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‘Skyrmions’ move at record speeds: a step toward future computing

An international research team led by scientists from the CNRS French laboratories has discovered that magnetic nanobubbles known as skyrmions can be moved by electrical currents, attaining record speeds up to 900 meters/second.

Anticipated as future bits in computer memory, the tiny size of these nanobubbles (a few nanometers) may provide great computing and information storage capacity and low energy consumption.

Speedup

Until now, these nanobubbles moved no faster than 100 m/s, which is too slow for computing applications. But thanks to the use of an antiferromagnetic material as a medium, the scientists successfully made the skyrmions move 10 times faster.

These results, which were published in the journal Science, offer new prospects for developing higher-performance and less- energy-intensive computing devices.

This study is part of the SPIN national research program launched in January, which supports innovative research in spintronics, with a view to helping develop a more agile and enduring digital world.

Citation: Pham, V. T., Sisodia, N., Manici, I. D., Urrestarazu-Larrañaga, J., Bairagi, K., Pelloux-Prayer, J., Guedas, R., Buda-Prejbeanu, L. D., Auffret, S., Locatelli, A., Menteş, T. O., Pizzini, S., Kumar, P., Finco, A., Jacques, V., Gaudin, G., & Boulle, O. (2024). Fast current-induced skyrmion motion in synthetic antiferromagnets. Science. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add5751

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New model for human neocortex: single-direction, not looped

Contrary to previous assumptions, nerve cells in the human neocortex are wired differently than in mice, according to a new study conducted by Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin and published in the journal Science.

In mice, signals tend to flow in loops, while human neurons communicate in one direction, which increases the efficiency and capacity of the human brain to process information, the researchers suggest.

For the study, the researchers examined brain tissue from 23 people who had undergone neurosurgery at Charité to treat drug-resistant epilepsy and granted permssion to the researchers.

It isn’t clear yet whether their findings within the outermost layer of the temporal cortex extend to other cortical regions, or how well they might explain the unique cognitive abilities of humans.

Multitasking advantage

“The directed network architecture we see in humans is more powerful and conserves resources because more independent neurons can handle different tasks simultaneously,” the researchers explain.

In the past, AI developers have looked to biological models for inspiration in designing artificial neural networks, but have also optimized their algorithms independently of the biological models.

Many artificial neural networks already use some form of this forward-directed connectivity because it delivers better results for some tasks, the researchers note.

Citation: Peng Y. et al. Directed and acyclic synaptic connectivity in the human layer 2-3 cortical microcircuit. Science 2024 Apr 18. 10.1126/science.adg8828

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Global underground infrastructure vulnerable to sea-level rise, chronic flooding

In January, we reported that major cities on the U.S. atlantic coast are sinking—some more than 5 mm per year, affecting 2 million people and 800,000 properties. Now, in a recent study, earth scientists at the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa have compiled additional research from experts worldwide.

Problems decades beforehand

The study shows that in cities where there are complex networks of buried and partially buried infrastructure, interaction with this shallower and saltier groundwater exacerbates corrosion and failure of critical systems such as sewer lines, roadways, and building foundations. 

“Chronic flooding … can start causing problems decades beforehand as groundwater interacts with buried infrastructure,” said Shellie Habel, lead author and coastal geologist in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH Mānoa. “This knowledge gap often results in coastal groundwater changes being fully overlooked in infrastructure planning.”

Sea level rise: unstoppable, irreversible reality for centuries to millennia

Habel and co-authors identified 1,546 low-lying coastal cities and towns globally, where around 1.42 billion people live, that are likely experiencing these impacts.

Well before the visible effects of surface flooding, sea-level rise pushes up the water table and shifts salty water landward. With this, the subsurface environment becomes more corrosive to critical underground infrastructure networks—buried drainage and sewage lines can become compromised and mobilize urban contamination, and building foundations can weaken.

Extensive research has substantiated that critical infrastructure around the world, including drainage and basements, is likely currently experiencing flooding from rising groundwater levels. 

Informed adaptation strategies

“The damage caused by sea level rise-influenced coastal groundwater is often concealed and not immediately perceptible,” said Habel. “As a result, it tends to be overlooked in infrastructure management and planning efforts.”

The study authors emphasize the importance of research efforts that can contribute to informed adaptation strategies. “Being aware of these hidden impacts of sea level rise is of significant importance for the State of Hawai‘i due to the concentration of communities situated along low-lying coastal zones where groundwater is generally very shallow,” said Habel.

Citation: Shellie Habel et al. 17-Jan-2024. Hidden Threat: The Influence of Sea-Level Rise on Coastal Groundwater and the Convergence of Impacts on Municipal Infrastructure. Annual Review of Marine Science. 10.1146/annurev-marine-020923-120737 (open access)

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Your spinal cord is smarter than you think

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan and colleagues have proved that motor (muscle movement) learning and memory are not solely confined to brain circuits.

Published in Science on April 11, the study found two critical groups of spinal cord neurons: one necessary for new adaptive learning, and another for recalling adaptations once they have been learned.

Ouch!

In an experiment, a mouse learned that dangling its legs too much avoided being electrically shocked, without learning and recall.

“Not only do these results challenge the prevailing notion that motor learning and memory are solely confined to brain circuits,” says Aya Takeoka at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan, “but we showed that we could manipulate spinal cord motor recall, which has implications for therapies designed to improve recovery after spinal cord damage.”

The findings could help scientists develop ways to assist motor recovery after spinal cord injury.

The findings could help scientists develop ways to assist motor recovery after spinal cord injury.

Citation: Lavaud, S., Bichara, C., Yeh, H., & Takeoka, A. (2024). Two inhibitory neuronal classes govern acquisition and recall of spinal sensorimotor adaptation. Science. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf6801

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Miniature stimulator could revolutionize deep-brain treatments

Rice University engineers say they have developed the smallest implantable brain stimulator ever demonstrated in a human patient. The pea-sized device can be powered wirelessly via an external transmitter and can stimulate the brain through the dura  (the protective membrane attached to the bottom of the skull). No implant required.

The “Digitally Programmable Over-brain Therapeutic” (DOT) device could revolutionize treatment for drug-resistant depression and other psychiatric or neurological disorders. This therapeutic alternative offers greater patient autonomy and accessibility than current neurostimulation-based therapies, and is less invasive than other brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), say the researchers.

No battery required

“In this paper [in open-access journal Science Advances], we show that our device, the size of a pea, can activate the motor cortex, which results in the patient moving their hand,” said Jacob Robinson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and of bioengineering at Rice. “In the future, we can place the implant above other parts of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, where we expect to improve executive functioning in people with depression or other disorders.”

In-home use

The researchers tested the device temporarily in a volunteeer human patient, using it to stimulate the motor cortex⎯the part of the brain responsible for movement—and generating a hand movement response. They next showed the device interfaces with the brain stably for a 30-day duration in pigs.

Implantation would require a minimally invasive 30-minute procedure that would place the device in the bone over the brain (not the brain itself). Both the implant and the incision would be virtually invisible, and the patient would go home the same day.

Robinson envisions the technology being used from the comfort of one’s home, where patients would retain complete control over how the treatment is administered.

No brain surgery

The equivalent treatment is deep brain stimulation (DBS), a safe procedure. But it’s still brain surgery, and its perceived risk will place a very low ceiling on the number of people who are willing to accept it and may benefit from it, according to Robinson.

For some conditions, epilepsy for example, the device may need to be on permanently or most of the time, but for disorders such as depression and OCD, a regimen of just a few minutes of stimulation per day could suffice to bring about the desired changes in the functioning of the targeted neuronal network.

Future research

Robinson said he is “really interested in the idea of creating networks of implants and creating implants that can stimulate and record, so that they can provide adaptive personalized therapies based on your own brain signatures.” An associated company, Motif Neurotech, is in the process of seeking FDA approval for a long-term clinical trial in humans. Patients and caregivers can sign up on the Motif Neurotech website to learn when and where these trials will begin.

The work was supported in part by The Robert and Janice McNair Foundation, the McNair Medical Institute, DARPA and the National Science Foundation.

Citation: Woods, J. E., Singer, A. L., Alrashdan, F., Tan, W., Tan, C., Sheth, S. A., Sheth, S. A., & Robinson, J. T. (2024). Miniature battery-free epidural cortical stimulators. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn0858 (open-access)

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‘Holodeck’ helps robots navigate the real world

Virtual interactive environments are currently used to train robots prior to real-world deployment, in a process called “Sim2Real.” But these complex environments, created by artists, are in short supply.

“Generative AI systems like ChatGPT are trained on trillions of words, and image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E are trained on billions of images,” notes Callison-Burch, Associate Professor in Computer and Information Science (CIS) at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We only have a fraction of that amount of 3D environments for training ‘embodied AI.’ If we want to use generative AI techniques to develop robots that can safely navigate in real-world environments, then we will need to create millions or billions of simulated environments.”

Star Trek-inspired

Enter Holodeck, a system for generating interactive 3D environments, co-created by Callison-Burch and others at Penn, and collaborators at Stanford, the University of Washington, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2).

Holodeck generates a virtually limitless range of indoor environments, using AI to interpret users’ requests.

Holodeck engages an LLM in conversation, using a carefully structured series of hidden queries to break down user requests into specific parameters. The system executes this query by dividing it into multiple steps. The floor and walls are created, then the doorway and windows.

Next, Holodeck searches Objaverse, a vast library of premade digital objects. Holodeck queries a layout module, which the researchers designed to constrain the placement of objects.

Reality check

To evaluate Holodeck’s abilities, the researchers generated 120 scenes using both Holodeck and ProcTHOR, an earlier tool created by the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the
University of Pennsylvania Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Students then evaluated the results.

The researchers also tested Holodeck’s ability to generate scenes that are less typical in robotics research and more difficult to manually create than apartment interiors, like stores, public spaces and offices. The researchers then used scenes generated by Holodeck to “fine-tune” an embodied AI agent.

In June, the researchers will present Holodeck at the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) and Computer Vision Foundation (CVF) Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Conference in Seattle, Washington.

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AI-powered smartglasses track gaze, facial expressions for VR/AR headsets

Cornell University researchers have developed two technologies that track a person’s gaze and facial expressions, using sonar-like sensing to improve communication.

Mounted on an eyeglass frame, the MR (mixed-reality) technology is small enough to fit on commercial smartglasses or virtual reality and augmented reality headsets like Vision Pro or Meta Quest. The design consumes significantly less power than similar tools using cameras, say the researchers.

The speakers and microphones are mounted on an eyeglass frame, bouncing sonar-like inaudible soundwaves off someone’s face and picking up reflected signals caused by face and eye movements.

GazeTrak

GazeTrak is the first eye-tracking system that relies on acoustic signals. It continuously and accurately detects facial expressions and recreates them in an avatar in real time. The detailed facial expressions and gaze movements could improve interactions with other users.

“It’s small, it’s cheap and super low-powered, so you can wear it on smartglasses every day—it won’t kill your battery,” said Cheng Zhang, an assistant professor of information science who directs the Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab, which created the new devices.

GazeTrak has a speaker and four microphones positoned around the inside of each eye frame of the glasses. It bounces and picks up soundwaves from the eyeball and the area around the eyes. It then sends sound signals into a customized deep-learning pipeline that uses AI to continuously infer the direction of the person’s gaze.

EyeEcho

For futher help, EyeEcho has an ultrasound speaker and an microphone located next to the glasses’ hinges, pointing down to catch skin movement as facial expressions change. These reflected signals are also interpreted by AI.



EyeEcho continuous facial expression tracking on glasses
(credit: Ke Li et al.)

Imaginative Uses

With this new technology, users can make hands-free video calls through an avatar, even in a noisy café or on the street. While some smartglasses have the ability to recognize faces or distinguish between a few specific expressions, currently, none track expressions continuously, like EyeEcho, say the researchers.

GazeTrak could also be used with screen readers to read out portions of text for people with low vision as they read a website or book.

GazeTrak and EyeEcho could also potentially help diagnose or monitor neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons, where patients often have abnormal eye movements and less expressive faces. It could tracked the progression of the disease at home or via a physician.

Li will present GazeTrak at the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking on May 11-16 and EyeEcho at the Association of Computing Machinery CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May.

Citations: Ke Li et al. EyeEcho: Continuous and Low-power Facial Expression Tracking on Glasses. arXiv https://arxiv.org/html/2402.12388v1 and Ke Li et al. GazeTrak: Exploring Acoustic-based Eye Tracking on a Glass Frame. arXiv. arxiv.org/html/2402.14634v2.

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Mayo Clinic study finds active workstations may improve cognitive performance

What if your workstation had a walking pad, bike, stepper and/or standing desk?

A Mayo Clinic study suggests that such an active workstation could reduce your sedentary time and improve your mental cognition at work—decreasing your risk of preventable chronic diseases without reducing job performance.

Improving work performance and health

“Active workstations may offer a way to potentially improve cognitive performance and overall health, simply by moving at work,” says Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, M.D., a preventive cardiologist at Mayo Clinic and senior author of the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

The research involved 44 participants in a randomized clinical trial with four office settings, evaluated over four consecutive days at Mayo Clinic’s Dan Abraham Healthy Living Center. Study findings are published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

The settings included a stationary or sitting station on the first day, followed by three active workstations (standing, walking or using a stepper) in a randomized order.

Researchers analyzed participants’ neurocognitive function based on 11 assessments that evaluated reasoning, short-term memory and concentration. Fine motor skills were assessed through an online typing speed test and other tests.  

Improved reasoning

When participants used the active workstations, their brain function either improved or stayed the same. Their typing speed slowed down only a bit, but the accuracy of their typing was not affected. The study revealed improved reasoning scores when standing, stepping and walking as compared with sitting. 

When it comes to your cardiovascular health, office workers may spend a large part of their eight-hour workday sitting at a computer screen and keyboard.

“These findings indicate that there are more ways to do that work while remaining productive and mentally sharp. We would do well to consider an active workstation in the prescription for prevention and treatment of conditions like obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes,” says Lopez-Jimenez.

Citation: Miguel A. Gomez Ibarra et al. 4 Apr 2024. Effect of Active Workstations on Neurocognitive Performance and Typing Skills: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Journal of the American Heart Association. https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.123.031228 (open-access)

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World’s most powerful MRI scanner images the living brain with unrivaled clarity

The Iseult MRI scanner, with a magnetic field intensity of 11.7 tesla (the most powerful in the world), has been announced by CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission).

CEA said they have acquired “some of the most remarkable anatomical images of the brain. The same image quality would require hours with MRI scanners currently available in hospitals (1.5 or 3 teslas), but that’s not realistic in practice (any movement would blur the image).”

Detecting weak brain signals

CEA said the scanner will also facilitate detection of some chemical species with weak signals that are hard to capture at lower magnetic fields, such as lithium (a drug used to treat bipolar disorders), molecules actively involved in brain metabolism) and glucose and glutamate (associated with many brain diseases, such as gliomas and neurodegeneration).

The ultra-detailed anatomical information will also support diagnostic and health care for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“Cognitive sciences will also be of key importance in our research,” said Nicolas Boulant, the Head of the Iseult project and Director of Research at CEA.

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AI writing, illustration emit less carbon than humans

A study by researchers at University of Kansas and University of California-Irvine suggests that writing and illustrating using AI emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans performing the same tasks. 

To calculate the carbon footprint of a person writing, the researchers measured the “energy budget”—the amount of energy used in certain tasks for a set period of time.

AI less energy-wasteful

They found that AI systems emit between 130 and 1,500 times less CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per page of text, compared to CO2e generated by human writers. And they also found that illustration systems like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney emit 310 to 2,900 times less CO2e per image than humans.

“When we did it, the results were kind of astonishing, even by conservative estimates,” said Torrance. “AI is extremely less wasteful.”

Environmental impact and combatting climate change

The research was conducted to improve understanding of AI and its environmental impact and to address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns; and taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, the researchers wrote.

Citation: Tomlinson, B., Black, R.W., Patterson, D.J. et al. The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans. Sci Rep 14, 3732 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54271-x (open access)

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