The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| US teen designs compact nuclear reactor Posted: 02 Mar 2013 09:35 PM PST
The American teen, who gained fame four years ago after designing a fusion reactor he planned to build in the garage of his family's home, shared his latest endeavour at a TED Conference in southern California on Thursday. "It's about bringing something old, fission, into the 21st Century," Wilson said. "I think this has huge potential to change the world." He has designed a small reactor capable of generating 50-100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power as many as 100,000 homes. The reactor can be made assembly-line style and powered by molten radioactive material from nuclear weapons, Wilson said. The relatively small, modular reactor can be shipped sealed with enough fuel to last for 30 years. "You can plop them down anywhere in the world and they work, buried under the ground for security reasons," he said, while detailing his design at TED. "In the Cold War we built up this huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and we don't need them anymore," Wilson said. "It would be great if we could eat them up, and this reactor loves this stuff." His reactors are designed to spin turbines using gas instead of steam, meaning they operate at temperatures lower than those of typical nuclear reactors and don't spew anything if there is a breach. The fuel is in the form of molten salt, and the reactors don't need to be pressurised, according to the teenager. "In the event of an accident, you can just drain the core into a tank under the reactor with neutron absorbers and the reaction stops," Wilson said. "There is no inclination for the fission products to leave this reactor," he said. "In an accident, the reactor may be toast, which is sorry for the power company, but there is no problem." Wilson, who graduated grade school in May, said he is putting off university to focus on a company he created to make Modular Fission Reactors. He sees his competition as nations, particularly China, and the roadblocks ahead as political instead of technical. Wilson planned to have a prototype ready in two years and a product to market in five years. "Not only does it combat climate change, it can bring power to the developing world," Wilson said with teenage optimism. "Imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket designed by those planning to habitat other planets. Not only would you have power for propulsion, but power once you get there." — AFP/Relaxnews |
| Scientists link two rats’ brains, a continent apart Posted: 02 Mar 2013 03:56 PM PST
With electrodes imbedded in its cortex, a rat in a research institute in Natal, Brazil sent signals via the Internet to a counterpart at a university lab in Durham, North Carolina, helping the second animal to get a reward. The exploit opens up the prospect of linking brains among animals to create an "organic computer," said Brazilian neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis. It also helps the quest to empower patients stricken with paralysis or locked-in syndrome, he said. "We established a functional linkage between two brains. We created a superbrain that comprises two brains," Nicolelis said in a phone interview with AFP. Published in the journal Scientific Reports, Nicolelis' team gave basic training to thirsty rats, who had to recognise lights and operate a lever to get a reward of water. They then implanted ultra-fine electrodes in the rats' brains, which were linked by a slender overhead cable to a computer. In a glass tank in Natal, the first rat was the "encoder," its brain sending out a stream of electrical pulses as it figured out the tricks for getting the reward. The pulses were sent in real time into the cortex of the second rat, or "decoder," rat, which was facing identical apparatus in a tank in North Carolina. With these prompts from its chum, the decoder rat swiftly found the reward in turn. "The pair of animals collaborated to solve a task together," said Nicolelis. What the second rat received were not thoughts, nor were they images, Nicolelis said. When the encoder rat achieved various tasks, the peaks in his brain signals were transcribed into a telltale pattern of electronic signals that were received by the decoder rat. Once the rat recognised the usefulness of these patterns, they became incorporated into its visual and tactile processing. "The second rat learns to recognise a pattern, a statistical pattern, that describes a decision taken by the first rat. He's creating an association of that pattern with a decision," said Nicolelis. "He may be feeling a little tactile stimulus, but it's something that we don't know how to describe because we cannot question the subject." The linkage "suggests we could create a brain net, formed of joined-up brains, all interacting," the scientist said, hastening to stress that such experiments would only be conducted on lab animals, not humans. "If you connect several animal brains, rat brains or primate brains, you probably could be creating an organic computer that is a non-Turing machine, a machine that doesn't work according to the Turing design of all the digital computers that we know. It would be heuristic, it wouldn't use an algorithm, and it would uses probabilistic decision-making based on organic hardware." Still unclear is how the decoder animal incorporates the encoder's signals into its mental space, a phenomenon called cortical plasticity. "We basically show that the decoder animal can incorporate another body as an extension of the map that the animal has in it's own brain," said Nicolelis, adding, though: "We don't know how this is done." Nicolelis carries out research at Duke University in Durham and at the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute for Neuroscience of Natal, or ELS-IINN. A decade ago, he leapt to prominence for pioneering work in having lab monkeys move a robotic arm through brain impulses. The latest work should help this, he said: "We are learning ways to interact with and send messages to the mammalian brain that will be fundamental for our goals of medical rehabilitation." His next goal is to have a paraplegic patient give the official kickoff to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, using a brain-machine interface to activate an artificial limb. — AFP/Relaxnews |
RIO DE JANEIRO, March 3 — Creating a "superbrain" of connected minds, scientists on Thursday said they had enabled a rat to help a fellow rodent while the animals were a continent apart but connected through brain electrodes.| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Features To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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