IBM’s Top Five Predictions for 2015

IBM has unveiled its fifth annual “Next Five in Five” — five technology innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years:

• You’ll beam up your friends in 3-D
• Batteries will breathe air to power our devices
• You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet
• Your commute will be personalized
• Computers will help energize your city

Where unconscious memories form

A small area deep in the brain called the perirhinal cortex is critical for forming unconscious conceptual memories, researchers at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain have found. The perirhinal cortex was thought to be involved, like the neighboring hippocampus, in “declarative” or conscious memories, but the new results show that the picture is more complex, said lead author Wei-chun Wang, a graduate student at UC Davis.

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Infrared add-on could let standard cameras see cancer

Technical University of Denmark in Roskilde researchers are developing a device that can convert mid-infrared radiation into visible light. Attached to a digital camera fitted with an infrared flash, it could detect tumors by recording the telltale pattern of infrared light they reflect.

The device could be placed in front of a digital camera lens like a filter, and be used to take thermal photographs or video.Current mid-infrared color imagers need to run at -200°C and cost around $100,000; an upconversion imager would run at room temperature and cost about $10,000.

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What Are the Benefits of Being Left Handed?

According to ABC News, lefties are "more likely to be schizophrenic, alcoholic, delinquent, dyslexic, and have Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, as well as mental disabilities." Lefties are also more accident-prone. In some cultures, they're persecuted based on superstitions. With all these drawbacks, it's easy to overlook the advantages of being left-handed, but those advantages might be substantial. Here's a list posted by Emma Taylor: 10 benefits of being left-handed.

Tracking the Brain's Ability to Bluff

Brain-imaging experiments show how bargaining games could provide insights into psychiatric disorders. The ability to infer another person's state of mind—including his or her perception of you—is an integral component of human interaction. To make business deals, maintain good relationships, and to play a winning hand of poker, we must be able to surmise to some extent what a client, spouse, or friend is thinking. But that skill can go awry in a number of psychiatric disorders, including autism and borderline personality disorder.

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Sniff Control

For severely paralyzed, "locked in" individuals, sniffing could become a way to communicate with the outside world. Researchers have developed a device that converts nasal pressure into electrical signals, which could enable paralyzed people to type text, surf the Web, and control wheelchairs.

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Repetitive head trauma can cause ALS

Recent evidence suggests that the incidence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is increased in association with head injury. And a new study published at Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology reports the first causal evidence about repetitive head trauma experienced in collision sports might be associated with the development of a motor neuron disease.

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Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound

A novel technology that implements transcranial pulsed ultrasound to remotely and directly stimulate brain circuits without requiring surgery has been developed. The technology has a spatial resolution approximately five times greater than transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and can exert its effects upon subcortical brain circuits deep within the brain.

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Japan develops 'touchable' 3D TV technology

A Japanese research team said Thursday it had developed the world's first 3D television system that allows users to touch, pinch or poke images floating in front of them.

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Biosynthetic corneas restore vision in humans

A new study from researchers in Canada and Sweden has shown that biosynthetic corneas can help regenerate and repair damaged eye tissue and improve vision in humans.

They initiated a clinical trial in 10 Swedish patients with advanced keratoconus or central corneal scarring. Each patient underwent surgery on one eye to remove damaged corneal tissue and replace it with the biosynthetic cornea, made from synthetically cross-linked recombinant human collagen.

Over two years of follow-up, the researchers observed that cells and nerves from the patients’ own corneas had grown into the implant, resulting in a “regenerated” cornea that resembled normal, healthy tissue. Patients did not experience any rejection reaction or require long-term immune suppression, which are serious side effects associated with the use of human donor tissue.

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The biosynthetic corneas also became sensitive to touch and began producing normal tears to keep the eye oxygenated. Vision improved in six of the ten patients, and after contact lens fitting, vision was comparable to conventional corneal transplantation with human donor tissue.

Regrowing Teeth

Researchers are finding ways to use stem cells to regrow teeth--a potentially easier and healthier alternative to dentures and dental implants. A Japanese team from the Tokyo University of Science, led by associate professor Takashi Tsuji, reported in Nature Methods that it had successfully regrown a tooth from cells extracted from mouse embryos. The researchers were able to transplant the tooth into an adult mouse, and the tooth bud continued to grow to full size.

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Autism diagnosis by brain scan

Scientists from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London have developed a 15-minute MRI brain scan that can identify adults with autism with over 90 per cent accuracy. The method could lead to the screening for autism spectrum disorders in children in the future.

MRI scans were used to reconstruct 3D image of the brain that could be assessed for structure, shape and thickness – all intricate measurements that reveal Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at its root. By studying the complex and subtle make-up of grey matter in the brain, the scientists can use biological markers, rather than personality traits, to assess whether or not a person has ASD.

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Brain fitness program study reveals visual memory improvement in older adults

A commercial brain fitness program from Posit Science Corp. has been shown to improve memory in older adults, at least in the period soon after training. The findings are the first to show that practicing simple visual tasks can improve the accuracy of short-term, or “working” visual memory. The research, led by scientists at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), is also one of the first to measure both mental performance and changes in neural activity caused by a cognitive training program.

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Intel Turns to Light to Transfer Data Inside PCs

Intel on Tuesday announced it had developed a prototype interconnect that uses light to speed up data transmission inside computers at the speed of 50 gigabits per second.

Intel researchers said that the optical technology could ultimately replace the use of copper wires and electrons to carry data inside or around computers. An entire high-definition movie can be transmitted each second with the prototype, the researchers said.

Reprogrammed Stem Cells Remember Their Past

While reprogrammed stem cells--those derived from fully differentiated adult cells--can be transformed into any type of tissue, scientists have now discovered that they preserve a memory of where they came from. That memory appears to influence the cells' development; reprogrammed stem cells are more easily converted back to their original identity, according to a study released online today in Nature. The findings could affect research into the two main uses for reprogrammed stem cells; growing efforts to study disease in cells derived from patients with those diseases, and the development of replacement cell therapies.

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Fabricating a Multifunctional Fiber

Fibers that carry light and sense pressure could be used for medical imaging and structural monitoring. Researchers have developed optical fibers that not only carry and modulate light, but also generate and sense pressure changes. The multifunctional fibers could be used to make various types of sensors. The fibers can also be squeezed in a way that modulates an optical signal, making them promising for "smart" textiles.

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Harvesting heat to power electronics

Thermoelectric (TE) energy harvesting is based on the heat flux through a thermoelectric element. The heat flux is driven by a temperature difference across the element. The generated voltage is proportional to the number of elements and the temperature difference.

The TE-Power Node uses any source of thermal energy to drive a wireless transceiver, storing power in a thin-film battery. The Node is a test bed for designers looking to build the next generation of sensor networks, in which the sensors power themselves by harvesting energy from the environment. The battery stores the power that trickles in from sources such as a warm industrial exhaust pipe and then releases the accumulated energy in a pulse powerful enough to operate the radio. A 10 °C difference in temperature produces enough electricity to transmit 13 bytes of information per second.

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fMRI research on brain activity validated

In a study published in Nature, a Stanford University-led team has shown that fMRI signals based on elevated levels of oxygenated blood in specific parts of the brain can be caused by activation of local excitatory neurons.

The key experiment involved turning on genetically engineered excitatory neurons in an experimental group of rats in the presence of blue light delivered via a fiber optic cable. The researchers then anesthetized the rats and looked at their brains with fMRI. They found that exciting these defined neurons with the optogenetic light produced the same kind of signals that researchers see in traditional fMRI BOLD experiments — with the same complex patterns and timing. In the control group of rats, which were not genetically altered, no such signals occurred. This showed that true neural excitation indeed produces positive fMRI BOLD signals.

The findings suggest that fMRI can now be used to study the brain-wide impact of changes in neural circuitry, such as ones that may underlie many neurological and psychiatric diseases.

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Caffeine may slow Alzheimer's

New evidence caffeine may slow Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, restore cognitive function.
Caffeine may be protective against the cognitive decline seen in aging, Parkinson's disease, dementia and Alzheimer's disease, a group of international experts has found.

Papers in the special issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, "Therapeutic Opportunities for Caffeine in Alzheimer's Disease and Other Neurodegenerative Disorders," are available free.

Scientists monitor neuron action potentials optically

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and colleagues in Switzerland and Japan have used fluorescent calcium indicator proteins to optically measure living mice neuron action potentials, as well as the activity of


The only way scientists could do this previously was by inserting invasive electrodes into the nerve tissue or the cells, which does not allow for identifying indivisual cells and damages the tissue.


The new technique allows for investigating how memories are formed and lost and when and where nerve cell activity patterns become altered, as in aging and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia.

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Endometrial stem cells could repair brain cells damaged by Parkinson's disease

Stem cells derived from the endometrium (uterine lining) and transplanted into the brains of laboratory mice with Parkinson's disease appear to restore functioning of brain cells damaged by the disease, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers.

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Eye Tracking for Mobile Control

It's hard sending a text message with arms full of groceries or while wearing winter gloves. Voice control is one alternative to using your fingers, but researchers are also working on other hands-free ways to control mobile devices. A team at Dartmouth College has now created an eye-tracking system that lets a user operate a smart phone with eye movement....

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Projected MultiTouch Screen

Light Blue Optics' interactive projector transforms any flat surface into a multitouch screen, planned to be released to the market in late 2010. When a person's fingers touch the display, infrared sensors detect the motion and allow the same kinds of interactions that are possible on, say, an iPhone. The product is initially being made available to industrial partners for commercial applications such as interactive displays in retail or educational settings.

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Smart clothes...

In the emerging 'Internet of Things', everyday objects are becoming networked. Clothing is no exception. It's still early days for Web-enabled clothes - the best example so far is the Nike+ running shoe, which contains sensors that connect to the user's iPod. But expect to see everything from your shirt to your underwear networked in the not too distant future.

In the following list of ten 'smart clothing' items, we showcase Internet pants, a proximity sensing shirt, a heart sensing bra, biosensor underwear, a "thought helmet", and more!

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Brain Waves Predict Suicide Risk

A new technique might help doctors foresee suicidal thoughts before a patient even has them. Researchers at UCLA are using quantitative EEG (QEEG) to determine how different individuals' brains respond to different antidepressants, trying to find early markers that indicate whether a new therapy will be effective.

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Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input

pCubee: a Perspective-Corrected Handheld Cubic Display

Using own skin cells to repair hearts on horizon

A heart patient's own skin cells soon could be used to repair damaged cardiac tissue thanks to pioneering stem cell research of the University of Houston's newest biomedical scientist, Robert Schwartz.

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A Brain Implant that Uses Light

Researchers at Medtronic are developing a prototype neural implant that uses light to alter the behavior of neurons in the brain. The device is based on the emerging science of optogenetic neuromodulation, in which specific brain cells are genetically engineered to respond to light. The company plans to market the device to neuroscience researchers and use it for in-house research on the effects of DBS.

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Magnesium supplement helps boost brainpower

Neuroscientists at MIT and Tsinghua University in Beijing show that increasing brain magnesium with a new compound enhanced learning abilities, working memory, and short- and long-term memory in rats. The dietary supplement also boosted older rats' ability to perform a variety of learning tests.

Magnesium, an essential element, is found in dark, leafy vegetables such as spinach and in some fruits. Those who get less than 400 milligrams daily are at risk for allergies, asthma and heart disease, among other conditions.

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Made-to-Order Heart Cells

Madison, WI-based Cellular Dynamics International (CDI) began shipping heart cells derived from a person's own stem cells. The cells could be useful to researchers studying everything from the toxicity of new or existing drugs to the electrodynamics of both healthy and diseased cardiac cells.


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How to Train the Aging Brain

Many longheld views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned.

Memories may not have vanished but have simply been hidden; similarity in sounds can jump-start a brain connection.

Continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you "bump up against people and ideas" that are different.

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Neuroengineers silence brain cells with multiple colors of light

Neuroscientists have developed a way to turn off abnormally active brain cells using multiple colors of light.

This research could prove useful for managing disorders including chronic pain, epilepsy, brain injury and Parkinson's disease.

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Stem Cells Restore Cognitive Abilities Impaired By Brain Tumor Treatment

Human embryonic stem cells could help people with learning and memory deficits after radiation treatment for brain tumors, suggests a new UC Irvine study.

Research with rats found that transplanted stem cells restored learning and memory to normal levels four months after radiotherapy. In contrast, irradiated rats that didn't receive stem cells experienced a more than 50 percent drop in cognitive function.

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Seats of emotional intelligence found in the brain

Head injuries sustained by Vietnam veterans have revealed parts of the brain vital for two types of emotional intelligence.

The dorsolateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex of the brain is related to "experiential" emotional intelligence (the capacity to judge emotions in other people), while the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is related to "strategic" emotional intelligence (the ability to plan socially appropriate responses to situations).

Damage to these regions didn't affect cognitive intelligence, suggesting that emotional and general problem-solving tasks are handled independently in the brain.

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Disconnect Between Brain Regions in ADHD

Two brain areas fail to connect when children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder attempt a task that measures attention, according to researchers at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and M.I.N.D. Institute.

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Giving Electronic Commands With Body Language

In the coming months, companies will begin selling gesture-powered devices that will allow people to flip channels on the TV or move documents on a computer monitor with simple hand gestures.


Stand in front of a TV armed with a gesture technology camera, and you can turn on the set with a soft punch into the air. Flipping through channels requires a twist of the hand, and raising the volume occurs with an upward pat. If there is a photo on the screen, you can enlarge it by holding your hands in the air and spreading them apart and shrink it by bringing your hands back together.

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Cell phone exposure may protect against and reverse Alzheimer's disease

A surprising new study in mice provides the first evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may actually protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer's disease. The study, led by University of South Florida researchers at the Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC), was published today in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

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Where Did the Time Go?

New research suggests why time seems to speed up or slow down.

In experiments, psychologists found that subjects underestimated how much time had passed by three months, but the more intervening related developments came to mind, the longer away the original event seemed.

They also found that when people were tricked into believing that more time had passed than was really the case, they assumed they must have been having more fun. The perception heightened their enjoyment of music and eased their annoyance at doing menial tasks.

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