This Robot Uses Artificial Brain Cells to Navigate Like a Human

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The behavior and interplay of two types of neurons in the brain helps give humans and other animals an uncanny ability to navigate by building a mental map of their surroundings. Now one robot has been given a similar cluster of virtual cells to help it find its own way around.

Researchers in Singapore simulated two types of cells known to be used for navigation in the brain — so-called “place” and “grid” cells — and showed they could enable a small-wheeled robot to find its way around. Rather than simulate the cells physically, they created a simple two-dimensional model of the cells in software. The work was led by Haizhou Li, a professor at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

“Artificial grid cells could provide an adaptive and robust mapping and navigation system,” Li wrote in an e-mail coauthored with Huajin Tang, a research scientist at A*STAR, and Yuan Miaolong, a graduate student and first author on a paper about the work. “Humans and animals have an instinctual ability to navigate freely and deliberately in an environment rather effortlessly.”

The work is significant because it shows the potential for having machines mimic more complex activity in the brain. Roboticists increasingly use artificial neural networks to train robots to perform tasks such as object recognition and grasping, but these networks do not faithfully reflect the complexity and subtlety of a real biological brain.

“Neural networks are actually very loosely inspired by the brain,” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. “They are distributed computing elements, but they’re very simple as compared with neurons; the connections are extremely simple as compared with a synapse.” He says this new development that takes inspiration from the brain “seems like good work.” (Read more from “This Robot Uses Artificial Brain Cells to Navigate Like a Human” HERE)

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Genetically-Engineered, Extra-Muscular Dogs Created by Chinese Scientists

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Photo Credit: The Independent Chinese scientists have created genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs, after editing the genes of the animals for the first time.

The scientists create beagles that have double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a certain gene, reports the MIT Technology Review. The mutant dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications”, Liangxue Lai, one of the researchers on the project, told the magazine.

Now the team hope to go on to create other modified dogs, including those that are engineered to have human diseases like muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s. Since dogs’ anatomy is similar to those of humans’, intentionally creating dogs with certain human genetic traits could allow scientists to further understand how they occur . . .

Recent developments in genome editing allow scientists to edit out or change genes relatively easily. The scientists said that the muscular dogs were mostly a proof of concept, and that they hope to go on to create more edited dogs. (Read more from “Genetically-Engineered, Extra-Muscular Dogs Created by Chinese Scientists” HERE)

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Researchers Perform First Surgery on the Human Genome

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Photo Credit: Time Ever since the human genome was mapped in 2001, scientists have been finding new and novel ways to manipulate it: intervening to remove offending genes or DNA sequences that can contribute to disease, and fixing mutations that can affect people’s health. As remarkable as those advances have been, however, they have only occurred on one dimension—the linear sequence of DNA.

Now scientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences their success in manipulating the genome in 3D. The human genome that’s squeezed into every microscopic cell in the body measures more than two meters long. To stuff it into a space just a few microns wide (the human hair, by comparison, is 40 to 50 microns in diameter) requires some masterful origami-like transformation.

In the study, Erez Lieberman Aiden, director of the center for genome architecture at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, and his colleagues describe how DNA performs this shrinking act. It turns out that there is a sequence in the genome—a DNA “word”—that signals when a long string of DNA should turn and form a loop. The end of that loop is signaled by the same word but in reverse, a mirror image of the original. Where these matched-up words appear on the genome determines which genes are exposed in a relatively accessible place and therefore which genes are more active. Loops formed in cells in the heart, for example, will be different from ones generated in skin cells or bone cells. (Read more from “Researchers Perform First Surgery on the Human Genome” HERE)

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The Number of Moles on Your Right Arm Could Be Tied to Your Cancer Risk

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Moles are usually harmless, but they can be used to assess a person’s risk for developing skin cancer. Someone with more than 100 moles across their body, for example, can be at a greater risk for melanoma, according to experts. Now a new study suggests that physicians may not have to look at a patient’s entire body—instead, doctors can focus on the patient’s right arm, where the presence of 11 or more moles could signal a greater risk of melanoma.

The study, published in the British Journal of Dermatology on Monday, looked at 3,594 twins, and then a larger group of men and women, who all had nurses count how many moles they had on 17 different parts of their body. The researchers found that the number of moles on a person’s right arm was most predictive of their total number of moles on their body. Women with over seven moles on their right arm were nine times more likely to have over 50 moles on their whole body. People with over 11 moles on their right arm were more likely to have over 100 moles on their whole body. (Read more from “The Number of Moles on Your Right Arm Could Be Tied to Your Cancer Risk” HERE)

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Captain America Battles Right-Wing Conservatives in New Comic [+video]

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In the latest issue of Marvel’s revamped Captain America, the iconic superhero takes on a group of right-wing conservatives trying to stop illegal immigrants from crossing the border.

In “Captain America: Sam Wilson #1,” the superhero also known as Sam Wilson heads to the border to take on an “evil” militia group known as the Sons of the Serpent, who are patrolling the area between Mexico and Arizona, according to a video summary of the issue created by the MacIver Institute. . .

The villain continues to describe the need for a wall along the U.S. border — another common theme among Republican presidential candidates. (Read more from “Captain America Battles Right-Wing Conservatives in New Comic” HERE)

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Cops Are Asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for Their Customers’ DNA

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When companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe first invited people to send in their DNA for genealogy tracing and medical diagnostic tests, privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement. DNA, after all, can be a key to solving crimes. It “has serious information about you and your family,” genetic privacy advocate Jeremy Gruber told me back in 2010 when such services were just getting popular.

Now, five years later, when 23andMe and Ancestry both have over a million customers, those warnings are looking prescient. “Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect,” warns Wired, writing about a case from earlier this year, in which New Orleans filmmaker Michael Usry became a suspect in an unsolved murder case after cops did a familial genetic search using semen collected in 1996. The cops searched an Ancestry.com database and got a familial match to a saliva sample Usry’s father had given years earlier. Usry was ultimately determined to be innocent and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated “the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases.”

The FBI maintains a national genetic database with samples from convicts and arrestees, but this was the most public example of cops turning to private genetic databases to find a suspect. But it’s not the only time it’s happened, and it means that people who submitted genetic samples for reasons of health, curiosity, or to advance science could now end up in a genetic line-up of criminal suspects. (Read more from “Cops Are Asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for Their Customers’ DNA” HERE)

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How a Woman’s Ebola Relapse Tears up Everything Doctors Thought They Knew

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Since 1976, when the Ebola virus was first identified, doctors racing to remote villages in African forests have thought they had a reasonable idea of what those infected were facing. The disease was grim – a hemorrhagic fever which caused copious bleeding and often death – but some people could and did fully recover. Now that is in question.

When nurse Pauline Cafferkey was admitted back into the infectious diseases unit of the Royal Free hospital in London on 9 October, nine months after recovering from Ebola, and then became critically ill, all the previous assumptions about the long-term effects of this virus had to be torn up.

Doctors and scientists are amazed and appalled. It is horrible for Cafferkey and her family, but the implications of her new illness are much more wide-reaching. The UK has a world-class health service. Cafferkey’s family were angry that the possibility that her symptoms were linked to Ebola was not immediately picked up, but even though she did not have the usual fever and vomiting, within days the virus had been identified once more and she had been flown to specialised care.

But a resurgence of illness that did not look like classic Ebola in survivors in countries with fragile or collapsed health systems, such as Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea or – for that matter – DRC or Uganda, which have had outbreaks in the past, would not have been recognised. It is entirely possible that people have died from Ebola complications unnoticed, months after their initial recovery, and more could still die.

Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at Nottingham University, is one of those who admits to real surprise. There are a lot of unknowns about Ebola, he said, “but I don’t think anybody would for one minute have expected complications quite as serious as they certainly appear. (Read more from “How a Woman’s Ebola Relapse Tears up Everything Doctors Thought They Knew” HERE)

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McDonald’s Franchisees Say the Brand Is in a ‘Deep Depression’ and ‘Facing Its Final Days’

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“We are in the throes of a deep depression, and nothing is changing,” one franchisee wrote in response to the survey by Nomura analyst Mark Kalinowski. “Probably 30% of operators are insolvent.”

Another wrote, “The CEO is sowing the seeds of our demise. We are a quick-serve fast-food restaurant, not a fast casual like Five Guys or Chipotle. The system may be facing its final days.”

More than a dozen franchisees expressed frustration with McDonald’s management, saying that CEO Steve Easterbrook’s turnaround plan — which includes initiatives like all-day breakfast and a shift to digital ordering kiosks — is a distraction from the core issues of McDonald’s, like food quality and customer service . . .

Several franchisees complained about all-day breakfast, saying that it has complicated kitchen operations and goes against Easterbrook’s repeated promises to simplify the menu.

“The system is very lost at the moment,” one franchisee wrote. “Our menu boards are still bloated, and we are still trying to be too many things to too many people. … Things are broken from the franchisee perspective.” (Read more from “McDonald’s Franchisees Say the Brand Is in a ‘Deep Depression’ and ‘Facing Its Final Days'” HERE)

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Your Smart Home Knows a Lot About You

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How much does your smart home know about you? That was the question that Charles Givre, a data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton, set out to answer in a recent experiment. Givre has an account on Wink, a platform designed to control, from a single screen, his Internet-connected home devices, such as door locks, window shades and LED lights. He wanted to learn what could be learned from his usage behavior. It turned out it was a little too much.

Earlier this month, at a big data conference in New York, Givre presented his results. By accessing his Wink account, he (or anyone with his login information) could identify his social media accounts, the names of his devices (like “Charles’s iPad) and his network information. An app that monitors his grill’s propane tank recorded the tank’s latitude and longitude, thus revealing the exact location of his house. From his Nest thermostat, he could figure out when his house was occupied and when it was not.

The goal of his experiment, Givre said, was not to demonstrate security flaws in his devices, but to document the wealth of information that they amass through everyday use. To access his usage history, some accounts required verification keys; others only asked for Givre’s email address and password. He wrote programs to “ping” his devices to gather new information about what was going on in his home in real time, and to find patterns there. He noted that his smart devices seemed to transmit information securely on its way to the companies’ servers, “but most of the interesting stuff was in the cloud anyway.”

As the trend toward networked “smart homes” and “connected cars” continues, security precautions are more important than ever. The Federal Trade Commission put out a report this year with best practices about how companies should notify their customers about data retention. Device makers say that customers can opt in or out of sharing their personal information with developers and third-party apps. But customers may not always be aware of just how much information their devices are collecting about them in the first place. (Read more from “Your Smart Home Knows a Lot About You” HERE)

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X-Rated Audio Shocks Customers at Target Store

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Shoppers at a Target store in San Jose stopped in their tracks Wednesday morning when a sexually explicit recording began blaring over the store’s public address system.

Chris Minor, who was shopping at the Westgate Mall store, said the material was X-rated and had profanities. Minor recorded the incident, along with the reactions of fellow shoppers, on his cell phone. Customers, which included mothers with babies, were stunned . . .

“I felt violated, and my body said wait a minute, this ain’t right. So I was uneasy,” he said. “I thought it may have been Halloween related, maybe an employee playing games, but this was rated-X material, which made me feel very uncomfortable. I was taken aback, very frustrated, and appalled, and angered by what I heard,” Minor told KPIX 5.

Minor said the store apologized over the PA system, and then the explicit recording started again. (Read more from “X-Rated Audio Shocks Customers at Target Store” HERE)

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