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Robot physio helps people walk again
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Play with shadows to signal aliens at the University of St Andrews, UK (arxiv.org/abs/1707.03730). Forgan modelled 500 points in the galaxy, each representing a civilisation that can manipulate its planet’s transit in a visible way. That’s relatively conservative; some researchers estimate there could be millions of alien societies that advanced. He determined how long it would take for each point to be lined up to see a transit at another point, slowly building a web across the galaxy.
HELLO from the other side of the galaxy. If there are advanced alien civilisations in the Milky Way, we ought to be thinking about how to introduce ourselves to them. The vastness of interstellar space makes that difficult, but a simulation suggests that stars could feasibly be used as lighthouse beacons. Just as rail systems use flashing lights as signals, we could one day alter the light shining from our sun, like waving a hand in front of a torch to encode a message. One way to do that is to build a planet-sized sheet in orbit around the sun, by lassoing swathes of asteroids or mining a chunk out of Mercury. Another, more feasible, idea is to add a message encoded in laser light to Earth’s silhouette as it passes in front of the sun, an event called a transit. Yes, it would be tricky. But if aliens were attempting to make contact, we could eventually cooperate with them to create a galactic communications network. “Eventually” here means at least 300,000 years, according to a simulation by Duncan Forgan
Robot physio helps people walk again ARTIFICIAL intelligence is helping people regain their mobility after a stroke or spinal injury. A robot harness overseen by a neural network offers tailored treatment that has improved people’s ability to walk normally. In the past, several physiotherapists were needed to physically support and guide each person through the process of 14 | NewScientist | 29 July 2017
SIPA USA/SIPA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Leah Crane
learning to walk again. As staff are expensive, robotic harnesses were introduced. But they offer limited help and can even cause gait problems if abnormal movements aren’t spotted. Rather than simply supporting a person’s weight, as existing harnesses do, the new smart RYSEN system can also correct gait by pushing people forward or back, or side to side. It collects information on leg movement, stride patterns and muscle activity from body sensors and feeds it into an algorithm. This allows the system to provide assistance tailored to how the person walks by deciding
Chatting with them all would need a kind of relay network to avoid celestial obstacles. “If you want to communicate with someone on the other side of the galactic centre, there’s lots of stuff in the way – dust, stars, a big black hole – so you can take the long way around using the network,” says Forgan. To spot extraterrestrial signals, you would generally have to be looking in just the right direction at just the right time. So Forgan focused on planets transiting their stars, because this happens regularly. If the orbit of another world is suitably aligned so that we can see it passing in front of its sun, then we could simply track such events, provided the
inhabitants are able to alter the look of these transits as a signal. In other words, the predictable orbit of a planet around its star helps us know when to look for any message being transmitted. “It’s a way to synchronise our watches,” Forgan says. Constructing any kind of orbiting object enormous enough to signal with would take a lot of work, though, and that makes it an unlikely eventuality, says Avi Loeb at Harvard University. Even if we could build something suitable, we might decide to apply our talents in other ways. “Once a civilisation is advanced enough to have the technology to build megastructures, it’s much more likely to leave its planet,” he says. If future humans decided to listen for alien responses to our signals, they would have to wait generations. “Each signal would take thousands of years to travel back and forth,” Loeb says. “In cosmic time that may not be that long, but you need patience.” That’s not to mention the interstellar politics involved in setting up a galactic network. The upside of communication with transit is that we already have missions such as the Kepler space telescope watching for planets passing in front of their stars. If other planets are seeking to make contact in this way, we won’t have to do any extra work –Could be a very long-distance call– to detect them. n
how much force to apply to their trunk to produce a natural gait. “The algorithm evaluates the optimal amount of body weight support for each patient,” says Grégoire Courtine, one of the team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne who created the harness. This helps them rebuild lost muscle mass and relearn posture and movement, while also retraining
“The smart harness system can correct people’s gait by pushing them forward or back, or side to side”
their brains to handle the delicate balance between gravity and forward motion that walking requires. The new system improved the in-harness gait of people following a stroke or a spinal injury. And after a single, 1-hour training session with the harness, people with spinal cord injury showed immediate improvement in their gait out of the harness over those given no physio session at all (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/b9t9). The next goal, says Courtine, is to commercialise the harness alongside further clinical trials. Nicole Kobie n
Play with shadows to signal aliens at the University of St Andrews, UK (arxiv.org/abs/1707.03730). Forgan modelled 500 points in the galaxy, each representing a civilisation that can manipulate its planet’s transit in a visible way. That’s relatively conservative; some researchers estimate there could be millions of alien societies that advanced. He determined how long it would take for each point to be lined up to see a transit at another point, slowly building a web across the galaxy.
HELLO from the other side of the galaxy. If there are advanced alien civilisations in the Milky Way, we ought to be thinking about how to introduce ourselves to them. The vastness of interstellar space makes that difficult, but a simulation suggests that stars could feasibly be used as lighthouse beacons. Just as rail systems use flashing lights as signals, we could one day alter the light shining from our sun, like waving a hand in front of a torch to encode a message. One way to do that is to build a planet-sized sheet in orbit around the sun, by lassoing swathes of asteroids or mining a chunk out of Mercury. Another, more feasible, idea is to add a message encoded in laser light to Earth’s silhouette as it passes in front of the sun, an event called a transit. Yes, it would be tricky. But if aliens were attempting to make contact, we could eventually cooperate with them to create a galactic communications network. “Eventually” here means at least 300,000 years, according to a simulation by Duncan Forgan
Robot physio helps people walk again ARTIFICIAL intelligence is helping people regain their mobility after a stroke or spinal injury. A robot harness overseen by a neural network offers tailored treatment that has improved people’s ability to walk normally. In the past, several physiotherapists were needed to physically support and guide each person through the process of 14 | NewScientist | 29 July 2017
SIPA USA/SIPA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Leah Crane
learning to walk again. As staff are expensive, robotic harnesses were introduced. But they offer limited help and can even cause gait problems if abnormal movements aren’t spotted. Rather than simply supporting a person’s weight, as existing harnesses do, the new smart RYSEN system can also correct gait by pushing people forward or back, or side to side. It collects information on leg movement, stride patterns and muscle activity from body sensors and feeds it into an algorithm. This allows the system to provide assistance tailored to how the person walks by deciding
Chatting with them all would need a kind of relay network to avoid celestial obstacles. “If you want to communicate with someone on the other side of the galactic centre, there’s lots of stuff in the way – dust, stars, a big black hole – so you can take the long way around using the network,” says Forgan. To spot extraterrestrial signals, you would generally have to be looking in just the right direction at just the right time. So Forgan focused on planets transiting their stars, because this happens regularly. If the orbit of another world is suitably aligned so that we can see it passing in front of its sun, then we could simply track such events, provided the
inhabitants are able to alter the look of these transits as a signal. In other words, the predictable orbit of a planet around its star helps us know when to look for any message being transmitted. “It’s a way to synchronise our watches,” Forgan says. Constructing any kind of orbiting object enormous enough to signal with would take a lot of work, though, and that makes it an unlikely eventuality, says Avi Loeb at Harvard University. Even if we could build something suitable, we might decide to apply our talents in other ways. “Once a civilisation is advanced enough to have the technology to build megastructures, it’s much more likely to leave its planet,” he says. If future humans decided to listen for alien responses to our signals, they would have to wait generations. “Each signal would take thousands of years to travel back and forth,” Loeb says. “In cosmic time that may not be that long, but you need patience.” That’s not to mention the interstellar politics involved in setting up a galactic network. The upside of communication with transit is that we already have missions such as the Kepler space telescope watching for planets passing in front of their stars. If other planets are seeking to make contact in this way, we won’t have to do any extra work –Could be a very long-distance call– to detect them. n
how much force to apply to their trunk to produce a natural gait. “The algorithm evaluates the optimal amount of body weight support for each patient,” says Grégoire Courtine, one of the team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne who created the harness. This helps them rebuild lost muscle mass and relearn posture and movement, while also retraining
“The smart harness system can correct people’s gait by pushing them forward or back, or side to side”
their brains to handle the delicate balance between gravity and forward motion that walking requires. The new system improved the in-harness gait of people following a stroke or a spinal injury. And after a single, 1-hour training session with the harness, people with spinal cord injury showed immediate improvement in their gait out of the harness over those given no physio session at all (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/b9t9). The next goal, says Courtine, is to commercialise the harness alongside further clinical trials. Nicole Kobie n