WAIT, WHAT? NOT ON BLUE ORIGIN?!

Amazon's Project Kuiper will now launch with ULA rockets


United Launch Alliance launches its Atlas V rocket to boost two satellites for SES of Luxembourg from Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida on Tuesday, October 4, 2022. The Atlas V is scheduled to launch some of Project Kuiper's satellites alongside the next generation of United Launch Alliance's rocket, the Vulcan Centaur. 

Photo by Joe Marino/UPI | License Photo


Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Amazon announced on Wednesday that Project Kuiper will launch prototype satellites on the first flight of United Launch Alliance's (ULA) new Vulcan Centaur rocket in 2023.

The goal of Project Kuiper is to launch a series of 3,236 satellites into low earth orbit to provide broadband access to areas of the globe that lack high-speed internet.

"We couldn't be more excited to join the first launch of ULA's Vulcan Centaur. We've already secured 38 Kuiper launches on Vulcan, using the same launch vehicle for our prototype mission gives us a chance to practice payload integration, processing, and mission management procedures ahead of those full-scale commercial launches," said vice president of technology for Project Kuiper Rajeev Badyal.

The satellites were previously scheduled to be launched on ABL Space System's RS1 rockets in 2022, but the change of platform has delayed the launch to 2023. Despite the switch, some of Project Kuiper's satellites will still be launched on ABL's rockets.

The first production satellites for Project Kuiper will launch on ULA's current generation Atlas V rockets, as well as rockets from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and France's Arianespace.

The Project Kuiper satellites are scheduled to be launched along with the Peregrine Lunar Lander an Astrobotic-designed NASA spacecraft designed to deliver payloads to the surface of the moon.

"Our prototype satellites will be ready this year, and we look forward to flying with ULA," said Badyal.

Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology plans to send the Peregrine lander, a model of which is shown in a laboratory here, into space along with satellites from Amazon's Project Kuiper. 

Photo courtesy of NASA

Chronic stress linked to increased risk of cancer

By Alan Mozes, HealthDay News

After adjusting for a number of influential factors -- including race, gender and prior medical history -- researchers found that lifelong stress appears to trigger a 14% rise in risk of cancer death. 

Photo by geralt/Pixabay

Over time, men and women under chronic stress face a significantly higher risk that they will die as a result of cancer, a new study warns.

The finding comes from an analysis of more than three decades of U.S. data from a federal health and nutrition survey.

After adjusting for a number of influential factors -- including race, gender and prior medical history -- the researchers found that lifelong stress appears to trigger a 14% rise in risk of cancer death.

But why?

Lead author Justin Moore explained that the link owes to a concept known as "allostatic load."

That's a measure of cumulative stress, or wear and tear on the body, due to what Moore described as "life course stressors."

Moore, an assistant professor in the cancer prevention, control and population health program at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University and Georgia Cancer Center in Atlanta, noted that allostatic load levels can be measured in hard numbers. To do so, experts look at several key biological indicators that together show precisely how stress affects the body.

Such wear and tear indicators include having a high body mass index (BMI), a key marker for obesity; high blood pressure; high blood sugar or cholesterol levels; and/or high blood levels of a liver-produced protein called albumin. High levels of creatinine, a waste product from normal muscular wear and tear, are also a marker for allostatic load stress, Moore noted, as are high levels of C-reactive protein, a sign of systemwide inflammation.

To see how such indicators -- and allostatic load as a whole -- might impact cancer deaths, Moore's team looked over nationwide health survey data collected between 1988 and 2019.

Collectively, the surveys included more than 41,000 adults. More than seven in 10 were White, about 13% were Black and roughly 9% were Hispanic.

Allostatic load levels of all participants were tallied on a 0-to-9 scale, with scores of 3 or more defined as indicative of a "high allostatic load."

In all, just under half of the participants (nearly 20,000) were pegged as having a high allostatic load. These respondents were more likely to be Black people, older, less well educated and less affluent compared with the low allostatic load group.

The investigators then gauged the link between high allostatic load and cancer death risk in several ways.

For example, after eliminating age as a consideration, a high allostatic load was linked to a 28% higher risk of death due to cancer.

When looking solely at Black and Hispanic respondents, the link was weaker, but the researchers said the relatively low numbers of non-White respondents may have affected that part of the analysis.

Still, when gender, race, age and educational background were also removed from the equation, a higher risk of cancer death was pegged at 21%.

And that dropped to a 14% increase in risk after investigators also accounted for patients' history of smoking, prior heart attack or previous history of either cancer or congestive heart failure.

Without adjusting for any potential confounders (such as age, race, gender, income and educational level), those with a high allostatic load were 2.4 times more likely to die from cancer than those with low allostatic loads, the researchers reported.

"Cumulative stress is associated with risk of cancer death" across the board, Moore said.

To address that link, Moore said that it would be important to adopt public health and clinical strategies to reduce chronic stress and inflammation. Those might include efforts to destigmatize mental health services as well as "providing culturally sensitive, competent and affordable resources in primary care facilities along the cancer care continuum."

He added that more research is needed to clarify cancer-specific risks and explore the role of stress in cancer outcomes.

Dr. Jonah Zuflacht is a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

In 2017, he led a large Columbia University study that identified a similarly strong link between stress and a significantly higher risk of stroke.

As for a specific link between stress, cancer risk and cancer progression, Zuflacht suggested that stress might render the immune system less able to identify and fight off cancer as it develops.

More broadly, he said, the impact of stress is not yet fully understood.

"If anything, it's probably under-recognized," Zuflacht said. "Because it does seem like there are a myriad of deleterious effects it can have, whether on the cardiovascular system or on those processes that allow for cancer cells to develop."

Moore and his colleagues recently reported their findings in the journal Population Health.

More information

There's more about stress and health at the American Psychological Association.

Copyright © 2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved.



Read MoreFlint, Mich., water crisis takes lasting toll on mental health


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Levi's jeans from 1880s auctioned for $87,400 after mine shaft discovery

A label inside the jeans reads:  "The only kind made by white labor,"

Oct. 13 (UPI) -- A pair of Levi's jeans dating from the 1880s were found in an abandoned mine and auctioned for $87,400.

The pants were found in an abandoned mine in the American West by self-described "denim archaeologist" Michael Harris and were sold at Durango Vintage Festivus, a four-day celebration of denim on the outskirts of Aztec, N.M.

The jeans, which feature a buckleback adjuster along the seat, were purchased by Kyle Hautner and Zip Stevenson. Hautner paid 90% of the price, while Stevenson contributed the remaining 10%.

Stevenson, who owns and operates the Denim Doctors repair shop in Los Angeles, said the pants were a rare discovery.

"These jeans are extremely rare -- especially in this fantastic worn condition and size," he told CNN.

Stevenson said Harris "has looked in at least 50 abandoned mines for five years and has not found a pair of equal quality."

He said a couple other pairs of Levi's from the same time period are known to still exist, but they are on display in museums and are not considered to be in wearable condition. He said the auctioned pair, by contrast, could be worn with only a few minor repairs.

"There's a couple of soft spots on the jeans that could use a bit of reinforcement but otherwise they're super-duper solid jeans," he said.

A label inside the jeans reads: "The only kind made by white labor," a slogan adopted by the denim company after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese workers from entering the United States.

"It's wild to see that," Haupert told the Wall Street Journal. "That's how old these jeans are."

A Levi's representative said the slogan, and the company's policy of not hiring Chinese immigrants, were scrapped in the 1890s.

The new owners said the jeans are now being kept in a safety deposit box near Denim Doctors and can be viewed by appointment. They said they are hoping to sell the pants to a museum for public display.

 

Curious Black Hole Crash in Deep Space Leaves Astrophysicists Puzzled

Scientists may have seen black holes "wobbling" for the first time -- or maybe it was just a detector glitch.

Jackson Ryan
Oct. 12, 2022 

Ripples in spacetime.
Caltech/MIT/LIGO/T. Pyle

Black hole collisions are some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe. As the two massive, invisible bodies spiral toward each other, they disturb the fabric of spacetime, sending out ripples across the universe. Those ripples -- gravitational waves -- eventually wash over the Earth, where some very sensitive detectors in the US, Italy and Japan can "hear" them.

One such ripple washed over our planet in the early hours of Jan. 29, 2020. It was picked up by the dual detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and a third detector, Virgo, in Italy. The detectors' characteristic chirp suggested a pair of black holes, one that was around 40 times the mass of the sun and the other 22 times, had smashed together.

In a new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers examined the wave from this collision, dubbed GW200129, which -- when first discovered -- showed a peculiar signal. The wave's chirp seemed to suggest the black holes that crashed into each other were "wobbling" around in their orbit. This wobble is, scientifically, known as "precession," and it would be the first time we've seen this effect in black holes.

However, other gravitational wave scientists aren't so certain the signal provides proof of this phenomenon. Instead, they have wondered whether the data may be affected by a glitch in one of the gravitational wave detectors that first spotted GW200129.
What's happening with GW200129?

First, let's talk about that "wobble." To visualize precession, think of the Earth orbiting the sun. You likely imagine our tiny, blue-green planet rotating around the big, hot ball of gas on a flat plane. The planet moves around the sun without deviating "up" or "down." It just moves around the sun like a racecar on the Daytona 500 circuit. (Let's not get into the axial precession of Earth here)



In the simulation, you can clearly see the orbital plane shifting as the two black holes orbit each other.Vijay Varma/Leo Stein/Davide Gerosa.

Two black holes share the same relationship, rotating around each other on a nice, flat orbital plane, shedding energy in the form of gravitational waves as they circle ever closer to one another. But in "precessing" black holes, the orbital plane is distorted over time. Einstein's seemingly unbreakable theory of general relativity suggests the way individual black holes spin (yes, they spin) can influence precession. When the spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can be rotated.

You can see an example of this produced by Vijay Varma, a Caltech astrophysicist, thanks to a tool he produced in a 2018 paper in the GIF above.

In theory, astrophysicists can "see" precession in binary black holes by studying the gravitational wave signal, but it's extremely subtle. The authors of the new research believe they've captured this elusive sign in the data — discovering a black hole binary that wobbled and tilted all over the place.

"It's extremely exciting to have finally observed it," says Mark Hannam, a professor of astrophysics at Cardiff University in the UK and first author on the new study. "This is something we've been hoping to observe since the first detections in 2015, both because it's a general relativity effect we've yet to see in the extreme regime of black-hole mergers, and it has the potential to tell us a lot about how black holes form."

Remember I mentioned black holes can spin? Well, generally, black holes that form when a star collapses spin fairly slowly and without any precession. But black holes that are created by the formation of two other black holes colliding can have quite unusual spins and extreme speeds, which could throw the whole system into disarray. Thus, Hannam notes, "one possibility is that the larger black hole was produced in an earlier merger of two black holes."

Pretty remarkable, but is it case closed? Not so fast.

Glitch in the space-trix

Though the signal may be interpreted as a pair of wobbling, precessing black holes, other astrophysicists have noted GW200129 could be something far less exciting: An error.

"In the case of GW200129, there was a faint but present glitch in LIGO's Livingston detector coincident with the event," said Ethan Payne, an astrophysicist at Caltech. Payne recently authored a preprint article, uploaded to the website arXiv in June, which describes GW200129 as a "curious case" and presents the argument that such a glitch may be affecting the signal.

Gravitational wave detectors can experience glitches and noise that sometimes obscure the signals. Most, Payne said, do not impact our understanding of where a gravitational wave originated. With some finessing, scientists can account for the noise and glitches. This was the case with the very first detection of gravitational waves from two colliding neutron stars, but scientists were able to model and "subtract" out the glitch.
An artist's impression of two neutron stars colliding, generating gravitational waves and a huge, bright jet.Caltech/LIGO

In the case of GW200129, another sensor in the gravitational wave detector was used to subtract out the glitch by Hannam in the new study. "The glitch removal may not have been perfect, but it's extremely unlikely that anything left over could mimic the precession we've seen," said Hannam. He says he's confident in his team's result because of all the development that went into preparing the data from the detectors and the checks done on his team's own analysis.

But uncertainty remains. Payne's work suggests some of the finessing scientists have done can remove all evidence of the glitch. Other astrophysicists I spoke with suggest the analysis have not fully accounted for this.

"I think it's exciting work," said Eric Thrane, an astrophysicist at Monash University in Australia and member of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration who was not affiliated with the research, "but in light of Payne['s paper], I'm not sure they have demonstrated what they set out to."

It should be noted that the process of analyzing the GW200129 signal, determining its precession, writing the new study and having it accepted for publication in Nature takes a long time. Hannam and his co-authors were preparing this piece long before problems with the LIGO glitch were completely resolved. The new paper hasn't discussed issues raised by the analysis performed by Payne and his team but Hannam notes "their method still needs development."

This is science in action. One team explains a data point, another provides reasons why we should be cautious about it. For now, astrophysicists I spoke with seem to be leaning away from GW200129 being the first precessing black hole binary we've spotted. But it's only a matter of time before scientists unequivocally see this phenomenon.

The LIGO, Virgo and Kagra detectors are set to start another observing run, the fourth, in early 2023. Over the past two years, the detectors have received significant upgrades which will make them more sensitive, opening up the possibility of detecting even more faint signals from across the cosmos. "We're likely to observe 200 to 300 more GWs per year, so there's a good chance that we'll soon understand these systems much better!" said Hannam.

And with that come further challenges, particularly around sorting through the glitches and noise.

"As the expected number of observations is going to increase as our detectors are improved, the number of events contaminated with glitches will skyrocket, and careful work will be needed to model the glitches," said Payne.

First published on Oct. 12, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. PT.

Holographic microscope can see through the skull, image the brain

Friday, 14 October, 2022

Image caption: A neural network in the brain of a living mouse was observed without removing the skull.

A new type of holographic microscope, developed by South Korean researchers, is reportedly capable of seeing through the intact skull and enabling high-resolution 3D imaging of the neural network within a living mouse brain, without removing the skull. The breakthrough has been reported in the journal Science Advances.

In order to scrutinise the internal features of a living organism using light, it is necessary to a) deliver sufficient light energy to the sample and b) accurately measure the signal reflected from the target tissue. However, in living tissues multiple scattering effects and severe aberration tend to occur when light hits the cells, which makes it difficult to obtain sharp images.

In complex structures such as living tissue, light undergoes multiple scattering, which causes the photons to randomly change their direction several times as they travel through the tissue. Because of this process, much of the image information carried by the light becomes ruined. However, even if it is a very small amount of reflected light, it is possible to observe the features located relatively deep within the tissues by correcting the wavefront distortion of the light that was reflected from the target to be observed. However, the abovementioned multiple scattering effects interfere with this correction process. Therefore, in order to obtain a high-resolution deep-tissue image, it is important to remove the multiple-scattered waves and increase the ratio of the single-scattered waves.

Back in 2019, researchers at Korea’s Institute for Basic Science (IBS) developed a high-speed time-resolved holographic microscope that could eliminate multiple scattering and simultaneously measure the amplitude and phase of light. They used this microscope to observe the neural network of live fish without incisional surgery. However, in the case of a mouse which has a thicker skull than that of a fish, it was not possible to obtain a neural network image of the brain without removing or thinning the skull, due to severe light distortion and multiple scattering occurring when the light travels through the bone structure.


The research team managed to quantitatively analyse the interaction between light and matter, which allowed them to further improve their previous microscope. In this recent study, they reported the successful development of a super-depth, three-dimensional, time-resolved holographic microscope that is said to allow for the observation of tissues to a greater depth than ever before.

Specifically, the researchers devised a method to preferentially select single-scattered waves by taking advantage of the fact that they have similar reflection waveforms even when light is input from various angles. This is done by a complex algorithm and a numerical operation that analyses the eigenmode of a medium (a unique wave that delivers light energy into a medium), which allows the finding of a resonance mode that maximises constructive interference (interference that occurs when waves of the same phase overlap) between wavefronts of light. This enabled the new microscope to focus more than 80 times of light energy on the neural fibres than before, while selectively removing unnecessary signals. This allowed the ratio of single-scattered waves versus multiple-scattered waves to be increased by several orders of magnitude.

Demonstrating this new technology by observing a mouse brain, the microscope was able to correct the wavefront distortion even at a depth that was previously impossible using existing technology. The microscope succeeded in obtaining a high-resolution image of the brain’s neural network under the skull — all in the visible wavelength without removing the mouse skull and without requiring a fluorescent label.

“When we first observed the optical resonance of complex media, our work received great attention from academia,” said Professor Moonseok Kim from The Catholic University of Korea and Dr Yonghyeon Jo from the IBS Center for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics (CMSD), who developed the foundation of the holographic microscope. “From basic principles to practical application of observing the neural network beneath the mouse skull, we have opened a new way for brain neuroimaging convergent technology by combining the efforts of talented people in physics, life and brain science.”

CMSD Associate Director Wonshik Choi added, “For a long time, our centre has developed super-depth bioimaging technology that applies physical principles. It is expected that our present finding will greatly contribute to the development of biomedical interdisciplinary research including neuroscience and the industry of precision metrology.”

Dogs can smell when people are stressed


Thursday, 29 September, 2022


The physiological processes associated with an acute psychological stress response produce changes in human breath and sweat that dogs can detect with an accuracy of 93.75%, according to a new study from Queen’s University Belfast.

Odours emitted by the body constitute chemical signals that have evolved for communication, primarily within species. Given dogs’ remarkable sense of smell, their close domestication history with humans and their use to support various human psychological conditions, researchers wondered whether dogs could be sensing chemical signals to respond to their owners’ psychological states.

In the new study, the researchers collected samples of breath and sweat from non-smokers who had not recently eaten or drunk. Samples were collected both before and after a fast-paced arithmetic task, along with self-reported stress levels and objective physiological measures: heart rate (HR) and blood pressure (BP). Samples from 36 participants who reported an increase in stress because of the task, and experienced an increase in HR and BP during the task, were shown to trained dogs within three hours of being collected. Four dogs of different breeds and breed mixes had been trained, using a clicker as well as kibble, to match odours in a discrimination task. At testing, dogs were asked to find the participant’s stress sample (taken at the end of the task) while the same person’s relaxed sample (taken only minutes before, prior to the task starting) was also in the sample line-up.

Overall, dogs could detect and perform their alert behaviour on the sample taken during stress in 675 out of 720 trials, or 93.75% of the time — much greater than expected by chance. The first time they were exposed to a participant’s stressed and relaxed samples, the dogs correctly alerted to the stress sample 94.44% of the time. Individual dogs ranged in performance from 90% to 96.88% accuracy.

Reporting their results in the journal PLOS ONE, the study authors concluded that dogs can detect an odour associated with the change in volatile organic compounds produced by humans in response to stress — a finding that tells us more about the human–dog relationship and could have applications to the training of anxiety and PTSD service dogs that are currently trained to respond predominantly to visual cues.

“This study demonstrates that dogs can discriminate between the breath and sweat taken from humans before and after a stress-inducing task,” the authors said. “This finding tells us that an acute, negative, psychological stress response alters the odour profile of our breath/sweat, and that dogs are able to detect this change in odour.”

Brain disease risk more than doubled in rugby players


Wednesday, 05 October, 2022


The risk of neurodegenerative disease among former Scottish international rugby union players is more than double that of the general population, according to new research published in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, prompting a call for strategies to cut the risks of head impact and traumatic brain injury across all sports, including in training.

Post-mortem studies of brain tissue have previously uncovered evidence of neurological disease uniquely associated with a previous history of traumatic brain injury or repetitive head impact exposure in former professional gridiron, soccer and rugby union players. In this study, Scottish researchers wanted to find out if the risk of neurodegenerative disease might also be higher among former rugby players than it is among the general population.

The study included 412 Scottish former international male rugby players (out of an initial total of 654) who were aged at least 30 by the end of 2020. The players were matched for age, sex and socioeconomic status with 1236 members of the public. National electronic health record data on hospital admissions, prescription meds and the most common causes of death among Scottish men were used to track the health and survival of both groups for an average of 32 years from the age of 30 onwards.

During the monitoring period, 121 (29%) of the former rugby players and 381 (31%) of the comparison group died. Former rugby players were older when they died, reaching an average age of nearly 79 compared with just over 76 in the comparison group. Former rugby players also had lower rates of death from any cause until they reached the age of 70, after which there was no difference between the two groups.

But the chance of being diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease was more than twice as high among the former rugby players (11.5%) than it was among the comparison group (5.5%), although risks varied by condition. The risk of a dementia diagnosis was just over twice as high, while that of Parkinson’s disease was three times as high, and that of motor neurone disease/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis 15 times as high. The field position (forward or back) of the former rugby players had no bearing on neurodegenerative disease risk.

The researchers acknowledged that 37% of former international rugby players who might have been eligible for inclusion in the study had to be excluded in the absence of matched health records; that the study focused only on men; and that information was not available on total career length in rugby, history of head impact and traumatic brain injury, or other potential risk factors for dementia. But the study was relatively large and long term, and the findings echo those of previous studies of former professional soccer and gridiron players.

“Notably, in contrast to data from the NFL [National Football League] and soccer, our cohort of rugby players largely comprises amateur athletes, although participating at an elite, international level. In this respect, it is the first demonstration that high neurodegenerative disease risk is not a phenomenon exclusive to professional athletes,” the researchers said.

The researchers noted that rugby authorities have taken steps to improve the detection of concussion injuries and to reduce the risks during match play. However, they said head impact exposures and concussion risk are not isolated to match play, so measures to reduce exposures in training might also be considered a priority.

“In addition to these primary prevention measures, interventions targeted towards risk mitigation among former rugby players with already accumulated head impact exposures might also be considered, including the development of specialist brain health clinics,” they added.

Air pollution could affect trajectory of stroke


Friday, 14 October, 2022


Air pollution has previously been associated with an increased risk of stroke, but what about its impact on the trajectory of a stroke once it occurs? This was the subject of a recent study from Chinese and US researchers, who published their results in the journal Neurology.

The study involved 318,752 people in the UK Biobank database with an average age of 56 who did not have a history of stroke or heart disease at the start of the study. Researchers looked at people’s exposure to air pollution based on where they lived at the start of the study and the participants were followed for an average of 12 years. During that time, 5967 people had a stroke. Of those, 2985 people developed cardiovascular diseases and 1020 people later died. People exposed to high levels of air pollution were more likely to have a first stroke, post-stroke cardiovascular disease or death than people not exposed to high levels of pollution.

After adjusting for other factors that could play a role, such as smoking and physical activity level, researchers found that for each 5 µg/m3 increase of fine particulate matter (PM2.5, which includes fly ash from coal combustion), the risk of transitioning from being healthy to having a first stroke increased by 24% and from being healthy to dying the risk increased by 30%. Those who had a stroke during the study had an average exposure of 10.03 µg/m3 of PM2.5, compared to 9.97 µg/m3 for those who did not have a stroke. The researchers also found that the pollutants nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide were associated with an increased risk of stroke and death.


“We found that high levels of air pollution were associated with increased risks of transitions from being healthy to a first stroke, cardiovascular events after stroke and death, but with a stronger effect on the transition from being healthy to having a stroke,” said study author Dr Hualiang Lin, from Sun Yat-sen University. “These results indicate that understanding and reducing the effects of air pollutants on different transition stages in stroke will be beneficial in managing people’s health and preventing the occurrence and progression of stroke.

“More research is needed, but it’s possible that decreasing exposure to heavy levels of air pollution could play a role in reducing the progression of stroke. People can reduce their exposure by staying indoors on heavy-pollution days, reducing their outdoor exercise, wearing masks to filter out particulate matter and using air purifiers.”

Lin noted that the results do not prove that air pollution causes stroke, cardiovascular disease or death; they only show an association. A limitation of the study was that air pollution exposure was assessed only at the beginning of the study and only based on where participants lived.

US Army soldiers felt ill while testing Microsoft’s HoloLens-based headset

"The devices would have gotten us killed," an Army report claims.

SCHARON HARDING - 10/13/2022, 

The US Army is testing a custom headset based off of Microsoft's HoloLens.

Microsoft and the US Army are continuing to explore how to make mixed reality an aid rather than a hindrance for soldiers. A US Army report that Bloomberg and Business Insider claim to have accessed indicates that Microsoft's HoloLens-based headsets, during testing, made soldiers feel physically ill and more vulnerable to harm.

Insider said an excerpt of a US Army report on a "recent" field test dictated to it by an unnamed employee included a soldier who tested the tech saying, "The devices would have gotten us killed."

This was reportedly in relation to the light that emits from mixed reality headsets like the HoloLens.

"Criticisms, according to the employee who dictated to Insider excerpts of this report, included that the device's glow from the display was visible from hundreds of meters away, which could give away the position of the wearer," Insider reported on Tuesday.

Bloomberg said it accessed a summary made by the Pentagon's testing office of a 79-page report detailing a field test with the HoloLens-like headsets that occurred in May and June. In it, US soldiers reported experiencing nausea, headaches, and strained eyes, which could all affect real-life missions. Neither Bloomberg nor Insider specified if these experiences represented the majority.

However, Bloomberg reported that among those who experienced "mission-affecting physical impairments," 80 percent started feeling ill in under three hours.

Insider also reported solider discomfort that sounds similar to what a lot of consumers complain about when getting used to a head-mounted display (HMD): the weight of the hardware limiting movement and a limited field of view. But while concern around these issues can be deterrents to potential buyers of gaming and entertainment gadgets, like the Quest Pro, they can be the difference between life and death for members of the military.Advertisement

Insider cited an anonymous "Microsoft employee briefed about the event," who said the HMD failed four out of six "operational demo" evaluations.

According to Bloomberg, Nickolas Guertin, director of Operation Test and Evaluation for the US Army, said in the summary of the US Army's report that the goggles need improvements around field of vision, low-light sensors, and display clarity and even claimed that some essential functions didn't work reliably.

But it wasn't all thumbs-down. The report summary found that the average time between downtime decreased and that the latest updates yielded "enhanced navigation and coordination of unit movements," according to Guertin, per Bloomberg.

The US Army has been familiar with Microsoft's HoloLens mixed reality tech for years. It started testing prototypes in 2017, four years before the US Army announced a historic, 10-year contract with Microsoft for 120,000 HoloLens-based headsets. At the time, the Army said the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) would "deliver next-generation night vision and situational awareness capabilities" for close combat and also would be used for training. The Army anticipated improvements for soldiers in "situational awareness, target engagement, and informed decision-making."

Microsoft's deal, said to be worth $21.9 billion, represents the public sector's largest mixed reality deal ever, so both parties have strong reason to get it right. In a statement to Bloomberg, Microsoft said it has quickly built and modified the IVAS gear to "deliver enhanced soldier safety and effectiveness" and that the company is "moving forward with the production and delivery of the initial set” of headsets.

But just like off the battlefield, the emerging technology is struggling to prove its value-add. According to Bloomberg, the summary of the Army's testing said acceptance of the headsets "remains low" among soldiers, who feel the headsets fail to "contribute to their ability to complete their mission." Bloomberg noted that the May-June field test was the fifth Soldier Touch Point Test for IVAS feedback.

In the summary of the report accessed by Bloomberg, Guertin reportedly advised that the US Army "prioritize improvements" on the technology.

In a statement to Insider, Doug Bush, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisition, said the military branch is tweaking the IVAS program's schedule "to allow time to develop solutions to the issues identified."

SCHARON HARDING

Scharon is Ars Technica’s Senior Products Expert and writes news, reviews, and features on consumer technology, including laptops, PC peripherals, and lifestyle gadgets. She’s based in Brooklyn.EMAIL scharon.harding@arstechnica.com

Human brain cells in a dish taught to play Pong

Thursday, 13 October, 2022

A microscopy image of neural cells where fluorescent markers show different types of cells. Green marks neurons and axons, purple marks neurons, red marks dendrites and blue marks all cells. Where multiple markers are present, colours are merged and typically appear as yellow or pink depending on the proportion of markers. 

Image credit: Cortical Labs.

A Melbourne-led team has for the first time shown that 800,000 brain cells living in a dish can perform goal-directed tasks — in this case, the simple tennis-like computer game ‘Pong’. Published in the journal Neuron, the team’s so-called ‘DishBrain’ system is evidence that even brain cells in a dish can exhibit inherent intelligence, modifying their behaviour over time.

Serving as lead author on the study was Dr Brett Kagan, Chief Scientific Officer of biotech startup Cortical Labs, which is dedicated to building a new generation of biological computer chips. He worked with collaborators from 10 other institutions on the project, including Monash University, RMIT University, University College London (UCL) and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

“In the past, models of the brain have been developed according to how computer scientists think the brain might work,” Kagan said. “That is usually based on our current understanding of information technology, such as silicon computing.

“But in truth, we don’t really understand how the brain works.

“From worms to flies to humans, neurons are the starting block for generalised intelligence. So, the question was, can we interact with neurons in a way to harness that inherent intelligence?”

To perform their experiment, the research team took mouse cells from embryonic brains as well as some human brain cells derived from stem cells and grew them on top of microelectrode arrays that could both stimulate them and read their activity. While scientists have for some time been able to mount neurons on multi-electrode arrays and read their activity, this is the first time that cells have been stimulated in a structured and meaningful way.


Electrodes on the left or right of one array were fired to tell DishBrain which side the Pong ball was on, while distance from the paddle was indicated by the frequency of signals. Feedback from the electrodes taught DishBrain how to return the ball, by making the cells act as if they themselves were the paddle.

“We’ve never before been able to see how the cells act in a virtual environment,” Kagan said. “We managed to build a closed-loop environment that can read what’s happening in the cells, stimulate them with meaningful information and then change the cells in an interactive way so they can actually alter each other.”

The researchers monitored the neurons’ activity and responses to this feedback using electric probes that recorded ‘spikes’ on a grid. The spikes got stronger the more a neuron moved its paddle and hit the ball. When neurons missed, their play style was critiqued by a software program created by Cortical Labs. This demonstrated that the neurons could adapt activity to a changing environment, in a goal-oriented way, in real time.

“The beautiful and pioneering aspect of this work rests on equipping the neurons with sensations — the feedback — and crucially the ability to act on their world,” said co-author Professor Karl Friston, a theoretical neuroscientist at UCL.

“Remarkably, the cultures learned how to make their world more predictable by acting upon it. This is remarkable because you cannot teach this kind of self-organisation, simply because — unlike a pet — these mini brains have no sense of reward and punishment.”

“An unpredictable stimulus was applied to the cells, and the system as a whole would reorganise its activity to better play the game and to minimise having a random response,” Kagan added. “You can also think that just playing the game, hitting the ball and getting predictable stimulation, is inherently creating more predictable environments.”

The theory behind this learning is rooted in the free energy principle, developed by Friston, which states that the brain adapts to its environment by changing either its world view or its actions to better fit the world around it.

“We faced a challenge when we were working out how to instruct the cells to go down a certain path,” Kagan said. “We don’t have direct access to dopamine systems or anything else we could use to provide specific real-time incentives, so we had to go a level deeper to what Professor Friston works with: information entropy — a fundamental level of information about how the system might self-organise to interact with its environment at the physical level.

“The free energy principle proposes that cells at this level try to minimise the unpredictability in their environment.”

Kagan said one exciting finding was that DishBrain did not behave like silicon-based systems. “When we presented structured information to disembodied neurons, we saw they changed their activity in a way that is very consistent with them actually behaving as a dynamic system,” he said.

“For example, the neurons’ ability to change and adapt their activity as a result of experience increases over time, consistent with what we see with the cells’ learning rate.”

By building a living model brain from basic structures in this way, scientists will be able to experiment using real brain function rather than flawed analogous models like a computer. Kagan and his team, for example, will next experiment to see what effect alcohol has when introduced to DishBrain.

“We’re trying to create a dose response curve with ethanol — basically get them ‘drunk’ and see if they play the game more poorly, just as when people drink,” Kagan said. This would potentially open the door for completely new ways of understanding what is happening with the brain, and could even be used to gain insights into debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and dementia.

“This new capacity to teach cell cultures to perform a task in which they exhibit sentience — by controlling the paddle to return the ball via sensing — opens up new discovery possibilities which will have far-reaching consequences for technology, health and society,” said Dr Adeel Razi, Director of Monash University’s Computational & Systems Neuroscience Laboratory.

“We know our brains have the evolutionary advantage of being tuned over hundreds of millions of years for survival. Now, it seems we have in our grasp where we can harness this incredibly powerful and cheap biological intelligence.”

The findings also raise the possibility of creating an alternative to animal testing when investigating how new drugs or gene therapies respond in these dynamic environments. According to Friston, “The translational potential of this work is truly exciting: it means we don’t have to worry about creating ‘digital twins’ to test therapeutic interventions. We now have, in principle, the ultimate biomimetic ‘sandbox’ in which to test the effects of drugs and genetic variants — a sandbox constituted by exactly the same computing (neuronal) elements found in your brain and mine.”

“This is the start of a new frontier in understanding intelligence,” Kagan said. “It touches on the fundamental aspects of not only what it means to be human but what it means to be alive and intelligent at all, to process information and be sentient in an ever-changing, dynamic world.”