By tapping databases and connecting people, places, and things Google's Knowledge Graph enriches your search experience.

This week Google is rolling out a new search tool: the Knowledge Graph. Breaking with the old strategy of keywords and webpages, Knowledge Graph makes use of the vast amounts of online data to give you persons, places, and things that are related to what you’re looking for. This new search philosophy of “Things Not Strings” ceases to treat your query as a random string of characters, and treats them as real world ideas instead. And it’s only the beginning of the move away from having to wade through website after website to find what you’re looking for.

Without Knowledge Graph, Google search results are keyword-based and direct us to websites that contain our keyword or related keywords. But as we know words are often ambiguous. For example, if you type in “mercury” you could be interested in the elemental liquid, the planet, or the fleet-of-foot messenger of the Roman gods. By being connected to a network of relevant material, results become more narrow, getting us to our relevant “mercury” more quickly. They’re richer too, allowing us easy access to information about the first planet from the sun.

Now, instead of Googling to get to the Wikipedia page, much of the information you’re looking for will already be displayed in the results – a Googlepedia. Sort of.

When searching for a book, dog breed, or planet, an information panel will appear in that empty white space to the right of the results list. The section will contain a brief description, a collection of facts, the highest-ranking related images, related searches, and other related information such as a map, an upcoming concert for a band, or recently Google+ posts from people in your circles.

The information display won’t be nearly as complete as a Wikipedia page, and not all topics get an information display. Easily packaged subjects like specific sports teams, movies, locations, and famous people get a display. Cars, video games, and companies do not.

Of course, your facts are only as good as your sources. The Knowledge Graph draws from multiple online data sources including Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and Freebase, an open database generated by Metaweb, which Google acquired in 2010. Wikipedia has nearly four million articles, and Freebase has data on over 24 million people, places, and things. Subject-specific information is gathered from sites like Weather Underground for weather and the World Bank for global economics. As before, data from Google searches are used to make educated guesses of what people are searching for and what webpages they want to see. They’ve only just started building it up, but already the Knowledge Graph includes 500 million people, places, and things with connections to 3.5 billion attributes. And the bewildering network of connections will be honed by people using it with a feature that allows users to point out incorrect or irrelevant information.

Like the real world and information about it, the Knowledge Graph is a work in progress. Here’s a short video that describes how Google is reshaping itself from an “information engine to a knowledge engine.”

What will Google look like after the Knowledge Graph has had 5 or 10 years to gobble up databases? If it’s true that Google was already making us dumber, get ready to donate a few more IQ points for the sake of convenience.

For many searches we probably won’t notice the “extra knowledge” in the results (incidentally, the Graph has yet to grace the Google page on my laptop), but already we can see where all of this is going. Along with Google, tools like WolframAlpha and Siri, have conditioned people to expect more out their software – they want useful information and they want it quick and easy. Google Chrome’s text to speech function makes that happen, and so do Google Glasses. It doesn’t get any easier than looking at things and talking to yourself. The Knowledge Graph adds to these as part of Google’s effort to both shape the direction that people interact with technology, and to stay relevant and competitive in this increasingly AI-driven world.

[image credits: Google via YouTube]
[video credits: Google via YouTube]
images: Google
video: Google via YouTube

No great surprise here, given that calorie restriction in mammals slows almost all measures of aging investigated to date: "Long-term caloric restriction (CR) has been reported to extend the life spans, delay the onset and decrease the incidence of a broad spectrum of age-associated diseases. However, its effect on rat explorative behaviour is still unclear. In the present study, a number of behavioural measures were continuously monitored in 3-, 12-, 24-25-, 28-29- and 35-44-month-old male Wistar rats that were fed either ad libitum or placed on a caloric restricted diet. A gradual decline in locomotor activity of the ad libitum fed rats has been determined during aging in the open field test. In the CR groups, 3-month-old rats exhibited lower levels of exploratory behavior, compared to rats on the control diet. 24-25-month-old CR rats exhibited higher levels of exploratory behaviour, compared to ad libitum fed animals of the same age. Chronic dietary restriction nullified the age-dependent decline in locomotor activity and explorative behaviour of rats."

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22590739

(Credit: Julius Schorzman/Wikimedia Commons)

Older adults who drank coffee — caffeinated or decaffeinated — had a lower risk of death overall than others who did not drink coffee, according a study by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and AARP.

Coffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections, although the association was not seen for cancer.

These results from a large study of older adults were observed after adjustment for the effects of other risk factors on mortality, such as smoking and alcohol consumption.

Researchers caution, however, that they can’t be sure whether these associations mean that drinking coffee actually makes people live longer.

Neal Freedman, Ph.D., Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, NCI, and his colleagues examined the association between coffee drinking and risk of death in 400,000 U.S. men and women ages 50 to 71 who participated in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study. Information about coffee intake was collected once by questionnaire at study entry in 1995-1996. The participants were followed until the date they died or Dec. 31, 2008, whichever came first.

The researchers found that the association between coffee and reduction in risk of death increased with the amount of coffee consumed. Relative to men and women who did not drink coffee, those who consumed three or more cups of coffee per day had approximately a 10 percent lower risk of death. Coffee drinking was not associated with cancer mortality among women, but there was a slight and only marginally statistically significant association of heavier coffee intake with increased risk of cancer death among men.

“Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in America, but the association between coffee consumption and risk of death has been unclear. We found coffee consumption to be associated with lower risk of death overall, and of death from a number of different causes,” said Freedman. “Although we cannot infer a causal relationship between coffee drinking and lower risk of death, we believe these results do provide some reassurance that coffee drinking does not adversely affect health.”

The investigators caution that coffee intake was assessed by self-report at a single time point and therefore might not reflect long-term patterns of intake. Also, information was not available on how the coffee was prepared (espresso, boiled, filtered, etc.); the researchers consider it possible that preparation methods may affect the levels of any protective components in coffee.

“The mechanism by which coffee protects against risk of death — if indeed the finding reflects a causal relationship — is not clear, because coffee contains more than 1,000 compounds that might potentially affect health,” said Freedman. “The most studied compound is caffeine, although our findings were similar in those who reported the majority of their coffee intake to be caffeinated or decaffeinated.”

Ref.: Neal D. Freedman et al., Association of Coffee Drinking with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality, New England Journal of Medicine, 2012, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1112010

It is taken as a tenet around here that involuntary death is a bad thing, and the process of getting to be dead despite your own wishes on the matter is arguably worse - it involves a great deal of ongoing suffering and pain as the body progressively fails. Greatly diminishing the incidence of death is one aim of the longevity science movement, achieved through the elimination of degenerative aging, the greatest cause of death. Can we say why being dead is bad, however? That is supposedly a harder job than declaring suffering to be bad and worthy of amelioration - though most philosophers fail to consider the economic costs of destruction, and in the end it should all come down to "I've decided I don't like it, and so I'll work towards doing something about it through progress in medical science." Reasons beyond personal choice are unnecessary, but here is a brief tour of some of the philosophy of death and nonexistence: "We all believe that death is bad. But why is death bad? In thinking about this question, I am simply going to assume that the death of my body is the end of my existence as a person. But if death is my end, how can it be bad for me to die? After all, once I'm dead, I don't exist. If I don't exist, how can being dead be bad for me? ... there's a puzzle raised by the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who thought it a mistake to find the prospect of my death upsetting. Yes, as the deprivation account points out, after death we can't enjoy life's pleasures. But wait a minute, says Lucretius. The time after I die isn't the only period during which I won't exist. What about the period before my birth? If nonexistence is so bad, shouldn't I be upset by the eternity of nonexistence before I was born? But that's silly, right? Nobody is upset about that. So, he concludes, it doesn't make any sense to be upset about the eternity of nonexistence after you die, either. It isn't clear how best to reply to Lucretius. One option, presumably, is to agree that we really do need to treat those two eternities of nonexistence on a par, but to insist that our prebirth nonexistence was worse than we thought. Alternatively, we might insist that there's an asymmetry that explains why we should care about the one period but not the other. But what is that difference? Perhaps this: When I die, I have lost my life. In contrast, during the eternity before my birth, although I'm not alive, I have not lost anything. You can't lose what you never had. So what's worse about death is the loss."

Link: http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Death-Bad-for-You-/131818/

Wireless power transfer experimental setup (credit: Z. Pantic and S. Lukic)

Researchers from North Carolina State University (NC State) have developed a new way to fine-tune wireless power transfer (WPT) receivers, making the systems more efficient and functional. WPT systems hold promise for charging electric vehicles, electronic devices, and other technologies.

Researchers have previously shown that it is possible to transmit power wirelessly by using magnetic resonance, but even minor changes in how the transmitter or receiver is tuned can result in faulty power transmission when the resonant frequencies don’t match.

A new prototype developed at NC State addresses the problem by automatically and precisely re-tuning the receivers in WPT systems. The researchers focused on receivers because methods already exist that allow researchers to use electronics to precisely tune the transmitters.

“We’re optimistic that this technology moves us one step closer to realizing functional WPT systems that can be used in real-world circumstances,” says Dr. Srdjan Lukic, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research.

How it works

Structure of the WPT system

WPT systems work by transmitting magnetic waves on a specific frequency from a transmitter to a receiver. These magnetic waves interact with a coil in the receiver to induce an electric current. If the coil is tuned so that its resonant frequency matches the frequency of the magnetic waves, the current it produces is amplified.

However, if the receiver and the transmitter frequencies differ even slightly, the system becomes inefficient and doesn’t transfer a significant amount of power. This is a problem because many factors can affect the tuning of a receiver or transmitter, such as temperature or proximity to other magnetic objects. In other words, a hot summer day could wreak havoc on the tuning of a receiver.

The engineers developed an electronic prototype that incorporates additional circuitry into the receiver that does two things: it injects small amounts of reactive power into the receiver coil as needed to maintain its original resonant frequency; and if the transmitter’s tuning changes, the prototype can read the trace amount of current being transmitted and tune the receiver’s frequency to match. The effect is similar to autotuning vocal pitch in pop music.

“Because we are using electronics to inject reactive power into the receiver coil, we can be extremely precise when tuning the receiver,” Lukic says. “This degree of fine-tuning maximizes the efficiency of the WPT system. The next step is to try incorporating this work into technology that can be used to wirelessly charge electric vehicles.”

Z. Pantic, S. Lukic, Framework and Topology for Active Tuning of Parallel Compensated Receivers in Wireless Power Transfer Systems, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 2012, DOI: 10.1109/TPEL.2012.2196055

New York City Stock Exchange (credit: Norbert Nagel/Wikimedia Commons)

World stocks fell Friday after credit downgrades slapped on Spanish banks unnerved investors already worried about the stability of the 17-country euro currency union.

Political turmoil in Greece has increased the likelihood that it could leave the 17-country monetary union, a move that could have ripple effects throughout Europe and the world’s financial markets.

Markets were jolted by Moody’s downgrade Thursday of 16 Spanish banks, said Jackson Wong, vice president at Tanrich Securities in Hong Kong.

In currencies, the euro fell to $1.2686 from $1.2714 late Thursday in New York. The dollar rose slightly to 79.30 yen from 79.28 yen.

 

Network showing genes that are regulated by FOS and SP1 genes. It contains many literature-associated and highly correlated genes. Genes reported in the literature associated with pancreatic cancer survival are represented with larger circles. The absolute correlation coefficient of gene expression with survival in the screening dataset is shown in red. (Credit: C. Winter et al./PLoS)

The algorithm Google uses to rank search results can now scan cancers to see which molecules best reveal the risks patients face, researchers have found, Txchnologist reports.

By seeing how proteins are linked in a kind of molecular Facebook, search engine algorithms could also help unearth new targets for drugs to help combat tumors, investigators added.

NetRank

The algorithm Google uses to rank which results pop up first in search queries, PageRank, orders results based on how other web pages are connected to them via hyperlinks.

Researchers modified PageRank to develop NetRank, which scans how genes and proteins in a cell are similarly connected through a network of interactions with their neighbors — “‘friends’ in the social network analogy,” said researcher Christof Winter, a medical doctor and computational biologist at Lund University in Sweden.

The investigators focused on pancreatic cancer, the most common form of which, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, accounts for approximately 130,000 deaths each year in Europe and the United States. Very few tests exist to find out a prognosis for the disease — how it might progress, whether a patient might live or die.

The researchers used NetRank on about 20,000 proteins to see which ones were the best indicators for survival. They identified seven proteins that could help assess how aggressive a patient’s tumor is and guide clinicians to decide if the prognosis was worth trying chemotherapy or not.

As to how accurate prognoses based on these seven markers were, roughly speaking, “our markers are right in two-thirds of cases, and wrong in one-third,” Winter said. These markers were 6 to 9 percent more accurate at prognoses compared with those relying on conventional clinical parameters.

Monte Carlo cross-validation workflow to evaluate the accuracy of methods for ranking genes for outcome prediction (credit: C. Winter et al./PLoS)

In addition to improving prognoses of cancer, this research could also help identify new targets to help destroy tumors.

Currently Winter and his colleagues are analyzing DNA and RNA data from breast cancer. The hope is “to develop a DNA-based prognostic blood test for breast cancer patients,” he said.

Ref.: Christof Winter et al., Google Goes Cancer: Improving Outcome Prediction for Cancer Patients by Network-Based Ranking of Marker Genes, PLoS Computational Biology, 2012, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002511 (open access)

Technology is helping communication companies merge telephone, television and Internet services, but a push to deregulate may leave some customers on the wrong side of the digital divide during this convergence, according to a Penn State telecommunications researcher.

“Moving away from copper lines is an example of abandoning obsolete technology and embracing technology that is faster, better, cheaper and more convenient,” said Rob Frieden, Pioneers Chair in Cable Television and professor of telecommunications and law. “But the risk is that we may be creating a digital divide — not necessarily a divide between the rich and poor, but between the information rich and information poor.”

Telephone companies are lobbying for government regulators to free them of their traditional role as a public utility, citing the convergence and availability of new communication technologies, such as cellular phones and fiber optic cable, that make copper-based telephone land lines obsolete, according to Frieden. However, not all these alternatives are as affordable and as ubiquitous as copper landlines, a problem that could leave many rural residents underserved, he said.

Frieden said rural customers could replace land line telephones with cellular phones, for example, but most cell phone companies charge a fee for each minute of use — metering — while most fees for land lines are unmetered and are paid through a fixed monthly charge. He also doubts that cellular service will be as dependable as landlines.

“Cell phone companies have these colorful maps that show how well they cover areas,” Frieden said. “But there are lots of places — including places in rural Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York — that do not have cell phone service, or offer limited services not suitable for broadband, Internet access.”

Fiber optic lines are glass wires that can carry voice, television and Internet signals. For instance, fiber optic equipment is often used for Voice Over Internet Protocol — VOIP — a technology that uses broadband Internet to carry such services as voice, texting and fax.

While fiber optic lines are more common now, they are usually not found in rural or remote areas.

“The phone companies are right,” said Frieden. “There are other forms of competition now, but these alternatives are not fair or adequate everywhere.”

As communication technologies merge, telephone companies face stiff competition from cable companies, which are classified as information service providers by the government and face limited regulation. Frieden said that telephone companies, however, are regulated as a utility. As a utility, phone companies — called carriers of last resort — are obligated to provide service to customers. To increase profitability, telephone companies would like to be released from the carrier-of-last-resort designation that binds them to providing high-cost, labor-intensive telephone landline service.

Frieden said that the push to end the phone company’s status as carriers of last resort may be the first step toward complete deregulation.

While telephone company lobbyists suggest that the market forces will ensure that all customers will eventually receive equal service in a deregulated environment, Frieden is skeptical about this promise.

“Everyone wants to say, the marketplace is great,” Frieden said. “But there’s also something called market failure particularly in rural and low-income areas.”

Ref.: Rob Frieden, The mixed blessing of a deregulatory endpoint for the public switched telephone network, presented at the End of the Phone System workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania, under review by the Journal of Information Policy

Reconstruction of Gage's skull and brain tissue (credit: John Darrell Van Horn et al./UCLA)

In 1848, Phineas Gage, the supervisor for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad in Vermont was using a 13-pound, 3-foot-7-inch rod to pack blasting powder into a rock when he triggered an explosion that drove the rod through his left cheek and out of the top of his head.

Miraculously, Gage lived, becoming the most famous case in the history of neuroscience because of the injury’s reported effects on his personality and behavior, which were said to be profound.

Gage went from being an affable 25-year-old to one that was fitful, irreverent and profane. His friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.”

Over the years, various scientists have studied and argued about the exact location and degree of damage to Gage’s cerebral cortex and the impact it had on his personality. Now, for the first time, researchers at UCLA, using brain-imaging data that was lost to science for a decade, have broadened the examination of Gage to look at the damage to the white matter “pathways” that connect various regions of the brain.

Reporting in the May 16 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, Jack Van Horn, a UCLA assistant professor of neurology, and colleagues note that while approximately 4 percent of the cerebral cortex was intersected by the rod’s passage, more than 10 percent of Gage’s total white matter was damaged. The passage of the tamping iron caused widespread damage to the white matter connections throughout Gage’s brain, which likely was a major contributor to the behavioral changes he experienced.

Because white matter and its myelin sheath — the fatty coating around the nerve fibers that form the basic wiring of the brain — connect the billions of neurons that allow us to reason and remember, the research not only adds to the lore of Phineas Gage but may eventually lead to a better understanding of multiple brain disorders that are caused in part by similar damage to these connections.

“What we found was a significant loss of white matter connecting the left frontal regions and the rest of the brain,” said Van Horn, who is a member of UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI). “We suggest that the disruption of the brain’s ‘network’ considerably compromised it. This may have had an even greater impact on Mr. Gage than the damage to the cortex alone in terms of his purported personality change.”

LONI is part of an ambitious joint effort with Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Institutes of Health to document the trillions of microscopic links between every one of the brain’s 100 billion neurons — the so-called “connectome.” And because mapping the brain’s physical wiring eventually will lead to answers about what causes mental conditions that may be linked to the breakdown of these connections, it was appropriate, as well as historically interesting, to take a new look at the damage to Gage’s brain.

Since Gage’s 189-year-old skull, which is on display in the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School, is now fragile and unlikely to again be subjected to medical imaging, the researchers had to track down the last known imaging data, from 2001, which had been lost due to various circumstances at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard, for some 10 years.

The authors were able to recover the computed tomographic data files and managed to reconstruct the scans, which revealed the highest-quality resolution available for modeling Gage’s skull. Next, they utilized advanced computational methods to model and determine the exact trajectory of the tamping iron that shot through his skull.

Finally, because the original brain tissue was, of course, long gone, the researchers used modern-day brain images of males that matched Gage’s age and (right) handedness, then used software to position a composite of these 110 images into Gage’s virtual skull, the assumption being that Gage’s anatomy would have been similar.

Van Horn found that nearly 11 percent of Gage’s white matter was damaged, along with 4 percent of the cortex.

“Our work illustrates that while cortical damage was restricted to the left frontal lobe, the passage of the tamping iron resulted in the widespread interruption of white matter connectivity throughout his brain, so it likely was a major contributor to the behavioral changes he experienced,” Van Horn said.

“Connections were lost between the left frontal, left temporal and right frontal cortices and the left limbic structures of the brain, which likely had considerable impact on his executive as well as his emotional functions.”

And while Gage’s personality changed, he eventually was able to travel and find employment as a stagecoach driver for several years in South America. Ultimately, he died in San Francisco, 12 years after the accident.

A modern parallel

“The extensive loss of white matter connectivity, affecting both hemispheres, plus the direct damage by the rod, which was limited to the left cerebral hemisphere, is not unlike modern patients who have suffered a traumatic brain injury,” he said.

“And it is analogous to certain forms of degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease or frontal temporal dementia, in which neural pathways in the frontal lobes are degraded, which is known to result in profound behavioral changes.”

Van Horn noted that the quantification of the changes to Gage’s brain’s pathways might well provide important insights for clinical assessment and outcome-monitoring in modern-day brain trauma patients.

The work was performed as part of the Human Connectome Project.

Ref.: John Darrell Van Horn et al., Mapping Connectivity Damage in the Case of Phineas Gage, PLoS ONE, 2012 (open access)

Debrief tool used in the experiment displays a video replay of the operator console (similar to this map display), and a timeline of events suggested by AEMASE for discussion during debrief. The tool also includes visualizations of entity movement over time. (Credit: S. M. Stevens-Adams et al.)

Navy pilots and other flight specialists soon will have a new “smart machine” installed in training simulators that learns from expert instructors to more efficiently train their students.

Sandia National Laboratories’ Automated Expert Modeling & Student Evaluation (AEMASE, pronounced “amaze”) is being provided to the Navy as a component of flight simulators.

Components are now being used to train Navy personnel to fly H-60 helicopters and a complete system will soon be delivered for training on the E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, said Robert G. Abbott, a Sandia computer scientist and AEMASE’s inventor. The work is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.

AEMASE is a cognitive software application that updates its knowledge of experts’ performance on training simulators in real time to prevent training sessions from becoming obsolete and automatically evaluates student performance, both of which reduce overall training costs, Abbott said.

“AEMASE is able to adapt and is aware of what’s going on,” he said. “That’s what’s driving our cognitive modeling and automated systems that learn over time from the environment and from their interactions with people.”

Previous flight simulators have not done well with ambiguous or new situations that required time-consuming reprogramming, making it difficult for the military to adapt quickly to changing environments and tactics.

AEMASE bypasses lengthy interviews of instructors and reprogramming once the simulator is running. Instead, instructors fly the simulator themselves to capture their expertise, a feature that works particularly well in ambiguous situations where it’s difficult to program a set of explicit rules, Abbott said.

Melissa Walwanis, a senior research psychologist at the Naval Air Warfare Center’s Training System Division in Orlando, Fla., said AEMASE will give Navy trainees specific ways to improve performance through machine learning, automated performance measurement, and recordings of trainees’ voices during the training sessions.

AEMASE addresses a needle-in-a-haystack problem. Just as search engines find certain words across the Internet, AEMASE scans hundreds of training sessions to find specific actions or scenarios and makes comparisons, Abbott said.

The software is designed for context recognition. It searches until it recognizes a situation it has seen before and determines whether the students are making a desirable decision, Abbott said.

The software recognizes there may be multiple right answers that incorporate different ways of responding to the situation, Forsythe added. For example, AEMASE tracks certain flight parameters — say distance, the angle of the aircraft from the ground and velocity — to create vectors that are treated as points within a multidimensional space defined by the parameters.

Different “right” answers are expressed as points in the space, but will tend to gather in one area, while poor performance can be measured by a point’s distance from the “expert” points.

But for instructors, AEMASE’s interface is simple. They can flag actions by pushing a one-click thumbs-up button to record good behavior or a thumbs-down button when students fly too low or too close together in the simulation, Abbott said.

AEMASE places those flagged events on a timeline display, so instructors and students can review errors in recordings of student performance. Then AEMASE uses that information to recognize other instances of the errors, helping the instructors become more efficient by automatically flagging errors for them to review with other students.

These flags are the seeds for the model’s future development as scenarios and preferred actions evolve over time, Forsythe said.

AEMASE also incorporates speech recognition technology to assess how effectively teams communicate.

Sandia is adapting the software to similar training aids for computer security analysts. Potential applications include driver’s education, automating robots, and many other areas, Abbott said.

 

Prototype of EEG-driven bionic legs (credit: Joy Wilson, University of Houston)

Dr. José Contreras-Vidal of the University of Houston has designed a pair of bionic legs that respond directly to signals from the brain.

The problem with the current brain-computer interface approach — implanting electrodes into a brain, as in the BrainGate2 system, is that it’s a dangerous procedure and can also lead to infections. It also requires a bulky hardware system.

Contreras-Vidal’s approach gets round these difficulties by employing electroencephalography (EEG), which measures those electrical signals from the brain that reach the scalp. The recording electrodes can be carried by a skull cap, and nothing has to penetrate the skin.

Such second-hand signals are not as precise as ones collected directly from the brain itself, and probably could not control the complex movements required of an arm and a hand, but he and colleagues at the University of Maryland were able to do this by analyzing what goes on in the brain when someone moves his limbs.

They used a system of cameras to record the movement patterns of a set of able-bodied volunteers who were walking on a treadmill, and then correlated the result with the electrical signals detected simultaneously at their scalps.

Even a simple task, like wiggling a toe, engages many parts of the brain. These include the frontal cortex (where decisions are made), the motor cortex (which controls muscle activity), the somatosensory cortex (where the sense of touch is located) and the part of the parietal cortex that regulates kinaesthesia (the sense of bodily motion, which is built up from signals from the muscles and the vestibular systems of the ears). By choosing sites carefully, the researchers were able to cover all these areas with as few as 12 electrodes.

The next step is to turn the result into reliable instructions that can operate a set of legs. These are made by Rex Bionics, a firm based in New Zealand. They are a partial exoskeleton that allows a user to stand and walk independently, without crutches, and are normally operated by hand controls. To adapt them to thought control, a group of able-bodied people will first don the cap and perambulate in the legs around a laboratory, to refine the process. Then — with luck, some time this summer — a full-scale trial in collaboration with a group of paralysed volunteers will start.

If the trial works, Dr Contreras-Vidal and his colleagues believe their technique will transform the lives of those with spinal injuries. It might also act as a form of physiotherapy, to help victims of strokes restore the use of their legs.

And it will certainly save a lot of money. A set of bionic legs can cost as much as $150,000. But the lifetime cost of caring for a 25-year-old with severe spinal injury is around $3m.

ZeroN (credit: MIT Media Lab)

In The Avengers, Tony Stark manipulates objects in thin air. MIT Media Lab researchers Jinha Lee and  Rehmi Post have actually created a similar tactile user interface for manipulating real floating objects in 3D space, called the ZeroN.

It’s essentially a small field in which gravity doesn’t overcome an object. Through the efforts of finely tuned electromagnetism, a user can place a metal ball in midair as easily as they’d place something on a shelf.

The ball can be repositioned by hand or by computer, it can be animated on a path, and with the help of software, it can even serve as a virtual camera or light source in a 3-D scene (a sort of 3-D animation suite that you can touch).

Lee has hidden the real magic just above where there’s a 3-D actuator housing an electromagnet. It’s this arm that provides the perfectly tuned magnetic loop (requiring a circuit built by Rehmi Post from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms), to keep the ball stable. But to drag that ball around lateral space, the actuator actually just repositions itself, moving in tandem with object, and keeping an eye out on its position with 3-D infrared cameras (as you see in the Kinect).

“ZeroN can remember how it has been moved. Physical motions of people can be collected in this medium to preserve and play them back indefinitely. When the users move and release the ZeroN, it continues to float and starts to move along the same path. This allows a unique, tangible record of a user’s physical presence and motion which will continue to exist even after the death of the person,” Lee explains.

“With this functionality, ZeroN can be adopted in many applications: animation prototyping, physics simulation/education, and 3-D design studios, etc. Many of the control that users had to have with mouse and a screen can be tangible and more intuitive.”

Alginate-based "pearls" containing antiaging ingredients are mixed into an activating cream in three layers, including 20- to 200-nm nanoemulsions to encapsulate lipophilic actives (credit: Capsum)

Growing demand for “enhanced cosmetics” is fostering research on micro-capsules and other technology to package those ingredients in creams, lotions and other products to take advantage of a global market valued at $425 billion in 2011.

To meet that demand, chemical companies are looking for better ways to encapsulate these additives — which can reduce inflammation, repair hair or prevent wrinkles — to stop them from breaking down in the bottle or help deliver them to the skin and hair more effectively.

A surfactant concentrated in the lamellar phase and engineered to form an onionlike vehicle has voids that can encapsulate and deliver active ingredients to skin and hair (credit: Rhodia)

Active ingredient delivery systems are already incorporated into 10 to 20 percent of cosmetics on the market today, a number predicted to grow to 35 or 45 percent in five years.

Cosmetics makers are adopting novel delivery systems for skin using a variety of micelles, vesicles, surfactants, and polymers, but they don’t often reveal those details to the public. Exceptions include:

• Air Products & Chemicals has adapted an insulin sugar delivery system to make better sunscreen.
• Microcapsules help coat the skin with protective ingredients, while another capsule system carries vitamins C and E beneath the skin as a second line of defense.
• Rovi’s Dermoprotectyl, a skin care ingredient, that combines two systems for delivering actives has two systems. One, based on inulin sugar nanoscale vesicles, places sunscreen ingredients on the surface of the skin. A second system, using lipid protective spheres, deposits vitamins E and C just below the surface of the skin for a second line of defense against sun-induced damage.
• A product from Evonik Industries uses water droplets coated in silica to make a “dry water.” When combined with a powder containing fragrances or vitamins and rubbed on skin or in hair, the water is released to form a cream that delivers the ingredients.

Ref.: Marc S. Reisch, Enhancing Cosmetics, Chemical & Engineering News, 2012 (open access)

Artist's view of a dust torus surrounding the accretion disk and central black hole in active galactic nuclei (credit: Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet)

By combining the light of three powerful infrared telescopes, an international research team has observed the active accretion phase of a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy tens of millions of light years away, yielding an unprecedented amount of data for such observations.

The resolution at which they were able to observe this highly luminescent active galactic nucleus (AGN) has given them direct confirmation of how mass accretes onto black holes in centers of galaxies.

“This three-telescope interferometry is a major milestone toward directly imaging the growth phase of supermassive black holes,” said Sebastian Hoenig, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Santa Barbara Department of Physics.

Very Large Telescope Interferometer at the ESO/Paranal Observatory in Chile (credit: Sebastian Hoenig)

They found that a ring of hot dust that marks the transition from a more-distant mixture of gas and dust in a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) structure to a gaseous disk closer to the black hole. The dusty part is interesting because it dominates the infrared emission of active galactic nuclei and can be easily observed, said Gerd Weigelt, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

By using the AMBER interferometry instrument to simultaneously combine the light from three 8-meter telescopes at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the research team was able to achieve the angular resolution needed to observe the hot dust ring. The Paranal Observatory is operated by the European Southern Observatories (ESO). To achieve the needed angular resolution in a single telescope, it would have to be 130 meters in diameter.

The combination of the light from the three telescopes was no small feat, as the tiny differences in the arrival of light in the individual telescopes have to undergo constant correction with an accuracy of a few microns.

Participating institutions:

• Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastronomy
• UCSB Department of Physics
• Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Firenze
• INAF — Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri
• Lagrange Laboratory,  University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, CNRS
• University Joseph Fourier (UJF) — Grenoble
• Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble (IPAG)

Ref.: G. Weigelt et al., VLTI/AMBER observations of the Seyfert nucleus of NGC 3783, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2012, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201219213 (open access)

Much of the mainstream aging research community has little interest in building therapies for aging, being focused on investigation only - though, fortunately, this situation is changing rapidly these days. The past stigma associated with public discussion of treating and ultimately preventing aging has largely evaporated within the scientific world.

Among those researchers who are interested in therapies for aging, most are focused on the slow boat of metabolic alteration: work that will have comparatively little pay-off even if successful, but which fits more readily into established research programs and the prejudices of research funding institutions.

The principal downside of metabolic alteration strategies, from my point of view, is that even if successful they cannot produce any significant longevity benefit in a person already old. All it can do is slow down aging by a modest amount - which isn't terribly useful those already aged and damaged. Even under the most optimistic estimates it will take another twenty years and many billions of dollars to see the evolution of a robust market in commercially available human metabolic enhancements to slow aging. It is a challenging field of research, and progress to date has been slow even in this era of rapid advances in biotechnology.

There is another disadvantage, which is illustrated by the different degrees to which life span is enhanced by similar strategies applied in mice versus humans. It is taken for granted in the literature, and thus probably not emphasized to the degree it should be, that an extension of life by 50% in mice based on some genetic or metabolic alteration - such as calorie restriction or growth hormone knockout - is probably not going to map to a similar extension of life in humans. If humans could achieve that sort of life extension through simply eating well and eating less or being growth hormone mutants, we'd have known about it by now. Consider Laron dwarfism, for example, or the generation after generation of practitioners of various degrees of calorie restriction that exist in many cultures.

With an eye to this second disadvantage, I'll point out an open access paper that considers the evolution of aging from the point of view of the maintenance gap. This is the gap between the cost of maintenance required to keep an organism from aging and the resources actually devoted to maintenance - both of which are subject to evolutionary selection pressures, which operate to maximize success in genetic propagation rather than the comfort or longevity of individual members of a species. The paper was published last year, but showed up in a recent issue of Biogerontology.

The maintenance gap: a new theoretical perspective on the evolution of aging

One of the prevailing theories of aging, the disposable soma theory, views aging as the result of the accumulation of damage through imperfect maintenance. Aging, then, is explained from an evolutionary perspective by asserting that this lack of maintenance exists because the required resources are better invested in reproduction. However, the amount of maintenance necessary to prevent aging, 'maintenance requirement' has so far been largely neglected and has certainly not been considered from an evolutionary perspective. To our knowledge we are the first to do so, and arrive at the conclusion that all maintenance requirement needs an evolutionary explanation.

Increases in maintenance requirement can only be selected for if these are linked with either higher fecundity or better capabilities to cope with environmental challenges to the integrity of the organism. Several observations are suggestive of the latter kind of trade-off, the existence of which leads to the inevitable conclusion that the level of maintenance requirement is in principle unbound. Even the allocation of all available resources to maintenance could be unable to stop aging in some organisms.

This has major implications for our understanding of the aging process on both the evolutionary and the mechanistic level. It means that the expected effect of measures to reallocate resources to maintenance from reproduction may be small in some species. We need to have an idea of how much maintenance is necessary in the first place. Our explorations of how natural selection is expected to act on the maintenance requirement provides the first step in understanding this.

The point to take away from this argument is that we should expect to find a broad variation between species in their response to similar forms of metabolic and genetic alteration aimed at extending life span. So far, that is what is seen, with we humans having the short end of the stick - though obviously there is an ocean of data yet to be obtained on this topic. On the whole, though, it seems like one more slowly building argument for the research community to focus on repair-based strategies for treating aging: build biotechnologies that are explicitly designed to repair forms of biological damage that existing repair systems either cannot handle or handle too slowly. SENS is the most obvious example, though I expect other, competing repair-focused visions to emerge in the years ahead as the SENS Foundation obtains further scientific support and promising research results.

Singularity University Announces Inaugural Synthetic Biology Accelerator Program

Startup founders will develop and launch transformative companies in the emerging field of synthetic biology at new Silicon Valley SynBio Startup Launchpad

Mountain View, CA (May 17, 2012)– Singularity University today announced the companies selected to participate in its inaugural synthetic biology accelerator program, SynBio Startup Launchpad. The program will nurture aspiring SynBio entrepreneurs seeking to apply the rapid-cycle, low-cost approaches employed by tech and biotech startups. Synthetic biology is genetic engineering using software-based design tools coupled with low-cost DNA synthesis and assembly.

The SynBio Program was conceived by Andrew Hessel, Co-Chair of SU’s Biotechnology and Bioinformatics track, and John Cumbers, Ph.D, a synthetic biologist working at NASA Ames Research Center. As Andrew Hessel explains, “advances in technology are allowing scientists to treat DNA, our genetic code, the same way people use code for software programming.”

The SynBio Startup Launchpad is Singularity University’s first formal initiative to support startups developing exponentially growing technologies. “The SynBio program brings together a powerful community seeking to support startups developing products from the emerging field of synthetic biology to address some of the world’s biggest challenges,” said Gabriel Baldinucci, Singularity University’s Vice President of Strategy and New Venture Development.

Three (3) companies have been selected for the SynBio Program: Evolutionary Solutions, Modern Meadow, and SoilGene. Evolutionary Solutions (founders Kettner Griswold and Paul Sebexen) is developing an oligo- to genome-scale synthesis device. Modern Meadow (co-founder Andras Forgacs) applies the latest advances in tissue engineering to produce a range of novel biomaterials for food and textile applications. SoilGene (founders Zachary Apte and Robert Lim) combines metagenomic and bioinformatic approaches to survey land opportunities for the natural resources and agriculture sectors.

A unique aspect of the SynBio program is its partnership with Triple Ring Technologies in Newark, California. The three selected companies will be based at Triple Ring to take advantage of its engineering and lab facilities, and their staff’s extensive expertise in life sciences innovation and commercialization. “We are excited to work with the SynBio entrepreneurs taking innovations to market in the emerging synthetic biology space,” said Joseph Heanue, Ph.D., president and CEO of Triple Ring Technologies.

The selected entrepreneurs will go through four months of comprehensive, customized mentoring and education in bringing their ideas to market. The companies receive close mentorship from a network of experienced advisors, weekly speakers on critical venture topics, networking with their peers, and valuable discounted services to launch their companies.

The first program will conclude in late August with the SynBio Companies pitching their ventures to investors and the community at “demo day” events.

About Singularity University

Singularity University’s mission is to assemble, educate, and inspire a new generation of leaders in business, science, finance, and government who strive to understand and use exponentially advancing technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges. Corporate Partners include Autodesk, Cisco, ePlanet Ventures, Genentech, Google, Kauffman Foundation, and Nokia. Since 2009, SU has hosted students and industry leaders from more than 60 countries at its campus at NASA Research Park, Moffett Field, CA.

SU offers a Summer Graduate Studies Program and numerous Executive Programs throughout the year focused on the impact and incubation of exponentially advancing technologies in the key areas of medicine and neuroscience, networks and computing systems, artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology and bioinformatics, nanotechnology, space and physical science, and energy and environmental systems. SU programs focus on the intersection of these areas with each other and with policy, law, and ethics; design; entrepreneurship; finance and economics; and futures studies and forecasting.

For more information about the SynBio program visit www.singularityu.org/synbio

SU Media contact: Diane Murphy (diane.murphy@singularityu.org)

SU Synbio Lab contact: Sandra Miller (Sandra.miller@singularityu.org)

 

 

Singularity University Welcomes Sandra Miller, Former Kauffman Foundation and Stanford Biodesign Executive, to Direct New Venture Activities, Including SU Labs

Mountain View, CA (May 16, 2012) — Singularity University (SU) has announced the appointment of Sandra Miller, an entrepreneurship education expert, as Managing Director of New Venture Development. Ms. Miller will be responsible for SU’s first incubation program, SynBio Startup Launchpad, while also working closely with Vice President of Strategy & New Venture Development Gabriel Baldinucci. Singularity Labs will be the model for SU’s work “after the classroom” and will encompass faculty and alumni research, new company generation and incubation, and innovation services for larger companies around the world.

“Sandra brings specialized experience to Singularity University and we are very excited to have her as a senior member of the Singularity University team. Sandra’s acumen in developing innovative entrepreneurship programs and advising early stage ventures is a perfect fit for SU, as we expand our offerings beyond education into the realm of catalyzing and mentoring companies around the world to solve humanity’s grand challenges,” said Singularity University CEO Rob Nail.

“Creating, incubating and financing companies to positively affect the lives of a billion people are central elements of SU’s vision. We call this 10^9+ impact,” said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, SU Chairman and Co-Founder. “Sandra’s extensive experience with leading entrepreneurship and innovation programs at the Kauffman Foundation, an SU Corporate Founder, and at the Stanford Biodesign Program are well suited to support SU’s entrepreneurial community.”

“I am honored to be a play a role in realizing Singularity University’s bold mission to positively impact a billion people, and am inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit of the Singularity University community,” said Miller.

Previously, Ms. Miller played a major role in the formation and growth of two world-class entrepreneurship education programs: Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation and the Stanford Biodesign Program, where she was Director and Managing Director, respectively. Sandra has advised more than 100 early stage technology-based companies and is an invited lecturer on the topics of entrepreneurship education, the commercialization of university research and related policies.

Sandra Miller has a BA from San Jose State University and MBA from Pepperdine University and completed the Women’s Director Development Program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

About Singularity University
Singularity University’s mission is to assemble, educate, and inspire a new generation of leaders in business, science, finance, and government who strive to understand and use exponentially advancing technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges. Corporate Partners include Autodesk, Cisco, ePlanet Ventures, Genentech, Google, Kauffman Foundation, and Nokia. Since 2009, SU has hosted students and industry leaders from more than 60 countries at its campus at NASA Research Park, Moffett Field, CA.
SU offers a Summer Graduate Studies Program and numerous Executive Programs throughout the year focused on the impact and incubation of exponentially advancing technologies in the key areas of medicine and neuroscience, networks and computing systems, artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology and bioinformatics, nanotechnology, space and physical science, and energy and environmental systems. SU programs focus on the intersection of these areas with each other, and with policy, law, and ethics; design; entrepreneurship; finance and economics; and futures studies and forecasting.

For more information about Singularity University visit www.singularityu.org

I don't normally post about Canadian politics on my blog, but we're starting to run into a serious problem, here. And his name is Stephen Harper.

I shuddered last year when Harper won a majority government, worried about what he might do with the added power. Now, his intentions are becoming increasingly clear: He's going to wage war on the environment. And he's going to do it in the most insidious way possible, using obfuscation and nasty tricks — and all driven by the myopic need to milk the Canadian landscape for all its got.

Specifically, the Conservative government is looking to pass Bill C-38, the Budget Implementation Act. The act itself is deliberately misnamed, as fully 30% of the 420 page bill has nothing to do with the budget at all. Instead, the bill serves as an attack on environmental legislation. Bill C-38, once passed, will repeal the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and introduce a watered-down approach to environmental assessment. It also re-writes the Fisheries Act, the Species at Risk Act, and the Navigable Waters Protection Act. In addition, it repeals the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, and cancels outright the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. A complete itemized list of Bill C-38's proposed changes can be found here.

Just as disturbing is the way the Harper government hopes to muzzle interest groups concerned with the environment. The charities sections now preclude gifts which may result in political activity. In addition, Harper's new counter-terrorism strategy lists environmentalism next to white supremacy as an “issue-based” terrorist threat. In other words, legitimate environmental groups, such as Greenpeace and Sierra Club Canada, could face some serious troubles should their efforts work to thwart the Conservative agenda. The strategy even lists animal rights groups as potential terrorist threats.

Even worse has been Harper's attack on scientists. It's gotten so bad in Canada that the journal Nature had to come out and slam the Conservative government for tightening the media protocols applied to federal government scientists and employees. Harper is doing his damnest to ensure that the Canadian public remain ignorant of the devastating impacts of his unchecked strategy on resource extraction.

Essentially, Harper is crippling anything that could undermine his scorched earth policy as far as resource extraction is concerned. The corporatist Conservatives are hellbent on exploiting the tar sands and building pipelines. It's all about squeezing the Canadian environment for every ounce its got, with no reflection on consequences — and with no sustainable vision for the future.

This will end badly for Canada and all Canadians.

A neural interface device allows patients to control a robotic arm with their minds.

Cathy Hutchinson hasn’t moved her limbs of her own volition for 15 years, but by imagining she was using her own hand, she controlled a robotic arm to pick up a thermos of coffee and took a sip. The technology is a neural interface system called BrainGate2, currently in clinical trials, which connects Cathy’s brain to a robot. The device is the result of over 10 years of research at Brown University and an extension of the first BrainGate in 2006, which allowed patients to control a computer cursor on a screen.

Cathy was one of two patients on the study, which was recently reported in Nature, who suffer from tetraplegia, a condition in which communication between the brain and the rest of the body is disconnected either through a stroke or damage to the spinal cord. Prof. John Donoghue, principal investigator on the BrainGate project, described their approach to Nature: “Our idea is to bypass that damaged nervous system and go directly from the brain to the outside world, so the brain signals cannot control muscles but machines and devices, like a computer or a robotic limb.” When Cathy controlled the arm with her mind to bring the coffee over for her to drink, the team was amazed.

Check out the video to see the moment for yourself:

As we previously introduced, BrainGate2 has three components: a sensor, a decoder, and assistive technology. The sensor consists of an array of 96 hair-thin electrodes the size of a children’s aspirin that is surgically implanted into the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls body movements. Neural activity is relayed through a gold wire to a computer (the decoder), which interprets the signals and produces a command for the robot arm. Two robotic arms have been tested in the study: the DEKA Arm System and the heavier DLR Light-Weight Robot III arm from the German Aerospace Centre.

Cathy has had the BrainGate sensor implanted in her brain for the last five years, as she was involved in previous studies with the system. During testing that took place one year ago, Cathy was able to successfully raise the coffee and drink from it using BrainGate2 four times out of six attempts. In another test of the BrainGate2 system, the two patients had to reach out and grab a ball in a 30-second window, and Cathy experienced better success with the DEKA arm (46 percent success rate) than the DLR arm (21 percent).

Prof. Donoghue explained to Nature that controlling the robotic arm is much more complicated than moving the cursor on a screen in the original BrainGate study: “To move from this type of two-dimensional movement to movements involving reaching out for an object, grasping it and then guiding it in three-dimensional space is a huge step for us. It seems like more than one additional dimension in complexity.” He emphasized that a lot of work needed to be done to improve the rate and accuracy of motion as well as improving the decoding algorithms for more complex motions.

The Brown researchers already have plans to make the sensor wireless and improve the robotic arm to allow for more complicated tasks, such as brushing teeth. In the long term, an alternative approach is being considered in which the signals from the decoder are transmitted to the patient’s muscles, allowing them to reuse their own limbs.

This is a huge stride for the field of brain-computer interfaces, and will undoubtedly inspire more surgical and nonsurgical approaches. Controlling objects with the mind makes for great science fiction, but people who suffer from conditions that prohibit motion due to spinal cord damage are on the cusp of regaining a part of themselves that they thought was lost forever. Furthermore, similar technologies will open up even more possibilities for mind control of objects as the programs that can translate neural signals into instructions become more sophisticated.

“All of us were standing in awe, more or less, because we’re watching her drinking the coffee,” Prof. Donoghue commented in the video. “It was really such a stunning scene.”

[Media: YouTube]

[Sources: Arstechnica, BrainGate, Nature, Nature Video]

Demonstration of ultrafast disintegration of matter by 2 keV LCLS pulses: The team combined techniques commonly used in solid state physics (Bragg reflection) with techniques from plasma physics (spectroscopy of diffusely-scattered light) to characterize ultrafast heating in graphite. (Credit: LLNL)

For the first time, scientists have seen an X-ray-irradiated mineral go to two different states of matter in about 40 femtoseconds (a femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second).

Using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford, Stefan Hau-Riege of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and colleagues heated graphite to induce a transition from solid to liquid and to warm-dense plasma.

Ultrafast phase transitions from solid to liquid and plasma states are important in the development of new material-synthesis techniques, in ultrafast imaging, and high-energy density science.

By using different pulse lengths and calculating different spectra, the team was able to extract the time dependence of plasma parameters, such as electron and ion temperatures and ionization states.

“We found that the heating and disintegration of the ion lattice occurs much faster than anticipated,” Hau-Riege said.

The research provides new insights into the behavior of matter irradiated by intense hard X-rays. Though the study ultimately serves as a breakthrough in plasma physics and ultrafast materials science, it also affects other fields such as single molecule biological imaging and X-ray optics.

For single-molecule bioimaging, the team found that in certain cases it may be substantially more difficult than anticipated because energy transfer is surprisingly fast. In X-ray optics, they found that the damage threshold is lower than anticipated.

This is the first XFEL high-energy density science experiment that used inelastic X-ray scattering as a plasma diagnostic.

In addition to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, participating institutions include Universitat Duisburg-Essen; Max Planck Advanced Study Group, Center for Free Electron Laser Science; Max Planck Institut fur medizinische Forschung; and Max Planck Institut fur Kernphysik, all of Germany.

Ref.: Forthcoming in May 21 edition of Physical Review Letters.