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.
Previous work has shown graphene can stimulate the growth of neurons, while polyethylene glycol (PEG) has been used with limited success to heal damaged spinal cords in animals. Building on this, researchers at the university used their chemistry knowhow to combine graphene nanoribbons (stripped from larger carbon nanotubes) with PEG to produce Texas-PEG. The amazing thing about this new material is that it acts as a much more potent "conductive scaffold," promoting the two ends of a severed spinal cord to repair and reconnect. Importantly, this isn’t just theoretical.
In an animal study involving a rat with a severed spinal cord, treatment with Texas-PEG restored some function within just 24 hours. After two weeks, the same rat was well on its way to a full recovery, displaying "almost perfect motor control." We’re still aways from translating this early research into an available treatment for spinal cord injuries in humans, but as the Rice release describes it, Texas-PEG’s potential "is too promising to be minimized."
There is already a heap of incredible work being done by doctors, researchers and engineers to restore the function of paralyzed limbs and improve the quality of life of patients — implants, electrical stimulation, exoskeletons and virtual reality therapy being a few examples. And, if new treatments come along that can help repair spinal cord damage soon after injury, all the better.
Two separate teams of scientists have taken quantum teleportation from the lab into the real world.
Researchers working in Calgary, Canada and Hefei, China, used existing fiber optics networks to transmit small units of information across cities via quantum entanglement — Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.â€
Stepping Outside the Lab
According to quantum mechanics, some objects, like photons or electrons, can be entangled. This means that no matter how far apart they are, what happens to one will affect the other instantaneously. To Einstein, this seemed ridiculous, because it entailed information moving faster than the speed of light, something he deemed impossible. But, numerous experiments have shown that entanglement does indeed exist. The challenge was putting it to use.
A few experiments in the lab had previously managed to send information using quantum entanglement But translating their efforts to the real world, where any number of factors could confound the process is a much more difficult challenge. That’s exactly what these two teams of researchers have done. Their breakthrough, published in two separate papers today in Nature Photonics, promises to offer important advancements for communications and encryption technologies.
Both experiments encode a message into a photon and send it to a way station of sorts. There, the message is transferred to a different photon, which is entangled with a photon held by the receiver. This destroys the information held in the first photon, but transmits the information via entanglement to the receiver. When the way station measures the photon, it creates kind of key — a decoder ring of sorts — that can decrypt the entangled photon’s information. That key is then sent over an internet connection, where it is combined with the information contained within the entangled photon to reveal the message.
The two experiments weren’t able to transmit very much information — the Calgary experiment was the quickest, and they only managed 17 photons a minute. The Hefei experiment was able to guess the state of the photons with better accuracy, however. While the Calgary researchers succeeded about 25 percent of the time, the Hefei researchers were right at most 50 percent of the time, due to their inclusion of an extra, albeit time-consuming, step in the process. Because both methods possess their own advantages, they will likely each form the basis for further research.
Nevertheless, both teams were able to use existing telecommunications infrastructure to accomplish something that had only been done in the lab before — a big step forward. The Calgary team sent photons over a distance of about 4 miles, while the Hefei team spanned almost 9.
Beam Me Up Scotty?
This isn’t teleportation in the “Star Trek†sense — the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement. The teleportation moniker is used because the initial message sent is destroyed when the photon carrying it gets measured, and it is only the information that gets teleported from one place to another.
One of the largest hurdles for both teams to overcome was the tendency of fiber optic cables to stretch and compress due to temperature changes. While this doesn’t matter for regular telecommunications, for quantum communication, the photons that are sent must arrive at precisely the same time. Both teams of researchers used additional complex data inputs to ensure that their photons were arriving exactly the same as they started out.
Quantum teleportation over long distances has actually been accomplished before — in 2012, a team of researchers from Austria sent information almost 90 miles between two of the Canary Islands using lasers. Using lasers to send information can work in some situations, but adverse environmental conditions can disrupt the signal. This is why the internet today consists of a network of fiber optic cables instead.
Quantum teleportation’s biggest application will likely be as a means of encrypting information. Because the two photons communicate with each other by entanglement, there’s no way for an outsider to read them. To decrypt a message, you would need the key, which is sent over the internet. Even if you intercepted the key, you would still only have half of the puzzle — to fully read it, you would need the entangled photons themselves.
The process could even theoretically be used to create a network of quantum repeaters to stretch the networks capabilities between cities and countries, New Scientist writes. Someday, the same spooky action that frustrated Einstein could be delivering your emails.
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It was just before dawn on September 9 in Lancaster, California, a small city on the northern edge of Los Angeles County. Dozens of sheriff’s deputies had been deployed several hours earlier to apprehend a gunman believed to have been responsible for an attempted murder, among other crimes, in the city during the previous day.
The man, Ray B. Bunge, had fled into a pitch-black open field and had barricaded himself in what authorities described as a “small dugout dirt berm with shrubs and fencing wire around him.†The previous day, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) had brought in a helicopter equipped with an infrared camera overhead, and a personnel carrier was set up in front of him.
In total, there were approximately 40 deputies on scene. After several orders to surrender throughout the night, Bunge did not comply. At his feet lay a shotgun—despite his shooting spree earlier in the day, he hadn’t fired a single shot toward law enforcement.
The folks at Sandisk have just unveiled a new 1 terabyte SDXC Memory Card SDXC at the Photokina 2016 photography show earlier today in Cologne, Germany. With that kind of card, you should never run out of space anymore for your photos or videos, or at least, not for a long time.
As far as the cost goes, the price has not been revealed, but considering that the company’s 512GB SDXC currently goes for around $350 on Amazon, we can expect the 1TB version to be priced at least twice as much when it comes out. It’s only a prototype for now after all, so don’t expect to get one under the Christmas tree this year.
Terence Crutcher was shot and killed by police in Tulsa., Okla., Friday, in a case that has prompted a Justice Department investigation.
Tulsa Police
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Tulsa Police
Terence Crutcher was shot and killed by police in Tulsa., Okla., Friday, in a case that has prompted a Justice Department investigation.
Tulsa Police
The video is disturbing and prompts many questions — and that’s how the police see it. The family of Terence Crutcher, who was shot dead by police Friday, says the footage should lead to criminal charges against the officer who killed an unarmed man.
The Justice Department has begun a parallel investigation into possible civil rights charges related to Crutcher’s death, U.S. Attorney Danny Williams, Sr., said Monday. He promised “to seek justice on behalf of this family, and for the public.”
Crutcher, who was black, died next to his SUV that had stopped in the middle of a two-lane road in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Seconds before he was shot, police dash-cam and helicopter footage shows, he had walked to his car with his hands held over his head as Officer Betty Shelby walked behind him, her gun raised.
We’ll post the helicopter video and link to more footage here, with the warning that some of the video is graphic and may be difficult to watch.
In the recording from the Tulsa police helicopter, an officer is heard saying of Crutcher as he walks in front of Shelby, “Looks like that’s a bad dude, maybe on something.”
Officers had been called to the scene by passers-by who called in to report a vehicle that had been abandoned. “He took off running,” a woman told a 911 operator, saying that the man said his vehicle might blow up. She added, “I think he’s smoking something.”
Shelby, who is white, was one of four police officers who were standing at the rear bumper of Crutcher’s car as he stood next to his vehicle around 7:45 p.m. Friday. She’s also the officer who shot him once, in the upper body — and who then radioed, “Shots fired.” Police say another officer used his Taser on Crutcher at nearly the same time he was shot.
“I want to assure our community, and I want to assure all of you and people across the nation who are going to be looking at this, we will achieve justice, period,” Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan said Monday, as his department released the videos. He called the footage “very disturbing; it’s very difficult to watch.”
Officer Shelby’s attorney, Scott Wood, told the Tulsa World that Shelby believed Crutcher was reaching for something inside his car, and that he hadn’t been following her commands.
Jordan added that he had first watched the police-cam footage was when he viewed it with Crutcher’s family — he said he did that Sunday, to give the slain man’s relatives a chance to see the video before anyone else.
“After watching the video and seeing what actually happened,” said Tiffany Crutcher, “We’re truly devastated, the entire family is devastated.”
Tiffany Crutcher then went on to tell the media gathered in Tulsa, “You all want to know who that big ‘bad dude’ was. That big ‘bad dude’ was my twin brother. That big ‘bad dude’ was a father. That big ‘bad dude’ was a son. That big ‘bad dude’ was enrolled at Tulsa Community College, just wanting to make us proud.
“That big ‘bad dude’ loved God; that big ‘bad dude’ was at church singing, with all his flaws, every week. That’s who he was.”
Tiffany Crutcher said her brother’s future was taken away because of negligence and incompetence — “and because he was a big ‘bad dude.'”
Demanding charges for the officers involved, Tiffany Crutcher said of her brother, “his life mattered.”
Referring to other incidents of police killings of unarmed black men, she added, “This is bigger than us right here. We’re going to stop it right here.”
The timecode in the video taken from the dash-cam of Officer Turnbough shows that Crutcher was shot around 1:50 into the recording. Over the radio, an officer can be heard referring to him as a “suspect” — although the situation was initially called in as a traffic incident, possibly involving a broken-down vehicle.
After Shelby shot Crutcher, two officers walked to the opposite side of the vehicle to ensure it was safe; a female officer is then seen running away from the immediate area. Moments later, three officers, seemingly including Shelby, backed slowly away from Crutcher’s body. They then crouched down behind a police cruiser.
Crutcher was left alone on the asphalt until around the 3:45 mark in the video, when an officer checks his pockets; it isn’t until around 4:30 that anyone crouches down to render any aid.
The police department says Betty Jo Shelby, 42, joined the force in December of 2011. Tulsa World reports that she had previously worked at the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office.
“Please, maintain the peace,” Police Chief Jordan said at his news conference. He added, “Protests are not a problem… I grew up in the 60s, it’s a very valid way for people to air their grievances.”
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Politics, Skittles and a massive humanitarian crisis don’t mix very well.
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Politics, Skittles and a massive humanitarian crisis don’t mix very well.
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Social media have become home to two things in recent years: memes and public shaming.
Both came into play Monday night when Donald Trump Jr. tweeted an image of a bowl of Skittles, comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned candy. “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you three would kill you, would you take a handful?” the meme asks. “That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”
The post by the Republican presidential candidate’s son immediately went viral. It earned the support and praise of many Trump supporters, who worry that an influx of refugees poises an existential security threat. It also drew condemnation from many who viewed the tweet as a flip, dehumanizing way to address a humanitarian catastrophe affecting more than 13 million people.
The makers of Skittles were quick to join the second camp. “Skittles are candy. Refugees are people,” a spokeswoman for the candy’s parent company, Wrigley, said in a widely distributed statement. “We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing.”
Others were more direct in their response, posting graphic images of Syrian refugees and writing, “Not a Skittle.”
And, as the Washington Post pointed out, the bowl of Skittles would have to be awfully large for Trump’s analogy to be accurate: The odds of being killed by a refugee in a terrorist attack are about 1 in more than 3.6 billion, according to a recent Cato Institute study.
Still, the potential danger posed by Syrian refugees has been a central theme of the Trump campaign. Trump regularly warns that refugees could be a “Trojan horse,” entering the country with the goal of later attacking it.
Trump has called, at varying points, to end all immigration by Muslims, from countries with a high risk of terrorism and from countries without proper screening methods. (Trump’s campaign has not clarified which countries fit the second two criteria.)
At a Florida rally Monday afternoon, Trump recited the lyrics of a jazz song called “The Snake,” something he’s done several times before, to underscore his worries.
The song tells the story of a woman who takes a snake into her house and rehabilitates it, only to see the snake bite and kill her. “Now I saved you, cried the woman. And you’ve bit me, even why,” Trump recited to the crowd. “And you know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die. Ah, shut up, silly woman, said that reptile with a grin. Now you knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in.”
These mental images — refugees as poisonous candy, venomous snakes or terrorist cells-in-waiting — come at a time when the Obama administration is working to humanize the world’s refugee problem. “They are just like us. They are us. And as Americans, so many of us are the product of families that had refugees and immigrants. And they’ve contributed so much to our country,” Assistant Secretary of State Tony Blinken told NPR.
He recently worked with Sesame Street to produce a video aimed at humanizing refugees so that children can better understand the problem. As Blinken explains to the Muppet Grover in the video, refugees are “people who’ve had to leave their homes because it’s not safe for them to live in their countries.”
While both Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton have called for tighter security screening of refugees admitted to the country, the United States already implements a detailed security check. Approval can take up to 24 months, as NPR reported last year.
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Samsung is facing a new challenge to its reputation after reports of Galaxy Note 7 fires in China, a market that was not included in its sweeping recall of the flawed smartphone.
The reports claim that at least two Note 7s have caught fire in China, which is the world’s largest smartphone market and a key battleground for Samsung.
Samsung has rebutted at least one of the reports, saying Monday that it had conducted a “detailed analysis” of a Note 7 that was reported to have caught fire and found that the damage was caused by an external heat source rather than the device’s battery. The phone’s owner drew media attention in China by posting photos of the charred phone online.
Another Note 7 fire was reported Monday, according to Chinese state media. Samsung didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on that incident.
When it announced the massive Note 7 recall on Sept. 2, Samsung said the Chinese market wasn’t affected because the batteries in the phones sold there came from a different supplier than the fire-prone ones.
But a Chinese regulator last week announced the recall of more than 1,800 Note 7 phones with potentially problematic batteries that had been sold in China before the official release.
Now, the world’s largest smartphone maker is facing claims that it’s not treating Chinese customers fairly.
The website of Global Times, a tabloid newspaper affiliated with the ruling Communist Party, published two articles criticizing Samsung on Tuesday. One cited an expert as saying that Samsung should explain how the Note 7 batteries in the Chinese market differ from those in the rest of the world.
Fang Xindong, director of the International Internet Research Institute at Shantou University, accused Samsung of “double standards” in China compared with Western countries.
In its statement Monday, Samsung said it “remains committed to researching and designing products and services that meet Chinese customers’ demands, thus providing the best product experience for Chinese consumers.”
But some people on Chinese social media expressed skepticism. In response to the Samsung statement on the Twitter-like platform Weibo, the user deemster_kyle accused the company of “playing a dirty trick in China.”
Samsung began exchanging customers’ Note 7 phones for new ones in its home market of South Korea on Monday. In the U.S., the replacement program is due to start Wednesday.
The company said the battery problem had been found in a tiny fraction of Note 7 phones but it was replacing all those with the potentially faulty batteries “because our customers’ safety is an absolute priority.”
Aviation authorities around the world have warned Note 7 owners not to use or charge the phones on planes.
— Paula Hancocks and Nanlin Fang contributed to this report.
CNNMoney (Hong Kong) First published September 20, 2016: 3:31 AM ET
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