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Stress raisers!

The de Havilland DH 106 Comet in flight, the worlds first commercial jetliner. 1952-1953

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OSKI

Pop-Outs: How the Brain Extracts Meaning From Noise

UC Berkeley neuroscientists have now observed this re-tuning in action by recording directly from the surface of a person’s brain as the words of a previously unintelligible sentence suddenly pop out after the subject is told the meaning of the garbled speech. The re-tuning takes place within a second or less, they found.

The research is in Nature Communications. (full open access)

A research group at MIT has created a new class of fast-acting, soft robots from hydrogels. The robots are activated by pumping water in or out of hollow, interlocking chambers; depending on the configuration, this can curl or stretch parts of the robot. The hydrogel bots can move quickly enough to catch and release a live fish without harming it. (Which is a feat of speed I can’t even manage.) Because hydrogels are polymer gels consisting primarily of water, the robots could be especially helpful in biomedical applications, where their components may be less likely to be rejected by the body. For more, see MIT News or the original paper. (Image credit: H. Yuk/MIT News, source; research credit: H. Yuk et al.)

Dutch trains now all powered by wind energy

All Dutch trains have become 100% powered by electricity generated by wind energy, the national railway company NS has said, making it a world’s first.

One windmill running for an hour can power a train for 120 miles, the companies said. Dutch electricity company Eneco won a tender offered by NS two years ago and the two companies signed a 10-year deal setting January 2018 as the date by which all NS trains should run on wind energy. ‘We in fact reached our goal a year earlier than planned,” said NS spokesman Ton Boon, adding that an increase in the number of wind farms across the country and off the coast of the Netherlands had helped NS achieve its aim.

They hope to reduce the energy used per passenger by a further 35% by 2020 compared with 2005.

Rabies Viruses Reveal Wiring in Transparent Brains

Scientists under the leadership of the University of Bonn have harnessed rabies viruses for assessing the connectivity of nerve cell transplants. Coupled with a green fluorescent protein, the viruses show where replacement cells engrafted into mouse brains have connected to the host neural network.

The research is in Nature Communications. (full open access)

winter sunrise reflections

by Denny Bitte

Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.

Plato, The Republic (via fyp-philosophy)

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