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Category: neuroscience

Meet “Unreal Engine”; VR’s friend in VR game creations.

Epic Games has been teasing “the future of VR development” recently, and the team is finally ready to tell everyone what that is: Creating virtual reality content within virtual reality itself, using the full version of its Unreal Engine 4. Epic cofounder Tim Sweeney says that while the company’s been supporting the likes of the Oculus Rift from the outset, the irony is that, up to this point, the experiences we’ve seen so far have been developed using the same tools as traditional video games. “Now you can go into VR, have the entire Unreal editor functioning and do it live,” he says. “It almost gives you god-like powers to manipulate the world.”

So rather than using the same 2D tools (a keyboard, mouse and computer monitor) employed in traditional game development, people making experiences for VR in Unreal can now use a head-mounted display and motion controllers to manipulate objects in a 3D space. “Your brain already knows how to do this stuff because we all have an infinite amount of experience picking up and moving 3D objects,” Sweeney says. “The motions you’d do in the real world, you’d do in the editor and in the way you’d expect to; intuitively.”

Imagine walking around an environment you’re creating in real time, like a carpenter surveying his or her progress while building a house. Looking around, you notice that the pillar you dropped in place earlier is unexpectedly blocking some of the view through a window you just added. Now there isn’t a clear line of sight to the snowcapped mountain on the horizon. Within the VR update for Unreal Engine 4, you can pick the pillar up with your hands and adjust its placement until it’s right.

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Time triva facts that make you go hmmm.

Passage of time is faster for your face than for your feet (supposing you’re standing up). Einstein’s theory of relativity states that the nearer you are to the center of the Earth, the slower time passes – and this has been already measured. For an instance, at the top of Mount Everest, a year would be about 15 microseconds shorter than at sea level.

A second isn’t what just you consider it is. Technically, it’s not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation consistent to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom”.

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DARPA is making great progress on their research on mapping and understanding the human brain. Recently they are working on a project that break’s Stevenson’s Law. Stevenson Law states that the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously will double every seven years, and currently sits at about 500 neurons; however, DARPA’s goal is to take it to 1 million neurons. Which means taking Brain-Mind Interface capabilities to a level where anyone or anything with this technology can outperform and control machines like we only dream about.

This week neuroscientists met with DARPA in Arlington, Virginia, to embark on a project breaking Stevenson’s Law.

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Researchers have constructed the first comprehensive model of how neurons in the brain behave when faced with a complex decision-making process, and how they adapt and learn from mistakes.

The mathematical , developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is the first biologically realistic account of the process, and is able to predict not only behaviour, but also neural activity. The results, reported in the Journal of Neuroscience, could aid in the understanding of conditions from and addiction to Parkinson’s disease.

The model was compared to experimental data for a wide-ranging set of tasks, from simple binary choices to multistep sequential . It accurately captures behavioural choice probabilities and predicts choice reversal in an experiment, a hallmark of complex decision making.

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Very interesting discovery about how our brain thinks; our brain isn’t always 100% error proof according to this report from Carnegie Mellon University. Therefore, when researchers are mapping the brain plus mimicking human brain functions; what is the tolerance level for error allowed then?

(Source: Carnegie Mellon University)A study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University investigated the brain’s neural activity during learned behavior and found that the brain makes mistakes because it applies incorrect inner beliefs, or internal models, about how the world works. The research suggests that when the brain makes a mistake, it actually thinks that it is making the correct decision—its neural signals are consistent with its inner beliefs, but not with what is happening in the real world.

“Our brains are constantly trying to predict how the world works. We do this by building internal models through experience and learning when we interact with the world,” said Steven Chase, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. “However, it has not yet been possible to track how these internal models affect instant-by-instant behavioral decisions.”

The researchers conducted an experiment using a brain-machine interface, a device that allows the brain to control a computer cursor using thought alone. By studying the brain’s activity, the researchers could see how the brain thinks an action should be performed. The researchers report that the majority of errors made were caused by a mismatch between the subjects’ internal models and reality. In addition, they found that internal models realigned to better match reality during the course of learning. “To our knowledge, this is the most detailed representation of a brain’s inner beliefs that has been identified to date,” said Byron Yu, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

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Scientists were able to study brain growth using a 3D gel model in order to see how the human brain gets its folds.

New research shows that our brains are likely folded because, as they grow, a large amount of volume has to fit in a small space (AKA, our skulls). This compression is actually beneficial, the folds reduce the length of neuronal wiring, improving cognitive function.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences teamed up with scientists in Finland and France to find out more about the folding process.

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Graphene; the material for brain chip implants; however, Q-Dots ferrofluid is where it will make us totally rethink brain implants in the future.

A new technology developed by researchers in Italy and the United Kingdom allows for the creation of graphene-based materials that can be interfaced with neurons without losing its electrical conductivity. This can lead to the creation of neural electrodes that are not only biocompatible, but stable within the body as well. (Photo : University of Cambridge)

Scientists from the United Kingdom and Italy have developed a new process in which a carbon form known as graphene is combined with neurons without sacrificing the integrity of these cells.

This revolutionary technology is believed to be a stepping stone for the creation of graphene-based electrodes, which can be implanted in the brain of people with motor disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, in order to regain control of their damaged limbs.

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Ampakines are known mental stimulants, but in rats they can also shelter the brain from age-related decline and even reverse deterioriation

A number of changes happen in the aging brain and one of these is a dendritic loss which onsets around middle age. In a new study, researchers have shown a particular drug belonging to the ampakine class of compounds, has significant neuroprotective properties.

Shielding the brain

Ampakines have already been shown to aid cognitive function in older rats, and they also appear to boost levels of BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is associated with staving off neural decline. In the latest study using one such ampakine, older rat brains were compared to adolescent samples. While untreated rats had short dendrites and fewer dendritic branches, after 3 months of treatment older rat brains were identical to younger ones. If that wasn’t enough, they showed enhanced signalling and even had more dendritic spines than the adolescent rats did.

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I don’t claim to be the expert on all things Quantum by no stretch; however, this is an amazing discovery and huge step forward for Quantum.

Quantum gas and liquid/ ferrofluid (quantum fluid made of tiny magnets). Now there’s a concept. Q-Dots as ferrofluid flowing through out your system (which is already comprised of about 72% H2O; think about how liquid Q-Dots can be easily absorb as a liquid and given your brain, heart, etc. run on electro charges and sensors; it could definitely open the discussion why even bother with nuero implants when Q-ferrofluid could actually be absorbed and manipulated to target the right areas for fighting diseases or improving brain functions.

The world of quantum mechanics happens only in small scales around a few nanometers. In this nanoworld, particles can behave like waves, and vice versa and have only some probability to be in a particular region. These effects can be directly observed in ultracold dilute gases. For this purpose thousands or a million atoms are cooled down to a few billionth of a degree above absolute zero. At such low temperatures particles become indistinguishable und unite collecitvely to a single giant matter wave called Bose-Einstein condensate which has astonishing properties. The matter wave flows as quantum fluid practically without inner friction, thus it is namedsuperfluid.

Researchers around Tilman Pfau at the Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology IQST in Stuttgart (Germany) created such a quantum fluid made of tiny magnets – that are atoms of the most magnetic element dysprosium. They call it “quantum ferrofluid” since it is superfluid and has magnetic properties similar to classical ferrofluids. Ferrofluids consist of ferromagnetic nanoparticles dissolved in oil or water. When a strong magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the surface of the ferrofluid it undergoes a so-called Rosensweig instability. The surface is no longer smooth like normal fluids, but it generates a regular thorny surface resembling a hedgehog. From the point view of the tiny magnets in a ferrofluid, every south- and northpole attract each other. Therefore, it is energetically favourable to be on top of each other along the field direction, so the fluid grows peaks out of the smooth surface.

For their investigations the researchers from Stuttgart created a quantum ferrofluid with 15,000 atoms and induced a magnetic instability. They observed then the emergence of regular patterns consisting of microscopic droplets, similar to the Rosensweig instability of ferrofluids. Each droplet has a radius smaller than 1 µm and their existence was not expected with the current state of research on these systems. Their observation could thus lead to a new field of research, as the researchers expect quantum fluctuations, related to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,to play an important role in the droplet existence. These quantum fluctuations allow a unique state of matter that connects opposite properties of gases, crystals and superfluids. This connectioncould be the path to a so-called supersolid, a spatially ordered material with superfluid properties.

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