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Implant teaching paralysed man to talk again
SUE KYLIONEN/THE IMAGE BANK/GETTY
Technology IT SPEAKS YOUR THOUGHTS
MOTORISTS who talk on their cellphones while driving often claim it is no more dangerous than chatting to a passenger. That has been disproved – and it now turns out that having someone in the car actually improves safety. People drive more carefully if they are carrying passengers, says Chris Lee at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. And the more passengers on board, the safer the driving gets. Lee concluded this after studying car-accident statistics for a 50-kilometre stretch of freeway in Florida. Writing in Accident Analysis and Prevention, he argues that the responsibility drivers feel towards their passengers might outweigh any distraction from talking to them, with one major caveat: youngsters drove worse if their passenger was younger than they were.
–Say aaah–
100 million. The number of YouTube viewers whose email and IP addresses Google must hand over to Viacom as evidence in a US court case
Snaky generator or electric eel?
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Drive safe, drive in company
The software is now translating Ramsey’s thoughts into sounds in real time, so Ramsey hears his “voice” as he makes a sound. As he tries to speak, the electrode picks up the signal from his brain and passes it to the software, which works out the shape of the vocal tract that Ramsey is attempting to form. A synthesiser then produces the corresponding sound. This gives Ramsey immediate feedback on his pronunciation, which he can use to hone his speaking skills in the same way infants do when learning to talk. Over the course of several trials, the proportion of occasions on which Ramsey produced the correct vowel sound has risen from 45 to 80 per cent, Guenther told the Acoustics 2008 conference in Paris, France, last week.
A French court has ordered eBay to pay compensation for fake goods sold on its site
The human genome is coming to Wikipedia – one gene at a time. The Gene Wiki project is using a computer program to retrieve and collate information on gene sequences, location and function from scientific databases. Over 8000 entries, from the myoglobin gene to sonic hedgehog, have been updated or created so far.
€38.6 million July 2008, ordered to pay compensation to LVMH, owner of Dior, Guerlain, Givenchy and Kenzo
€20,000 June 2008, paid in compensation to Hermes (handbags) Still to come: Tiffany (jewellery) and L’Oréal (perfume)
A GIANT rubber snake could be the future of renewable energy. The rippling “Anaconda” produces electricity as it is squeezed by passing waves. The device is a flexible tube filled with seawater and sealed at both ends like a sausage. Each wave squeezes the tube, producing a bulging pressure wave that travels down its length. When the bulge reaches
the end it sets turbines spinning, generating electricity. Full-scale versions will be 7 metres across, 200 metres long and could produce 1 megawatt of power. Mini Anacondas a few metres long are now being tested by John Chaplin and Grant Hearn at the University of Southampton, UK. They hope to test a one-third scale model in the sea next year. Chaplin says a rubber structure with few mechanical parts will be more resilient than existing wave-power devices.
GIZMO
COSTLY COUNTERFEITS
SOURCE: REUTERS
Nine years after a brain-stem stroke left Erik Ramsey almost totally paralysed, he is learning to talk again – starting with basic vowel sounds. In 2004, Ramsey had an electrode implanted in his speech-motor cortex by Philip Kennedy’s team at Neural Signals in Duluth, Georgia, who hoped the signal it picked up could be used to restore his speech. Interpreting these signals proved tricky, but fortunately Frank Guenther’s team at Boston University were working on the same problem. They used information from MRI scans of healthy people to pick up activity from their brains as they controlled the position of the lips, tongue, jaw and larynx to produce speech, and used this to develop software that could recognise and translate the patterns of brain activity during speech.
Look out, MRSA. Virginia Davis and colleagues at Auburn University in Alabama have created long-lasting antibacterial coatings for hospitals, food packaging and medical implants by combining carbon nanotubes with lysozyme molecules, which kill bacteria by destroying their cell walls. The lysozyme also helps the nanotubes spread out into hard, thin films. A stack of these films just 200 nanometres thick cut the number of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria by 94 per cent (Nano Letters, DOI: 10.1021/nl080522t).
“It’s a world where relationships are disposed of at the click of a mouse” Himanshu Tyagi, a psychiatrist at West London Mental Health Trust in the UK, claims that online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are fostering the idea among their users that friendships can be formed and destroyed quickly and easily (The Daily Telegraph, London, 4 July)
www.newscientist.com
12 July 2008 | NewScientist | 25
Technology IT SPEAKS YOUR THOUGHTS
MOTORISTS who talk on their cellphones while driving often claim it is no more dangerous than chatting to a passenger. That has been disproved – and it now turns out that having someone in the car actually improves safety. People drive more carefully if they are carrying passengers, says Chris Lee at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. And the more passengers on board, the safer the driving gets. Lee concluded this after studying car-accident statistics for a 50-kilometre stretch of freeway in Florida. Writing in Accident Analysis and Prevention, he argues that the responsibility drivers feel towards their passengers might outweigh any distraction from talking to them, with one major caveat: youngsters drove worse if their passenger was younger than they were.
–Say aaah–
100 million. The number of YouTube viewers whose email and IP addresses Google must hand over to Viacom as evidence in a US court case
Snaky generator or electric eel?
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Drive safe, drive in company
The software is now translating Ramsey’s thoughts into sounds in real time, so Ramsey hears his “voice” as he makes a sound. As he tries to speak, the electrode picks up the signal from his brain and passes it to the software, which works out the shape of the vocal tract that Ramsey is attempting to form. A synthesiser then produces the corresponding sound. This gives Ramsey immediate feedback on his pronunciation, which he can use to hone his speaking skills in the same way infants do when learning to talk. Over the course of several trials, the proportion of occasions on which Ramsey produced the correct vowel sound has risen from 45 to 80 per cent, Guenther told the Acoustics 2008 conference in Paris, France, last week.
A French court has ordered eBay to pay compensation for fake goods sold on its site
The human genome is coming to Wikipedia – one gene at a time. The Gene Wiki project is using a computer program to retrieve and collate information on gene sequences, location and function from scientific databases. Over 8000 entries, from the myoglobin gene to sonic hedgehog, have been updated or created so far.
€38.6 million July 2008, ordered to pay compensation to LVMH, owner of Dior, Guerlain, Givenchy and Kenzo
€20,000 June 2008, paid in compensation to Hermes (handbags) Still to come: Tiffany (jewellery) and L’Oréal (perfume)
A GIANT rubber snake could be the future of renewable energy. The rippling “Anaconda” produces electricity as it is squeezed by passing waves. The device is a flexible tube filled with seawater and sealed at both ends like a sausage. Each wave squeezes the tube, producing a bulging pressure wave that travels down its length. When the bulge reaches
the end it sets turbines spinning, generating electricity. Full-scale versions will be 7 metres across, 200 metres long and could produce 1 megawatt of power. Mini Anacondas a few metres long are now being tested by John Chaplin and Grant Hearn at the University of Southampton, UK. They hope to test a one-third scale model in the sea next year. Chaplin says a rubber structure with few mechanical parts will be more resilient than existing wave-power devices.
GIZMO
COSTLY COUNTERFEITS
SOURCE: REUTERS
Nine years after a brain-stem stroke left Erik Ramsey almost totally paralysed, he is learning to talk again – starting with basic vowel sounds. In 2004, Ramsey had an electrode implanted in his speech-motor cortex by Philip Kennedy’s team at Neural Signals in Duluth, Georgia, who hoped the signal it picked up could be used to restore his speech. Interpreting these signals proved tricky, but fortunately Frank Guenther’s team at Boston University were working on the same problem. They used information from MRI scans of healthy people to pick up activity from their brains as they controlled the position of the lips, tongue, jaw and larynx to produce speech, and used this to develop software that could recognise and translate the patterns of brain activity during speech.
Look out, MRSA. Virginia Davis and colleagues at Auburn University in Alabama have created long-lasting antibacterial coatings for hospitals, food packaging and medical implants by combining carbon nanotubes with lysozyme molecules, which kill bacteria by destroying their cell walls. The lysozyme also helps the nanotubes spread out into hard, thin films. A stack of these films just 200 nanometres thick cut the number of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria by 94 per cent (Nano Letters, DOI: 10.1021/nl080522t).
“It’s a world where relationships are disposed of at the click of a mouse” Himanshu Tyagi, a psychiatrist at West London Mental Health Trust in the UK, claims that online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are fostering the idea among their users that friendships can be formed and destroyed quickly and easily (The Daily Telegraph, London, 4 July)
www.newscientist.com
12 July 2008 | NewScientist | 25