavik street corners before the end of the year.
The point-to-point delivery drone system is also being used by JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce and logistics giant that is already living Amazon’s dream of owning its last-mile delivery. Beyond operating an online marketplace, JD.com has more than 70,000 delivery people getting those packages to paying customers in China. Since 2016, the Chinese company has also operated a fleet of 40 drones that have made “thousands of runs that have packages going to customers,†says Josh Gartner, vice president of international corporate affairs at JD.com.
JD.com currently uses delivery drones in the rural areas of four Chinese provinces. Those drones are “fully automated†and fly “fixed routes†between warehouses or to the backyards of certain “village promoters†employed by JD.com in each country village, Gartner explains. The village promoters then distribute the packages on foot to customers within each village.
Zipline employs a similar logic of using automated drones to boost the productivity of individual human workers. Zipline’s Rwandan distribution center can operate with just three to four human flight operators potentially handling hundreds of drone flights per day. The flight operators spend their days loading packages onto the Zips, placing the drones in the launch catapult, and then recovering the returning drones that land by using a tailhook to snag onto a line so that they can plop safely onto a giant cushion. (Rinaudo proudly points out that the Rwandan operation runs entirely on Rwandan engineers and flight operators rather than outsourced foreign labor.)
The predictability of automated delivery drones’ flight paths also helps them pass muster with safety regulators. For example, Zipline has provided air traffic controllers at Kigali International Airport with heads-up displays that allow them to track each Zipline drone with centimeter-level accuracy using advanced GPS. That has ensured smooth daily operations, even as the number of flights increases. In fact, Zipline’s Rwandan delivery drone operation is on track to become one of the busiest “airports†in the world based on flight volume by the end of 2018, Rinaudo says.
Still, the upcoming Zipline launch in Tanzania will push the company’s current model to its limits. Tanzania’s sprawling land area—including geographic highlights such as Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti National Park—is 36 times larger than Rwanda’s. That means Zipline will need both more distribution centers and more capable delivery drones to cover a country that is bigger than any US state except for Alaska.
For Tanzania, Zipline eventually plans to roll out four distribution centers each equipped with fleets of up to 30 drones capable of making up to 500 deliveries per day from each center. The startup’s engineers have also been developing an upgraded drone that can carry up to 4.4 pounds, fly at 68 miles per hour, and deliver within a 99-mile radius. That system would enable healthcare workers to simply place orders by text message and receive their packages within half an hour.
Don’t expect to see a Rwanda- or Tanzania-style national-scale delivery drone service coming to the US anytime soon. For one thing, the US Federal Aviation Administration has suggested regulations for delivery drones will not be ready until 2020 at the earliest. By that time, delivery drone operations may only account for one percent of the global commercial drone market, according to a report by Gartner.
Another factor is that the economics of delivery drones make less sense in cities already crowded with many competing delivery services and where safety concerns are more abundant, says Josh Gartner of JD.com (no relation to the Gartner research firm). Indeed, the Chinese company is considering ground-based delivery robots for Chinese cities instead of delivery drones. Similar delivery robots have already been rolling around certain cities in the US and European countries, where delivery drone services mostly remain grounded.
Some companies may seek a middle ground in suburban or rural areas by testing delivery drones as robotic partners for delivery van drivers. In February 2017, UPS—the world’s largest package delivery company—joined forces with the Ohio-based company Workhorse Group to conduct a much-publicized test of a delivery drone deployment from the top of a “Big Brown†van. “Our HorseFly delivery drone can handle packages of 10 pounds and under,†says Mike Dektas, a representative for Workhorse Group. “With the truck and drone delivery system this is a good weight limit, and the 30-mile [drone] range works as well.â€
Similarly, Matternet has teamed up with Mercedes-Benz to try out the combination of delivery drones and vans. Matternet’s CEO Raptopoulos also envisions solo delivery drones as becoming profitable for both his startup and logistics companies such as FedEx or UPS, with a price point of around $5 for delivery within an hour. He adds that a company such as Amazon could make the delivery drone service even cheaper or potentially free for customers who have already signed up for the $99 Amazon Prime subscription.
Silicon Valley’s magical vision of delivery drones—Harry Potter-style owl messengers for each of us Muggles—remains seductive as ever. But it’s worth paying attention to what has already been accomplished in the more remote parts of the world—lessons likely to be applied as delivery drone services slowly take off in developed countries. By the time 2018 rolls around, Zipline will surely have more insights to offer would-be winners in the game of drones.
“The vast majority of people thought this was crazy and stupid and there was no chance it would happen in Africa,†says Zipline’s CEO Rinaudo. “Now our entire distribution center is run by a totally driven and brilliant team of Rwandan operators and engineers who are not only working 12 hours a day and 7 days a week, but [also] doing things that the richest tech companies in the world haven’t figured out how to do yet.â€
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Thomas Reardon puts a terrycloth stretch band with microchips and electrodes woven into the fabric—a steampunk version of jewelry—on each of his forearms. “This demo is a mind fuck,†says Reardon, who prefers to be called by his surname only. He sits down at a computer keyboard, fires up his monitor, and begins typing. After a few lines of text, he pushes the keyboard away, exposing the white surface of a conference table in the midtown Manhattan headquarters of his startup. He resumes typing. Only this time he is typing on…nothing. Just the flat tabletop. Yet the result is the same: The words he taps out appear on the monitor.
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That’s cool, but what makes it more than a magic trick is how it’s happening. The text on the screen is being generated not by his fingertips, but rather by the signals his brain is sending to his fingers. The armband is intercepting those signals, interpreting them correctly, and relaying the output to the computer, just as a keyboard would have. Whether or not Reardon’s digits actually drum the table is irrelevant—whether he has a hand is irrelevant—it’s a loop of his brain to machine. What’s more, Reardon and his colleagues have found that the machine can pick up more subtle signals—like the twitches of a finger—rather than mimicking actual typing.
You could be blasting a hundred words a minute on your smart phone with your hands in your pockets. In fact, just before Reardon did his mind-fuck demo, I watched his cofounder, Patrick Kaifosh, play a game of Asteroids on his iPhone. He had one of those weird armbands sitting between his wrist and his elbows. On the screen you could see Asteroids as played by a decent gamer, with the tiny spaceship deftly avoiding big rocks and spinning around to blast them into little pixels. But the motions Kaifosh was making to control the game were barely perceptible: little palpitations of his fingers as his palm lay flat against the tabletop. It seemed like he was playing the game only with mind control. And he kind of was.
2017 has been a coming-out year for the Brain-Machine Interface (BMI), a technology that attempts to channel the mysterious contents of the two-and-a-half-pound glop inside our skulls to the machines that are increasingly central to our existence. The idea has been popped out of science fiction and into venture capital circles faster than the speed of a signal moving through a neuron. Facebook, Elon Musk, and other richly funded contenders, such as former Braintree founder Bryan Johnson, have talked seriously about silicon implants that would not only merge us with our computers, but also supercharge our intelligence. But CTRL-Labs, which comes with both tech bona fides and an all-star neuroscience advisory board, bypasses the incredibly complicated tangle of connections inside the cranium and dispenses with the necessity of breaking the skin or the skull to insert a chip—the Big Ask of BMI. Instead, the company is concentrating on the rich set of signals controlling movement that travel through the spinal column, which is the nervous system’s low-hanging fruit.
Reardon and his colleagues at CTRL-Labs are using these signals as a powerful API between all of our machines and the brain itself. By next year, they want to slim down the clunky armband prototype into a sleeker, watch strap-style so that a slew of early adopters can dispense with their keyboards and the tiny buttons on their smartphones’ screens. The technology also has the potential to vastly improve the virtual reality experience, which currently alienates new users by asking them to hit buttons on controllers that they can’t see. There might be no better way to move around and manipulate an alternate world than with a system controlled by the brain.
Reardon, CTRL-Labs’ 47-year-old CEO, believes that the immediate practicality of his company’s version of BMI puts it a step ahead of his sci-fi-flavored competitors. “When I see these announcements about brain-scanning techniques and the obsession with the disembodied-head-in-a-jar approach to neuroscience, I just feel like they are missing the point of how all new scientific technologies get commercialized, which is relentless pragmatism,†he says. “We are looking for enriched lives, more control over things over things around us, [and] more control over that stupid little device in your pocket—which is basically a read-only device right now, with horrible means of output.â€
Reardon’s goals are ambitious. “I would like our devices, whether they are vended by us or by partners, to be on a million people within three or four years,†he says. But a better phone interface is only the beginning. Ultimately, CTRL-Labs hopes to pave the way for a future in which humans can seamlessly manipulate broad swaths of their environment using tools that are currently uninvented. Where the robust signals from the arm—the secret mouthpiece of the mind—become our prime means of negotiating with an electronic sphere.
This initiative comes at a prescient moment for CTRL-Labs, where the company finds itself perfectly positioned to innovate. The person leading this effort is a talented coder with a strategic bent, who has led big corporate initiatives—and left it all for a while to become a neuroscientist. Reardon understands that everything in his background has randomly culminated in a humongous opportunity for someone with precisely his skills. And he’s determined not to let this shot slip by.
Reardon grew up in New Hampshire as one of 18 children in a working class family. He broke from the pack at age 11, learning to code at a local center funded by the local tech giant, Digital Equipment Corporation. “They called us ‘gweeps,’ the littlest hackers,†he says. He took a few courses at MIT, and at 15, he enrolled at the University of New Hampshire. He was miserable—a combination of being a peach-fuzz outsider and having no money. He dropped out within a year. “I was coming up on 16 and was, like, I need a job,†he says. He wound up at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at first working in the radiology lab at Duke, helping to get the university’s computer system working smoothly with the internet. He soon started his own networking company, creating utilities for the then-mighty Novell networking software. Eventually Reardon sold the company, meeting venture capitalist Ann Winblad in the process, and she hooked him up with Microsoft.
Reardon’s first job there was leading a small team to clone Novell’s key software so it could be integrated into Windows. Still a teenager, he wasn’t used to managing, and some people reporting to him called him Doogie Howser. Yet he stood out as exceptional. “You’re exposed to lots of type of smart people at Microsoft, but Reardon would kind of rock you,†says Brad Silverberg, then head of Windows and now a VC (invested in CTRL-Labs). In 1993, Reardon’s life changed when he saw the original web browser. He created the project that became Internet Explorer, which, because of the urgency of the competition, was rushed into Windows 95 in time for launch. For a time, it was the world’s most popular browser.
A few years later, Reardon left the company, frustrated by the bureaucracy and worn down from testifying in the anti-trust case involving the browser he helped engineer. Reardon and some of his browser team compatriots began a startup focused on wireless internet. “Our timing was wrong, but we absolutely had the right idea,†he says. And then, Reardon made an unexpected pivot: He left the industry and enrolled as an undergraduate at Columbia University. To major in classics. The inspiration came from a freewheeling 2005 conversation with the celebrated physicist Freeman Dyson, who mentioned his voluminous reading in Latin and Greek. “Arguably the greatest living physicist is telling me don’t do science—go read Tacitus,†says Reardon. “So I did.†At age 30.
In 2008, Reardon did get his degree in classics—magna cum laude—but before he graduated he began taking courses in neuroscience and fell in love with the lab work. “It reminded me of coding, of getting your hands dirty and trying something and seeing what worked and then debugging it,†he says. He decided to pursue it seriously, to build a resume for grad school. Even though he still was well-off from his software exploits, he wanted to compete for a scholarship—he got one from Duke—and do basic lab work. He transferred to Columbia, working under renowned neuroscientist Thomas Jessell (who is now a CTRL-Labs advisor, along with other luminaries like Stanford’s Krishna Shenoy).
According to its website, the Jessell Lab “studies systems and circuits that regulate movement,†which it calls “the root of all behavior.†This reflects Columbia’s orientation in a neuroscience divide between those concentrating on what goes on purely inside the brain and those who study the brain’s actual output. Though a lot of glamour is associated with those who try to demystify the mind through its matter, those in the latter camp quietly believe that the stuff the brain makes us do is really all the brain is for. Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert once famously summarized this view: “We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain…Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you.â€
That view helped shape CTRL-Labs, which got its start when Reardon began brainstorming with two of his colleagues in the lab in 2015. These cofounders were Kaifosh and Tim Machado, who got their doctorates a bit before Reardon did and began setting up the company. During the course of his grad study, Reardon had became increasingly intrigued by the network architecture that enables “volitional movementâ€â€”skilled acts that don’t seem complicated but actually require precision, timing, and unconsciously gained mastery. “Things like grabbing that coffee cup in front of you and raising it to your lips and not just shoving it through your face,†he explains. Figuring out which neurons in the brain issue the commands to the body to make those movements possible is incredibly complicated. The only decent way to access that activity has been to drill a hole in the skull and stick an implant in the brain, and then painstakingly try to figure out which neurons are involved. “You can make some sense of it, but it takes a year for somebody to train one of those neurons to do the right thing, say, to control a prosthesis,†says Reardon.
But an experiment by Reardon’s cofounder Machado opened up a new possibility. Machado was, like Reardon, excited about how the brain controlled movement, but he never really thought that the way to do BMI was to plant electrodes into the skull. “I never thought people would do that to send texts to each other,†says Machado. Instead, he explored how motor neurons, which extend through the spinal cord to actual muscles in the body, might be the answer. He created an experiment in which he removed the spinal cords of mice and kept them active so that he could measure what was happening with the motor neurons. It turned out that the signals were remarkably organized and coherent. “You could understand what their activity is,†Machado says. The two young neuroscientists and the older coder-turned-neuroscientist saw the possibility of a different way of doing BMI. “If you’re a signals person, you might be able to do something with this,†Reardon says, recalling his reaction.
The logical place to get ahold of those signals is the arm, as human brains are engineered to spend a lot of their capital manipulating the hand. CTRL-Labs was far from the first to understand that there’s value in those signals: A standard test to detect neuromuscular abnormalities uses the signals in what’s called electromyography, commonly referred to as EMG. In fact, in its first experiments CTRL-Labs used standard medical tools to get its EMG signals, before it began building custom hardware. The innovation lies in picking up EMG more precisely—including getting signals from individual neurons—than the previously existing technology, and, even more important, figuring out the relationship between the electrode activity and the muscles so that CTRL-Labs can translate EMG into instructions that can control computer devices.
Adam Berenzweig, the former CTO of the machine learning company Clarifai who is now lead scientist at CTRL-Labs, believes that mining this signal is like unearthing a communications signal as powerful as speech. (Another lead scientist is Steve Demers, a physicist working in computational chemistry who helped create the award-winning “bullet time†visual effect for the Matrix movies.) “Speech evolved specifically to carry information from one brain to another,†says Berenzweig. “This motor neuron signal evolved specifically to carry information from the brain to the hand to be able to affect change in the world, but unlike speech, we have not really had access to that signal until this. It’s as if there were no microphones and we didn’t have any ability to record and look at sound.â€
Picking up the signals is only the first step. Perhaps the most difficult part is then transforming them into signals that the device understands. This requires a combination of coding, machine learning, and neuroscience. For some applications, the first time someone uses the system, he or she has a brief training period where the CTRL-Labs software figures out how to match a person’s individual output to the mouse clicks, key taps, button pushes, and swipes of phones, computers, and virtual reality rigs. Amazingly, this takes only a few minutes for some of the more simple demos of the technology so far.
A more serious training process will be required when people want to go beyond mimicking the same tasks they now perform—like typing using the QWERTY system—and graduate to ones that shift behavior (for instance, pocket typing). It might be ultimately faster and more convenient, but it will require patience and the effort to learn. “That’s one of our big, open, challenging questions,†says Berenzweig. “It actually might require many hours of training—how long does it take people to learn to type QWERTY right now? Like, years, basically.†He has a couple of ideas for how people will be able to ascend the learning curve. One might be to gamify the process (paging Mavis Beacon!). Another is asking people to think of the process like learning a new language. “We could train people to make phonetic sounds basically with their hands,†he says. “It would be like they’re talking with their handsâ€
Ultimately, it is those new kinds of brain commands that will determine whether CTRL-Labs is a company that makes an improved computer interface or a gateway to a new symbiosis between humans and objects. One of CTRL-Labs’ science advisors is John Krakauer, a professor of neurology, neuroscience, and physical medicine and rehabilitation at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who heads the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab there. Krakauer told me that he’s now working with other teams at Johns Hopkins to use the CTRL-Labs system as a training ground for people using prosthetics to replace lost limbs, specifically by creating a virtual hand that patients can master before they undergo a hand transplant from a donor. “I am very interested in using this device to help people have richer moving experiences when they can no longer themselves play sports or go for walks,†Krakauer says.
But Krakauer (who, it must be said, is somewhat of an iconoclast in the neuroscience world) also sees the CTRL-Labs system as something more ambitious. Though the human hand is a pretty darn good device, it may be that the signals sent from the brain can handle much, much more complexity. “We don’t know whether the hand is as good as we can get with the brain we have, or whether our brain is actually a lot better than the hands,†he says. If it’s the latter, EMG signals might be able to support hands with more fingers. We may be able to control multiple robotic devices with the ease with which we play musical instruments with our own hands. “It’s not such a huge leap to say that if you could do that for something on a screen, you can do it for a robot,†says Krakauer. “Take whatever body abstraction you are thinking about in your brain and simply transmit it to something other than your own arm—it could be an octopus.â€
The ultimate use might be some sort of prosthetic that proves superior to the body parts with which we are born. Or maybe a bunch of them, attached to the body or somewhere else. “I love the idea of being able to use these signals to control some extraneous device,†Krakauer says. “I also like the idea of being healthy and just having a tail.â€
For a company barely two years old, CTRL-Labs has been through a lot. Late last year, co-founder Tim Machado left. (He is now at Stanford’s prestigious Deisseroth bioengineering lab, but remains an advisor to the company and co-holder of the precious intellectual property.) And just last month the company changed its name. It was originally called “Cognescent,†but last month the team finally accepted the fact that keeping that name would mean perpetual confusion with the IT company Cognizant, whose market cap is over $40 billion. (Not that anyone will remember how to spell the startup’s new name, which is pronounced “Control.â€)
But if you ask Reardon, the biggest development has been the rapid pace of building a system to implement the company’s ideas. This is a change from the halting progress in the early days. “It took at least three to four months to just be able to see something on the screen,†says Vandita Sharma, a CTRL-Labs engineer. “It was a pretty cool moment finally when I was able to connect my phone system with the band and see EMG data on the screen.†When I first visited CTRL-Labs earlier this summer, I played with a demo of Pong, the most minimal control test, and watched Mason Remaley, a 23-year-old game wizard, play a game of Asteroids with only a few of the features in the arcade game. Only a few weeks later, Asteroids was fully implemented and Kaifosh was playing it with twitches. Remaley is working on Fruit Ninja now. “When I saw a live demo in November, they seemed to have come a little way. More recently they really seemed have nailed it,†says Andrew J. Murray, a research scientist at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, who spent time in Jessell’s lab with Reardon.
“The technology we’re working on is kind of binary in its opportunity—it either works or it doesn’t work,†says Reardon. “Could you imagine a [computer] mouse that worked 90 percent of the time? You’d stop using the mouse. The proof we have so far is, Goddamn, it’s working. It’s a little bit shocking that it’s working right now, ahead of where we thought we were going to be.†According to cofounder Kaifosh, the next step will be dogfooding the technology in-house. “We’ll probably start with throwing out the mouse,†he says.
But getting all of us to throw out our keyboards and mouses will take a lot more. Such a move would almost certainly require adoption from the big companies that determine what we use on a daily basis. Reardon thinks they will fall in line. “All the big companies, whether it’s Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook are making significant bets and explorations on new kinds of interaction,†he says. “We’re trying to build awareness.â€
There’s also competition for EMG signals, including a company called Thalmic Labs, which recently had a $120 million funding round led by Amazon. Its product, first released in 2013, only interprets a few gestures, though the company is reportedly working on a new device. CTRL-Labs’ chief revenue officer, Josh Duyan, says CTRL-Labs’ non-invasive detection of individual motor neurons is “the big thing that…makes true Brain-Machine Interfaces…it’s what separates us from not becoming another un-used device like Thalmic.†(CTRL-Labs’ $11 million Series A funding came from a range of investors including Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, Breyer Capital, Glazer Investments, and Fuel Capital.) Ultimately, Reardon feels that his technology has an edge over other BMI operations—like Elon Musk, Bryan Johnson, and Regina Dugan of Facebook, Reardon has been a successful tech entrepreneur. But unlike them, he’s got a PhD in neuroscience.
“This doesn’t happen many times in life,†says Reardon, to whom it’s happened more than most of us. “It’s kind of a Warren Buffet-ish moment. You wait and you wait and you wait for that thing that looks like, Oh, good Lord, this is really going to happen. This is that big thing.â€
And if he’s right, in the future when people say things like this, they may wag their tails.
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In the past month, more than 100 large fires have burned 7.8 million acres, according to the National Parks Service. But these fires don’t destroy everything in sight. “Many of the plants may look devastated, but below ground they have survived and they’ll sprout right back,†says Andrew Larson, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Montana. Not only can many species survive the fire—others need wildfires to fulfill their biological destinies. Onlookers will find these four species flourishing in the affected areas next spring.
Morel mushrooms are a diverse, globally distributed, and delicious species. They’re also notoriously hard to find, and mushroom hunters have developed many theories about where they can expect the fruit to sprout. Prudent shroom seekers should stick to recently burned Boreal forests in California, according to a 2016 study in Forest Ecology and Management. And humans aren’t the only ones who will enjoy a bumper crop of these tasty mushrooms—bears also eat them.
The most famous of the charred-forest-loving birds is the black-backed woodpecker, which follows the waves of beetles that invade burnt trees. This particular species actually lives exclusively in areas recently ravaged by fire, but other woodpeckers are also happy to take advantage of the influx of grubs. Once the black-backed fliers start moving on in search of another fire, other birds take will over their nests.
Lodgepole pines are known for their fire-sensitive cones, which are covered by resin that melts in high heat to release seeds. “You get a great big pulse of pines right after the fire,†says Larson. However, not all lodgepole pines have this adaptation. Fire-sensitive cones are better suited to areas that get large, hot forest fires and don’t have a lot of pine predators, according to a 2014 study. An abundance of seed-stealing red squirrels skew the advantage towards pines that release their seeds in regular, non-combustive cycles.
Scientists have been doing experiments since the 1980s to find out why these yellow flowers bloom after devastating fires. Their seeds start to germinate when exposed to smoke, but they are also more likely to sprout in a soil mix that includes charred Chaparral forest wood.
Fire is a natural part of many ecosystems out west, though scientists disagree about how much fire is necessary to keep things healthy. “It’s important to recognize there’s a lot of negative consequences for humans,” Larson says, “But many of the plants, animals, and fungi need burned environment.”
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Sometimes a new gadget is just really cool-looking. It hits all the right aesthetic notes, boasts a flashy new technology and looks like something you want. But whether it’s something you need—or will be willing to empty out your wallet for—is another matter entirely.
Here’s something that seems to fit this category, for now. Per Bloomberg, on Tuesday Samsung Electronics mobile business president Koh Dong-jin said the company is planning to release a phone with a flexible display next year—though the development process for a consumer-ready product could be hindered by various technical challenges Samsung still needs to resolve.
“As the head of the business, I can say our current goal is next year,†Koh said. “When we can overcome some problems for sure, we will launch the product.â€
Samsung first displayed a flexible OLED prototype in 2013 called “Youm,†meaning it’s had a few years to work out issues already. Speculation and rumors about the imminent release of a flexible Samsung phone have been circulating for years.
Video of supposed prototypes circulated online that year. It’s really sort of hard what to make of them, though; the designs ranged from a clunky device with the same shape and hard shell of a cosmetic compact to retractable screens and folded models ready to expand to tablet size.
All of them had clunky form factor; judging from the Bloomberg report the folding version of the phone is the current working idea.
Historically, the flip phone idea has been pretty archaic ever since smartphones transitioned to full touch screens, and recent entries in the genre have mostly (with some exceptions like Samsung’s Leader 8) been seen as nostalgic throwbacks. A flexible touch screen might breathe some new life into the concept, or it could just end up as a gimmick. Sometimes simplicity is better if there’s no actual use scenario where a complicated concept doesn’t improve the user’s experience.
Folding the phone out into a tablet-size device sounds cool in theory, but might end up being a flashy trick with little real utility. The market for tablets has already crashed as current phones have caught up in power and closed the gap on screen size, so luring people back to the phablet concept might be difficult.
Most current smartphones aren’t exactly impregnable to mankind’s ancient enemies: water and pointy rocks. There’s some anecdotal data suggesting old-style flip phones were more durable, but that’s because they were small and cased in plastic, not glass.
Whether or not a flexible display is more or less susceptible to the elements and gravity than a current-gen phone will ultimately be a major factor in most consumers’ decisions.
Some of the Samsung prototypes showcased previously look like they might not be able to fall off a coffee table without sustaining serious damage. One of them has screens on the front and the interior! Moreover, putting the frame of the device in motion runs the risk that a single crack could fissure throughout the device’s entire screen, turning what would be minor damage into another phone into a total loss in the flexible one.
To be fair to Samsung, the underlying concept here is really cool. Said concept also needs to prove it’s more than just a gimmick, which could take a few generations of development. Since rumors have been floating Samsung would release something like this for years, it’s probably better to wait and see before declaring this the next threshold of mobile tech.
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