Engineering technology may not have been the biggest news of the past week but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. In fact, I’d say they were the highlight of my week! I hope you enjoy my finds. And please, please comment with links to the engineering articles I may have missed.
Paralyzed Monkeys Walk With Help Of Neural Interface
Scientists develop a cancer-detecting smartphone add-on that’s up to 99% accurate
Harvard researchers 3D print a heart-on-a-chip
Google’s DeepMind AI –“Grasps Basic Laws of Physics”
Samsung files patent for a bizarre folding smartphone
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Paralyzed Monkeys Walk With Help Of Neural Interface
Vocativ
According to Brown University researcher David Borton “The spinal cord is unfortunately called the spinal cord, but it really is a spinal brain.” Using a wireless interface they took in motor signals recorded by a device implanted into the brains of rhesus monkeys. The neural interface then decoded and transmitted those signals to the spinal cord, which was able to signal the monkeys’ legs to move like normal.
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Scientists develop a cancer-detecting smartphone add-on that’s up to 99% accurate
ExtremeTech
A fascinating story from researchers at Washington State University who have come up with a diagnostic rig that can use a smartphone, a prism, and an ELISA plate to detect cancer. Is this is another step in engineering an actual consumer tricorder?
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Harvard researchers 3D print a heart-on-a-chip
New Atlas
“At around the size of a USB stick, organs-on-chips use living human cells to mimic the functions of organs like the lungs, intestines, placenta and heart, as well as emulate and study afflictions like heart disease. But as promising as the technology is, making the chips is a delicate, complicated process, and microscopes and high-speed cameras are needed to collect data from them,” reports New Atlas.
The sensors used allow researchers to study how long-term exposure to toxins might affect your organs. Pretty amazing tech, wouldn’t you agree?
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Google’s DeepMind AI –“Grasps Basic Laws of Physics”
The Daily Galaxy
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, along with Google’s DeepMind’s artificial intelligence team, have trained AI machines to interact with objects in order to evaluate their properties without any prior awareness of physical laws.
While recent advances in AI have achieved ‘superhuman performance’ in complex control problems and other processing tasks, the machines still lack a common sense understanding of our physical world. Still, exciting to watch this tech advance and I’m fascinated by the future possibilities. You?
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Samsung files patent for a bizarre folding smartphone
Engadget
Another story with a hint of Star Trek in it, Samsung has filed a patent for a smartphone with a that can be folded in half like a flip phone. The device would also have a secondary screen, that’s activated when it’s folded shut. There’s even a complex “semiautomatic” powered folding action as one of the options. As Engadget reports, “Of course, patents don’t usually lead directly to products…but it’s fun to see what a company’s engineers are dreaming about.”
That’s it for this engineering tech articles on my list this week! See you on the “flip side” of next week.
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