During surgery, surgeons must minimize the risk of damage to soft tissues and transplant quickly, without contamination.

Source: Octopus-inspired sucker transfers thin, delicate tissue grafts and biosensors

A molecular geneticist and quantum biologist argues that our entire conscious experience comes from a field of wayward electromagnetic waves in our brain.

Waves of electrical activity get sent out by neurons and, as they propagate across swaths of the brain, orchestrate our entire conscious experience. The research, published last month in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, offers more theory than tangible evidence, but the author says it could pave the way for robots that genuinely think and feel.

Source: New Research Claims That Consciousness Itself Is an Energy Field

This year, my colleague Andrey Pototsky and I were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for our experimental work involving vibrating living earthworms.

Sound waves can also form “solitons.” These are waves that move for long distances and pass by each other without any deformation occurring

Potential to produce and modify nerve impulses in the brain by externally generating ultrasound waves at different frequencies, such as on a mobile device, for instance, we may be able to trigger Faraday waves in the brain’s tissues.

Source: We vibrated earthworms to learn about safely connecting human brains to computers

Imagine a mobile phone charger that doesn’t need a wireless or mains power source. Or a pacemaker with inbuilt organic energy sources within the human body. Researchers are picking up the challenge of ‘scavenging’ invisible power from low-frequency vibrations in the surrounding environment, including wind, air or even contact-separation energy (static electricity).

“Triboelectric nanogenerators (or ‘TENGs’) can be made at low cost in different configurations, making them suitable for driving small electronics such as personal electronics (mobile phones), biomechanics devices (pacemakers), sensors (temperature/pressure/chemical sensors), and more,” says Professor Youhong Tang, from Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering.

Using non-invasive materials, could one day be used for implantable and wearable energy harvesting aims.

Source: Nanogenerator ‘scavenges’ power from their surroundings — ScienceDaily

Robots are stuck in an analog world, and any physical interactions they have with the world (mediated through sensors) are fundamentally analog in nature. In this hybrid analog-digital computation platform, in which the digital component runs the high-level algorithm, the analog component is responsible for sensor fusion and motion control.

Source: Brain-Inspired Robot Controller Uses Memristors for Fast, Efficient Movement – IEEE Spectrum

Flexible materials  respond to external stimuli for actuation, structural control, and sensing for fabric-based robots that move, support loads, and allow closed-loop controls to create smart adaptable clothing, self-deployable shelters, and lightweight shape-changing machinery.

Roboticizing fabric by integrating functional fibers | PNAS

 

The California Public Utilities Commission has been investigating the quality of service performance on the telco networks operated by AT&T and Frontier.

Telcos caused a lot of their own problems, have deemphasized copper maintenance for decades.

Day is going to come, likely during coming decade when telcos will just declare they are walking away from copper, with zero pretenses that they are going to replace it with something else. Regulators will rant and rave, but I can’t see any ways that they can stop the inevitable.

Source: The Regulatory Struggle to Maintain Copper Networks | POTs and PANs

Allows each app developer to create her own blockchain that can talk to other ledgers; “Going to see a lot of different innovative products that can’t exist in a smart contract environment. Game blockchains, ensuring gamers don’t cheat. Blockchains within consortia. They are difficult to deploy in a smart contract environment,” says Wood.

Source: Meet The Network That Could Be Poised To Dethrone Ethereum | Zero Hedge

The presence of dark energy in our universe is causing space to expand at an accelerating rate. As a result, over the next approximately 100 billion years, all stars residing beyond the Local Group will fall beyond the cosmic horizon and become not only unobservable, but entirely inaccessible, thus limiting how much energy could one day be extracted from them. Here, we consider the likely response of a highly advanced civilization to this situation. In particular, we argue that in order to maximize its access to useable energy, a sufficiently advanced civilization would chose to expand rapidly outward, build Dyson Spheres or similar structures around encountered stars, and use the energy that is harnessed to accelerate those stars away from the approaching horizon and toward the center of the civilization.

Nanotechnology is enabling the development of devices on a scale ranging from one to a few hundred nanometers. At this scale, novel nanomaterials and nanoparticles show new properties and behaviors not observed at the microscopic level. In the future, networks of nano-devices will be a key component of almost every field of our society, with applications in biomedicine, environmental protection, entertainment, homeland security, and beyond. In order to enable nano-devices to communicate with each other, many fundamental challenges need to be addressed.

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Design, fabrication and control of the systems impose novel design principles which greatly differ from that of the macro.

IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Nano-Antennas, Nano-Transceivers and Nano-Networks/Communications