A nerdy father of two, a husband of a beautiful and understanding wife, an engineer who loves anime and tinkering with PCs and games, but most of all, loves God.
Keith Thomas from New York was involved in a driving accident back in 2020 that injured his spine’s C4 and C5 vertebrae, leading to a total loss in feeling and movement from the chest down. Recently, though, Thomas had been able to move his arm at will and feel his sister hold his hand, thanks to the AI brain implant technology developed by the Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine.
The research team first spent months mapping his brain with MRIs to pinpoint the exact parts of his brain responsible for arm movements and the sense of touch in his hands. Then, four months ago, surgeons performed a 15-hour procedure to implant microchips into his brain — Thomas was even awake for some parts so he could tell them what sensations he was feeling in his hand as they probed parts of the organ.
While the microchips are inside his body, the team also installed external ports on top of his head. Those ports connect to a computer with the artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that the team developed to interpret his thoughts and turn them into action. The researchers call this approach "thought-driven therapy," because it all starts with the patient’s intentions. If he thinks of wanting to move his hand, for instance, his brain implant sends signals to the computer, which then sends signals to the electrode patches on his spine and hand muscles in order to stimulate movement. They attached sensors to his fingertips and palms, as well, to stimulate sensation.
Thanks to this system, he was able to move his arm at will and feel his sister holding his hand in the lab. While he needed to be attached to the computer for those milestones, the researchers say Thomas has shown signs of recovery even when the system is off. His arm strength has apparently "more than doubled" since the study began, and his forearm and wrist could now feel some new sensations. If all goes well, the team’s thought-driven therapy could help him regain more of his sense of touch and mobility.
While the approach has a ways to go, the team behind it is hopeful that it could change the lives of people living with paralysis. Chad Bouton, the technology’s developer and the principal investigator of the clinical trial, said:
"This is the first time the brain, body and spinal cord have been linked together electronically in a paralyzed human to restore lasting movement and sensation. When the study participant thinks about moving his arm or hand, we ‘supercharge’ his spinal cord and stimulate his brain and muscles to help rebuild connections, provide sensory feedback, and promote recovery. This type of thought-driven therapy is a game-changer. Our goal is to use this technology one day to give people living with paralysis the ability to live fuller, more independent lives."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/vDFYqZt
Last spring, Amazon launched its long-rumored live audio-streaming platform, Amp. The pitch was to reinvent radio with “an infinite dial of shows.” Amp offers users access to a vast, built-in music library to create their own DJ sets with. No need to buy songs or flirt with the DMCA, just make a playlist, go live, talk in between tracks, follow the chat and even invite callers. When I wrote about it a year ago, it showed promise, but it was iOS only, light on users and had a limited feature set.
A little over a year later and Amp is reaching an important milestone: It’s finally available on Android. Amp is Amazon’s first home-grown streaming platform and the year-plus stint as an Apple exclusive meant it enjoyed a level of technical predictability and a self-imposed restriction on growth and user numbers. But as the doors open to the other half of the mobile universe, it’s about to be exposed to the full reality of competing in an already busy social-creator landscape.
Growing beyond iOS is an important move for Amp, even if the platform technically remains in beta (and US-only). But the wider reach of Google’s operating system — from TVs to Chromebooks and beyond — will be a decisive step in the process of Amazon proving it can build a viable streaming platform from the ground up (rather than acquire an already successful one).
You can, of course, find DJ sessions and internet radio in myriad places online. Whether it’s big platforms like YouTube and TikTok or more direct rivals like Stationhead or Tidal (via its Live Sessions feature) and even Amazon Music’s own DJ Mode, there are several destinations for live curated music streams. Of course, let’s not forget Amazon-owned Twitch, which is teeming with tune spinners. Oh, and there’s obviously FM radio, too. This obviously begs the question: What makes Amp unique?
Amazon
“It’s very much like Sirius meets YouTube,” Zach Sang, one of Amp’s contracted creators, and former broadcast DJ told Engadget. “It’s real life, legacy career broadcasters mixed with the future of those broadcasters. It’s everybody coming together, it’s radio democratized. It’s a way that radio genuinely should be programmed: for people and not for profit,” he added. From a user’s point of view, Amp’s main differentiator appears to be its focus on radio and radio-style shows specifically. Plus that built-in music library (Stationhead, for example, requires you to have either Apple Music or Spotify at your own cost).
I asked user Christina “Criti” Gonzalez, who hosts her own daily show, how she’d describe Amp. “[It’s] a very unique, weird place where you’re able to listen to all the music you’ve forgotten about, didn’t know about and crave to hear, again with personalities and so many people of all different walks of life that have one common interest – music.”
Amp Co-Founder, Matt Sandler – who used to work at LA’s KROQ FM – explained that he felt all of the existing options weren’t quite giving listeners or creators what they wanted. “If you posted a job for KROQ and an on air position, you’d get hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of submissions and people who wanted to curate music and talk to the community on air,” he told Engadget. “There have been lots of services built around live connection or music or community. One of the things that I think will drive the success of a business like this is really that balance between scale and connection.”
Amp signed deals with celebrities and established presenters such as Nicki Minaj, Joe Budden, Nick Cannon and the aforementioned Sang to give the platform some known-name appeal, and it’s done so without creating much of a barrier around them compared to regular creators. Your show can sit right next to Nicki Minaj’s in the listings. Although the roster covers large genres like hip-hop, sports, country and pop there’s not much in the way of alt/indie or electronic in that lineup right now.
Unlike Clubhouse, which enjoyed an early surge of popularity, Amp has largely gone under the radar since launch. “The thing we’re maniacally focused on every day is making sure that the product is right before stepping out and bigger and bigger fashion,” Sandler said. But many people I’ve mentioned it to aren’t aware of it – and Amp’s not even included on the list of Amazon products/services Wikipedia page.
Amazon
The app is clearly a lot busier than when I wrote about it just after launch, but the average number of listeners for most shows remains frustratingly low for most shows (based on multiple user reports and other publicly visible data). But several users explained they weren’t discouraged. “The community that it has right now, it’s a small enough space for people to feel like they’re connected, even if they don’t know each other.” Gonzalez said.
At the beginning, according to Sandler, even Amp’s leadership was unsure in which direction the platform would unfold. There was the possibility that the big-name artists would dominate while regular users gravitated to being listeners. In reality, it’s the smaller, home-grown shows and the aforementioned community that has made Amp a nice place to hang out.
“The culture there is so inviting.” Gonzalez said. “I feel like other social media sites can turn negative quickly. I haven’t had much experience with that on Amp and I appreciate that.” Adding, ”It’s crazy what the experience on Amp has done, because I truly honestly say to anyone that’s not an Amp to join it, because it really will change your perspective.”
One of the main complaints I had with Amp right after launch was that hosts needed at least one listener to be able to play a song and often that meant… waiting. There was also no way to communicate with any listeners you did have. Today the awkward waits are (mostly) gone and each stream has its own chat room which has switched it from a one-directional platform to the collection of friendly gatherings that it has become today.
Several creators and listeners have told me they’ve created genuine connections and friendships that have spilled over into real life. The chat rooms in shows are a rare mix of positivity, musical discourse and humor. Trolling and negativity is unusually rare and it’s obvious there’s a real sense of commitment to the app. But at some point it needs to expand to stop it becoming a circular economy where everyone is both a host and a listener.
Amp doesn’t share information about user numbers or demographics, but the typical host and listener right now, perhaps unsurprisingly, appears to mirror the generations that were brought up on mix tapes and burning albums to CD. Where sharing music was more tactile and a little bit slower. In the nicest possible way, the community energy often feels like the best bits of early internet chat rooms. Like many music-first spaces online, there’s little in the way of negativity, and while many creators may fall into a similar age group, a variety of backgrounds has been a defining factor since day one.
Amazon
The positive community is Amp’s to lose though. As it opens up to Android, the door to even more users opens, and with that the challenge of scaling up the platform while maintaining what keeps it special. And there’s also the matter of money. Right now, Amp pays out many of its hosts via an opaque creator fund. “One of the things that we’re focused on is making sure that creators can earn through the service over time, not just through the fund, but through other mechanisms as well.” Sandler said. When I asked about subs, tipping and other Twitch-esque ways to earn money he added “Those are all things you could easily imagine in the service.”
For now, the creator fund is helping keep hosts motivated, but Amp will need to provide realistic alternative revenue streams to keep creators around (and, of course, lure in more). But perhaps the bigger investment Amp needs is in itself. It’s hard to find much in the way of outward promotion of the app and the best tool for promoting its best creators are its own social channels. If Amp can make itself more visible, it can grow the user base which in turn makes that creator economy, be it tipping, subs and beyond, more viable.
There are also occasional technical issues that remind you the app is still in beta, which an injection of new users, on a new operating system no less, might exacerbate. Mostly, it’s small annoyances like the chat swallowing your last message. Occasionally, it’s more dramatic like a stream crashing or a host being booted out of their own show.
“The glitchiness causes some frustration. And, sometimes that can change your experience doing the show and with others listening. So once those kinks get ironed out, I feel like the creators will feel more comfortable and less anxious while they’re doing sets” Gonzalez said. Users have even coined the phrase “Amp be Ampin’” as a refrain to the inevitable quirkiness that happens every couple of weeks or after an update.
Where does the app go from here? “I think there’s a big opportunity for amp specifically to move charts and culture around the world. And that means personalities, spinning music, having conversations and developing communities that exist in the app but that have social currency outside of the app as well.” Sandler said. Sang on the other hand thinks it’s a way to keep the spirit of radio going. “It’s not like there’s any major radio stars on the come up. So it’s like, where are they going to come from? Let them come from Amp.”
Or, as Gonzalez was quick to point out, sometimes, it’s just about the music. “There are certain creators that talk through their experience or a memory or something like that. And it completely changes how I looked at the song to begin with” she said. “I love the community so much, but it’s also just the variety, being exposed to certain genres. So I love that and ever since I’ve been really addicted.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/q0S2HXc
At the start of his third year of graduate school, Kazi Albab Hussain became a father. As a new dad and a PhD student studying environmental nanotechnology, plastic was on his mind. The year before, scientists had discovered that plastic baby bottles shed millions of particles into formula, which infants end up swallowing (while also sucking on plastic bottle nipples). “At that time,” Hussain says, “I was purchasing many baby foods, and I was seeing that, even in baby foods, there are a lot of plastics.”
Hussain wanted to know how much was being released from the kinds of containers he’d been buying. So he went to the grocery store, picked up some baby food, and brought the empty containers back to his lab at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. In a study published in June in Environmental Science & Technology, Hussain and his colleagues reported that, when microwaved, these containers released millions of bits of plastic, called microplastics, and even tinier nanoplastics.
Plastics are complex cocktails of long chains of carbon, called polymers, mixed in with chemical additives, small molecules that help mold the polymers into their final shape and imbue them with resistance to oxidation, UV exposure, and other wear and tear. Microwaving delivers a triple whammy: heat, UV irradiation, and hydrolysis, a chemical reaction through which bonds are broken by water molecules. All of these can cause a container to crack and shed tiny bits of itself as microplastics, nanoplastics, and leachates, toxic chemical components of the plastic.
The human health effects of plastic exposure are unclear, but scientists have suspected for years that they aren’t good. First, these particles are sneaky. Once they enter the body they coat themselves with proteins, slipping past the immune system incognito, “like Trojan horses,” says Trinity College Dublin chemistry professor John Boland, who was not involved in this study. Microplastics also collect a complex community of microbes, called the plastisphere, and transport them into the body.
Our kidneys remove waste, placing them on the front lines of exposure to contaminants. They are OK at filtering out the relatively larger microplastics, so we probably excrete a lot of those. But nanoplastics are small enough to slip across cell membranes and “make their way to places they shouldn’t,” Boland says.
“Microplastics are like plastic roughage: They get in, and they get expelled,” he adds. “But it’s quite likely that nanoplastics can be very toxic.”
Once they’ve snuck past the body’s defense systems, “the chemicals used in plastics hack hormones,” says Leonardo Trasand, a professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the director of the Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards. Hormones are signaling molecules underlying basically everything the body does, so these chemicals, called endocrine disruptors, have the potential to mess with everything from metabolism to sexual development and fertility.
“Babies are at greater risk from those contaminants than full-grown people,” Hussain says. So to test how much plastic babies are exposed to, Hussain’s team chose three baby-food containers available at a local grocery store: two polypropylene jars labeled “microwave-safe” according to US Food and Drug Administration regulations, and one reusable food pouch made of an unknown plastic.
Around a third of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions comes from the global food system, and lost or wasted food is known to contribute some amount—but it has never been clear to exactly what degree. Now, by following specific foods through their entire life cycle, researchers have determined just how much this wasted food adds to emissions through phases such as harvest, transportation and disposal.
For a study in Nature Food, Xunchang Fei of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and his colleagues used 164 countries’ food supply data from 2001 to 2017 to estimate emissions across 54 food commodities and four categories: cereals and pulses; meat and animal products; vegetables and fruits; and root and oil crops.
Credit: Jade Khatib; Source: “Cradle-to-Grave Emissions from Food Loss and Waste Represent Half of Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Food Systems,” by Jingyu Zhu et al., in Nature Food, Vol. 4; March 2023 (data)
Roughly a third of food is lost during harvest, storage and transportation or is wasted by consumers. The team found this food was responsible for greenhouse gases equivalent to 9.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide—about half the global food system’s total emissions—in 2017. Four countries (China, the U.S., India and Brazil) contributed 44.3 percent, mainly owing to their dietary habits and large populations. Of the four food categories, meat and animal products were the source of almost three quarters of emissions that occurred during the supply-chain phase for food that was ultimately lost.
The study considered emissions across nine postfarming stages, which vary among regions—for instance, developed countries’ advanced waste-treatment technologies can create fewer emissions. Such intricate details show how “different countries should set different targets for [food loss and waste] reductions,” Fei says—such as reducing meat production in some areas, and switching from landfills to anaerobic digestion or composting processes in others.
Credit: Jade Khatib; Source: “Cradle-to-Grave Emissions from Food Loss and Waste Represent Half of Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Food Systems,” by Jingyu Zhu et al., in Nature Food, Vol. 4; March 2023 (data)
Food systems expert Prajal Pradhan of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany notes that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals aim to halve food waste in the coming years—which Pradhan says wouldn’t be enough to limit global warming but would be a start. Based on this study, he says, emissions could decrease if “high-income countries could focus on saving food discarded by consumers, and low- and middle-income countries could prioritize avoiding food loss during harvesting, processing, storage and transport.”
A major system of ocean currents that ferries heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic could shut down far sooner than expected, according to new predictions. Such a collapse would prove catastrophic for Earth’s climate.
The system, known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) had previously been measured to be dramatically weakening in conjunction with rising ocean temperatures. Despite this, however, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently announced that climate scientists don’t expect the AMOC to totally switch off within the century.
But a new study is now challenging that conclusion, raising the specter of a halted AMOC to as early as 2025.
“Shutting down the AMOC can have very serious consequences for Earth’s climate, for example, by changing how heat and precipitation are distributed globally,” study leader Peter Ditlevsen, from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.
Finding that direct measurements of the AMOC’s strength have only been made for the past 15 years, Ditlevsen’s team applied sophisticated statistical tools to ocean temperature data going all the way back to the 1870s for an enhanced dataset. This detailed analysis ultimately suggested significant warning signs of the AMOC shutting down between 2025 and 2095, with a staggering certainty of 95%. More specifically, the team’s results evidenced that the most likely time for this collapse would be around 2057.
Still, other climate scientists remain cautious, saying that there are still uncertainties in the data that could affect its accuracy. However, it’s worth considering that even the mere possibility of the AMOC shutting down so soon is rather alarming.
The AMOC, which includes the Gulf Stream as part of its system, is our planet’s main mode of transporting heat away from the tropics. Without it, the tropics would rapidly increase in temperature while vital tropical rains get disrupted. Such rains are essential for the environments of South America, western Africa as well as in India and other regions of south Asia.
Meanwhile, northern and western Europe would lose their source of warm water from the tropics, leading to more storms and severely cold winters in these areas. The loss of the Gulf Stream in particular would also result in rising sea levels on the US’ eastern seaboard.
“Our result underscores the importance of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible,” Ditlevsen said.
In recent years, we’ve already seen the dangers of human-induced climate warming play out as heatwaves grip much of the northern hemisphere. And although the loss of the AMOC may see northern and western Europe cool, “this shutdown will contribute to an increased warming of the tropics,” Ditlevsen said, “where rising temperatures have already given rise to challenging living conditions.”
The findings were published on Tuesday (July 25) in the journal Nature Communications.
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Apple is responsible for an ever-growing number of truly intriguing (re: nonsensical) patent applications. These usually cause Apple fans’ heads to turn like a dog hearing the quiet skittering of a nearby squirrel. However, the latest approved patent from the Cupertino, California-based company may take the prize as its strangest yet.
Can This iPad Replace Your Laptop?
In the patent, first filed in June of 2021 and approved Tuesday, Apple talks up its ideas for “Modularized Computing and Input Devices.” This kind of kickstand would act as a kind of slotted dock that could accept multiple screens and keyboards, and potentially more. It’s all configured around some kind of base device that can connect both displays or keyboards in multiple configurations. The base itself would be hinged to allow these devices to swivel.
Some of the included diagrams show how you could connect a keyboard and display to the base to form a kind of tablet with a keyboard setup. Others show how you could attach two or even three screens together, which itself gives the same energy as a fantasy barbarian dual-wielding two shields. As described in the patent, one screen could display content while the other could act as a drawing tablet or keyboard.
Now, it’s at this point we should mention that Apple filing a patent does not mean it ever intends to follow up on its design. Apple files quite a few patents for its wearables, phones, and many more device applications. Considering the time between when Apple files the patents and when it receives approval, these patents aren’t necessarily indicative of where Apple is moving with its technology.
Gizmodo reached out to Apple for comment about this latest patent, but we did not immediately hear back.
One of the funkiest aspects of the patent is the inclusion of a large, classic-style vinyl turntable. The application itself describes this as merely an “input device” that can provide information to the base. Essentially, the base would allow physical or wireless communication with the attached device, in this case, a turntable usable by “disc jockeys,” or anybody working the decks on their device.
The patent further describes how “The computing device can be utilized by a music producer, a disc jockey, an audio engineer, or the like to generate music in one configuration while also being modular to permit the user to remove the input device.” The patent references how the base would connect with that turntable device to respond to certain toggles like physical buttons and knobs.
Another part of the patent describes keeping the connected laptop upright, like a book. Any connected device can collapse on top of each other like a laptop. Another configuration includes one screen attached to a shorter keyboard. Joined to the keyboard is described as another touchscreen that could act as a kind of drawing tablet. We’ve seen these extra hinges on other experimental designs like this laptop with a foldable wristrest. Companies like Framework have tried out laptops with replaceable keyboards and slots for computer upgrades. Considering all the questions of comfort of usability, it’s no wonder why no major company has tried to iterate on an ultra-customizable laptop.
The thing is, you can already buy iPads with physical, attachable keyboards, so a completely customizable device seems like a pipe dream and a rather ill-considered dream at that. The connection points for such a device would need to be strong indeed, but what would make the most sense is if such a dock were compatible with existing Apple hardware.
A NASA mission has observed a supermassive black hole pointing its highly energetic jet straight toward Earth. Don’t panic just yet, though. As fearsome as this cosmic event is, it’s located at a very safe distance of about 400 million light-years away.
Actively feeding supermassive black holes, including the one at hand, are surrounded by swirling disks of matter called accretion disks which gradually feed them over time. Some of the material they don’t swallow is then channeled toward their poles, where it’s subsequently blasted out at near-light, or relativistic, speed. This creates highly energetic and extremely bright electromagnetic radiation. In some cases, like with NASA’s latest muse, that jet is pointed straight at Earth. Those events are known as blazars.
This blazar, designated Markarian 421 and located in the constellation Ursa Major, was observed with NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), which launched in December 2021. IXPE observes a property of magnetic fields called polarization, which refers to the fields’ orientation. The polarization of the jet blasted out by Markarian 421 revealed a surprise for astronomers, showing that the part of the jet where particles are being accelerated is also home to a magnetic field with a helical structure.
Blazar jets can stretch across space for millions of light-years, but the mechanisms that launch them aren’t yet well-understood. However, these new discoveries surrounding the jet of Markarian 421 could shed some light on this extreme cosmic phenomenon.
“Markarian 421 is an old friend for high-energy astronomers,” lead researcher behind the discovery and Italian Space Agency astrophysicist, Laura Di Gesu, said in a statement. “We were sure the blazar would be a worthwhile target for IXPE, but its discoveries were beyond our best expectations, successfully demonstrating how X-ray polarimetry enriches our ability to probe the complex magnetic field geometry and particle acceleration in different regions of relativistic jets.”
IXPE dives deeper into the twisted structure of blazar jets
The main reason jets of feeding supermassive black holes are so bright is that particles approaching the speed of light give off tremendous amounts of energy and behave according to the physics of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
Blazar jets also get an extra boost to such brightness because their orientation towards us causes wavelengths of light associated with their jets to “bunch up,” increasing both their frequencies and energies. This is similar to how sound waves from the siren of an approaching ambulance “bunch up” to cause an increase in frequency that makes it sound more high-pitched.
As a result of these two effects, blazars can often outshine the combined light of every star in the galaxies that house them. And now, IXPE has used that light to paint a picture of the physics going on at the heart of Markarian 421’s jet and even identify the glowing beam’s point of origin.
Previously, models of blazar jets had hinted that they’re accompanied by helical magnetic fields, almost like DNA in living cells, except single- rather than double-stranded. What wasn’t predicted, however, was the fact that the magnetic helix would host areas where particles are being accelerated.
An artist’s depiction of the IXPE observatory in space observing the universe in X-rays. (Image credit: NASA)
“We had anticipated that the polarization direction might change, but we thought large rotations would be rare, based on previous optical observations of many blazars,” research co-author and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist, Herman Marshal, said. “So, we planned several observations of the blazar, with the first showing a constant polarization of 15%.”
Even more remarkably, analysis of IXPE’s data showed that the polarization of the jet dropped to 0% between its first and second observations. This showed the team the magnetic field was turning like a corkscrew.
“We recognized that the polarization was actually about the same but its direction literally pulled a U-turn, rotating nearly 180 degrees in two days,” Marshall said. “It then surprised us again during the third observation, which started a day later, to observe the direction of polarization continuing to rotate at the same rate.”
An artist’s concept of a feeding supermassive black hole with a jet streaming outward at nearly the speed of light. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
During these maneuvers, measurements of electromagnetic radiation in the form of optical, infrared and radio light showed no effect on the stability and structure of the jet itself, even when X-ray emissions did change. This implied a shockwave traveling along the twisted magnetic field from Markarian 421.
Hints of such a phenomenon have once been seen in the jet of another blazar witnessed by IXPE, Markarian 501, but the team’s new findings represent more clearcut evidence that a helical magnetic field does indeed contribute to a traveling shockwave that’s accelerating jet particles to relativistic speeds.
The team behind the work intends to continue studying Markarian 421 as well as identify other blazars to find some with similar qualities in pursuit of revealing a mechanism that powers the extreme and bright outflows characteristic of these phenomena.
“Thanks to IXPE, it’s an exciting time for studies of astrophysical jets,” Di Gesu concluded.
The team”s research was published on Monday (July 17) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
