XPL Cream Creates A 24-Hour Layer Of Skin To Cover Up Wrinkles And Blemishes
There’s no shortage of beauty products that claim to reduce wrinkles.
Whether any of them work, however, is highly disputed. While the XPL,
short for cross-linked polymer layer, won’t magically erase the signs of
aging like those suspicious beauty products swear to do, it can
literally shave decades off your face by covering your wrinkles up.
Instead of turning back the clock on your skin like most anti-aging
products claim to do, this new material is designed to merely mask the
signs of aging. You know, just like makeup.
Except, it’s made up of a skin-like material that can be applied to any
part of your skin, covering up wrinkles, crow’s feet, and any other
blemish for up to 24 hours at a time.
Developed by researchers from MIT and Harvard, the XPL is applied in a
two-step process. In the first step, polysiloxane components are
applied to the skin, after which, a platinum catalyst is added to
stiffen it up into a cross-linked film that looks and feels like regular
skin. While that sounds technical, both layers are actually applied in
the form of creams and ointments, so it should be no more complicated
than your regular beauty routine. Aside from its cosmetic functions, the
material can be used to protect damaged skin similar to bandages, as
well as deliver topical skin medications while ensuring it doesn’t get
wiped or washed off.
A startup called Olivo Laboratories has been formed to further refine
and develop XPL, with plans to bring it to market in the near future.
Learn more about the research from the link below.
Kobi Garden Robot Trims Grass, Mulches Leaves, And Removes Snow
We’ve already seen robotic lawnmowers
that autonomously keep your garden in tip-top shape. Kobi, however, is
much more than that. Billed as an “all-season garden robot,” it’s rigged
to capably mow grass, mulch leaves, and remove snow, giving you a
hands-free way to maintain lawns and gardens all year round.
Just like indoor cleaning robots, the automaton will need to make a
digital map of the area it will maintain. As such, you’ll need to show
it the physical parameters of your property, define the boundaries, and
let it know all the fixed obstacles. From there, it will simply rely on
that digital map, along with its GPS and safety sensors, to find its way
around your place.
A proactive robot, Kobi can be programmed to perform daily
maintenance in your property, so your grass will always be perfectly
trimmed, with absolutely no leaves in sight. During snow season, it does
the same thing, removing every small amount of snow it comes across, so
there’s little chance you’ll wake up with a big pile of powder. It
relies on real-time weather reports (it’s connected, after all) to know
whether it’s snowing, too, so it can start removing powder all on its
own.
During operation, it runs at speeds of up to 2 mph, with fully
autonomous recharging, so it will find its own way to the docking
station when needed. Do note, the amount of area it can cover will
depend on the activity. As in, while it can maintain lawns up to 7
acres, it can only pick up leaves within a 3 acre range as well as
remove snow within 0.37 acres. While that might be a concern for
multi-millionaires who live in giant properties, we’re guessing that’s
enough for most homeowners.
Kobi is currently in the consumer testing phase. When released, it will be priced at $3,999
Preserving Bodies in a Deep Freeze: 50 Years Later
By Peter Gwynne, INSN Contributor |
Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
(Inside Science) -- Early in the 1960s, a group of enthusiasts advanced
the concept of freezing humans as soon as they die, in hopes of
reviving them after the arrival of medical advances able to cure the
conditions that killed them. The idea went into practice for the first
time 50 years ago.
On Jan. 12, 1967, James Bedford, an emeritus professor of psychology at
the University of California, became the first person to be
"cyropreserved." A small team of doctors and other enthusiasts froze him
a few hours after he died from liver cancer that had spread to his
lungs.
A few days later the team placed the body into an insulated container
packed with dry ice. Later still, Bedford was immersed in liquid
nitrogen in a large Dewar container. Fifteen years on, after a series of
moves from one cryopreservation facility to another, his body found a
home at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona,
where it still resides.
By current standards of cryonics, the procedure was remarkably untidy
and disorganized. Nevertheless, a visual evaluation of Bedford's
condition in 1991 found that his body had remained frozen and suffered
no obvious deterioration.
"There's no date set for another examination," said R. Michael Perry, care services manager at Alcor.
But as promoters of cryopreservation celebrate the 50th anniversary of
Bedford's death and freezing -- known to some as "Bedford Day" -- they
emphasize improvements to the freezing and preservation procedures that
Bedford's experiences advanced.
The community is also undergoing a significant change in its
expectations for reviving frozen patients. Rather than planning for a
Lazarus-like resuscitation of the entire body, some proponents of the
technology focus more on saving individuals' stored memories, and
perhaps incorporating them into robots.
Aura of suspicion
Beyond the cryopreservation community, however, an aura of scientific suspicion that surrounded Bedford's freezing remains.
"Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the
promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead
tissue offered by the 'cryonics' industry," neuroscientist Michael
Hendricks of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, wrote in Technology Review.
Scientists aren't the industry's only critics.
Families of individuals designated for freezing -- including Bedford's
own family -- have gone to court to protest or defend loved ones'
decisions to undergo freezing.
In a more recent case, in 2011, a Colorado probate judge upheld a
contract that Mary Robbins had signed with Alcor over objections from
Robbins' children. And last year the High Court of England upheld a
mother's right to seek cryonic treatment of her terminally ill
14-year-old daughter after her death, despite the father's wishes.
Public reaction to the technology reached its nadir in New England in
2002, when court documents revealed that Boston Red Sox baseball icon
Ted Williams was frozen in the Alcor facility, with his head severed
from his body. Williams' son John Henry, who arranged the process, was
himself frozen after he died of leukemia.
Politics has also impacted the technology's progress. In 2004, for
example, Michigan's state government voted to license a facility called
the Cryonics Institute, located in Clinton, as a cemetery. That move,
reversed eight years later, prevented the institute from preparing
bodies for cryopreservation on its own, because applying such procedures
to a dead body required the services of a licensed funeral director.
The cryonics industry flatly disagrees with its critics.
Alcor asserts on its website that
"[t]here are no known credible technical arguments that lead one to
conclude that cryonics, carried out under good conditions today, would
not work." The company adds: "Cryonics is a belief that no one is really
dead until the information content of the brain is lost, and that low
temperatures can prevent this loss."
Certainly the controversies have not discouraged candidates for cryopreservation.
Worldwide, more than 250 individuals are now housed in cryonic
facilities, at a minimum per-person cost of about $28,000 in the U.S.
Russia's KrioRus company offers a cut-rate level starting at $12,000,
with the condition that it stores several human bodies and assorted pets
and other animals in communal Dewar containers. Individual contracts
can specify the length of storage. At present, the U.S. and Russia are
the only countries with facilities that offer human cryopreservation.
Difficult beginning
The first attempt at cryopreservation did not go particularly smoothly.
Bedford died before all preparations for his cryopreservation were
complete. So instead of draining his blood and replacing it with a
customized antifreeze solution to protect the body's tissues from
freezing damage, the team simply injected the antifreeze into Bedford's
arteries without removing the blood.
The team then surrounded the body in dry ice, and started it on a
series of transfers from one container to another that ended up in a
Dewar container in Alcor's facility.
Because of those difficulties, cryonics experts feared that the body
had suffered serious damage. But the examination in 1991 quelled those
concerns.
"We were really relieved that he was not discolored," Perry recalled.
"And corners of the ice cubes [around him] were still sharp; he had
stayed frozen all the time."
In recent years, cryonics promoters have borrowed from medical advances in such fields as cryobiology and nanobiology.
To prevent ice crystals from damaging cell walls in the frozen state,
cryopreservationists replace the body's blood supply with mixtures of
antifreeze compounds and organ preservatives -- a technique developed to
preserve frozen eggs for fertility treatments.
Another emerging approach accounts for the separation of Ted Williams'
head and body. Based on studies of roundworms, promoters of cryonics
argue that freezing can preserve the contents of individuals' brains
even if their bodies can't be revived. That opens the possibility of
downloading cryopreserved personalities into a robotic future body.
Hendricks disagrees. "While it may be possible to preserve these
features in dead tissue, that is certainly not happening now," he
pointed out in Technology Review.
A distant dream
Scientists such as Barry Fuller, a professor of surgical science and
low temperature medicine at England's University College, London,
emphasize that even preserving body parts in such a way that they remain
viable on thawing remains a distant dream.
"There is ongoing research into these scientific challenges, and a
potential future demonstration of the ability to cryopreserve human
organs for transplantation would be a major first step into proving the
concept," he told The Guardian. "But at the moment we cannot achieve that."
Nevertheless, Perry expresses optimism about a timeline for the revival of frozen humans.
"We think in terms of decades," he said. "Sometimes we say fifty to a hundred years."
David Gorski, a surgeon at Wayne State University Medical Center in Michigan, takes a darker view.
"Fifty years from now," he said, "it's likely that all that will remain
of my existence will be some scientific papers and a faint memory held
by my nieces and nephews and maybe, if I'm lucky, a few of my youngest
readers." This article is provided by Inside Science News Service, which is supported by the American Institute of Physics.
Ultrafast Camera Captures 'Sonic Booms' of Light for First Time
By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor |
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This graphic shows a so-called
photonic Mach cone, which is sort of like a sonic boom; but in this
instance, you can see the cone-shaped wake of light pulses.
Credit: Jinyang Liang and Lihong V. Wang
Just as aircraft flying at supersonic speeds create cone-shaped sonic
booms, pulses of light can leave behind cone-shaped wakes of light. Now,
a superfast camera has captured the first-ever video of these events.
The new technology used to make this discovery could one day allow scientists to help watch neurons fire and image live activity in the brain, researchers say. [Spooky! Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena]
Science behind the tech
When an object moves through air, it propels the air in front of it away, creating pressure waves that move at the speed of sound in
all directions. If the object is moving at speeds equal to or greater
than sound, it outruns those pressure waves. As a result, the pressure
waves from these speeding objects pile up on top of each other to create
shock waves known as sonic booms, which are akin to claps of thunder.
Sonic booms are confined to conical regions known as "Mach cones" that
extend primarily to the rear of supersonic objects. Similar events
include the V-shaped bow waves that a boat can generate when traveling
faster than the waves it pushes out of its way move across the water.
Previous research suggested that light can generate conical wakes
similar to sonic booms. Now, for the first time, scientists have imaged
these elusive "photonic Mach cones."
Light travels at a speed of about 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second) when moving through vacuum. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in
a vacuum. However, light can travel more slowly than its top speed —
for instance, light moves through glass at speeds of about 60 percent of
its maximum. Indeed, prior experiments have slowed light down more than a million-fold.
The fact that light can travel faster in one material than in another
helped scientists to generate photonic Mach cones. First,study lead
author Jinyang Liang, an optical engineer at Washington University in
St. Louis, and his colleagues designed a narrow tunnel filled with dry
ice fog. This tunnel was sandwiched between plates made of a mixture of
silicone rubber and aluminum oxide powder.
Then, the researchers fired pulses of green laser light — each lasting
only 7 picoseconds (trillionths of a second) — down the tunnel. These
pulses could scatter off the specks of dry ice within the tunnel,
generating light waves that could enter the surrounding plates.
The green light that the scientists used traveled faster inside the
tunnel than it did in the plates. As such, as a laser pulse moved down
the tunnel, it left a cone of slower-moving overlapping light waves
behind it within the plates.
Using a "streak camera," scientists have imaged a cone-shaped wake of light called a photonic Mach cone for the first time.
Credit: Liang et al. Sci. Adv.2017;3:e1601814
Streak camera
To capture video of these elusive light-scattering events, the researchers developed a "streak camera"
that could capture images at speeds of 100 billion frames per second in
a single exposure. This new camera captured three different views of
the phenomenon: one that acquired a direct image of the scene, and two
that recorded temporal information of the events so that the scientists
could reconstruct what happened frame by frame. Essentially, they "put
different bar codes on each individual image, so that even if during the
data acquisition they are all mixed together, we can sort them out,"
Liang said in an interview.
There are other imaging systems that can capture ultrafast events, but
these systems usually need to record hundreds or thousands of exposures
of such phenomena before they can see them. In contrast, the new system
can record ultrafast events with just a single exposure. This lends
itself to recording complex, unpredictable events that may not repeat
themselves in precisely the same manner each time they happen, as was
the case with the photonic Mach cones that Liang and his colleagues
recorded. In that case, the tiny specks that scattered light moved
around randomly.
The researchers said their new technique could prove useful in
recording ultrafast events in complex biomedical contexts such as living
tissues or flowing blood. "Our camera is fast enough to watch neurons
fire and image live traffic in the brain," Liang told Live Science. "We
hope we can use our system to study neural networks to understand how
the brain works."
The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 20 in the journal Science Advances.
Original article on Live Science.
Virtual reality (VR) typically refers to computer technologies that use software
to generate realistic images, sounds and other sensations that
replicate a real environment (or create an imaginary setting), and
simulate a user's physical presence in this environment. VR has been
defined as "...a realistic and immersive simulation of a three-dimensional environment, created using interactive software and hardware, and experienced or controlled by movement of the body"[1] or as an "immersive, interactive experience generated by a computer".[2]
A person using virtual reality equipment is typically able to "look
around" the artificial world, move about in it and interact with
features or items that are depicted on a screen or in goggles. Most 2016-era virtual realities are displayed either on a computer monitor, a projector screen, or with a virtual reality headset (also called head-mounted display
or HMD). HMDs typically take the form of head-mounted goggles with a
screen in front of the eyes. Programs may include audio and sounds
through speakers or headphones.
Advanced haptic systems in the 2010s may include tactile information, generally known as force feedback in medical, video gaming
and military training applications. Some VR systems used in video games
can transmit vibrations and other sensations to the user via the game controller. Virtual reality also refers to remote communication environments which provide a virtual presence of users with through telepresence and telexistence or the use of a virtual artifact (VA). The immersive environment can be similar to the real world in order to create a lifelike experience or it can differ significantly from reality where gamers can use fictional powers.
Etymology and terminology
Paramount for the sensation of immersion into virtual reality are a high frame rate (at least 95 fps), as well as a low latency. Furthermore, a pixel persistence lower than 3 ms is required, because if not, users will feel sick when moving their head around.
In 1938, Antonin Artaud described the illusory nature of characters and objects in the theatre as "la réalité virtuelle" in a collection of essays, Le Théâtre et son double. The English translation of this book, published in 1958 as The Theater and its Double,[3] is the earliest published use of the term "virtual reality". The term "artificial reality", coined by Myron Krueger, has been in use since the 1970s. The term "virtual reality" was used in The Judas Mandala, a 1982 science fiction novel by Damien Broderick. "Virtual"
has had the meaning "being something in essence or effect, though not
actually or in fact" since the mid-1400s, "...probably via sense of
"capable of producing a certain effect" (early 1400s)".[4] The term "virtual" has been used in the computer sense of "not physically existing but made to appear by software" since 1959.[4]
Virtual reality is also called "virtual realities", "immersive multimedia", "artificial reality"[5] or "computer-simulated reality". A dictionary definition for "cyberspace"
states that this word is a synonym for "virtual reality", but the two
terms are fundamentally different (something that is "virtual" does not
necessarily need to rely on a network, for instance).[6]
Virtual reality shares some elements with "augmented reality" (or
AR). AR is a type of virtual reality technology that blends what the
user sees in their real surroundings with digital content
generated by computer software. The additional software-generated images
with the virtual scene typically enhance way the real surroundings look
in some way. Some AR systems use a camera to capture the user's
surroundings or some type of display screen which the user looks at
(e.g., Microsoft's HoloLens, Magic Leap).
