A severely paralyzed man has been able to communicate using a new type of technology that translates signals from his brain to his vocal tract directly into words that appear on a screen. Developed by researchers at UC San Francisco, the technique is a more natural way for people with speech loss to communicate than other methods we've seen to date.
So far, neuroprosthetic technology has only allowed paralyzed users to type out just one letter at a time, a process that can be slow and laborious. It also tapped parts of the brain that control the arm or hand, a system that's not necessarily intuitive for the subject.
The USCF system, however, uses an implant that's placed directly on the part of the brain dedicated to speech. That way, the subject can mentally activate the brain patterns they would normally use to say a word, and the system can translate the entire word, rather than single letters, to the screen.
To make it work, patients with normal speech volunteered to have their brain recordings analyzed for speech related activities. Researchers were then able to analyze those patterns and develop new methods to decode them in real time, using statistical language models to improve accuracy.
However, the team still wasn't sure if brain signals controlling the vocal tract would still be intact in patients paralyzed for many years. To that end, they enlisted an anonymous participant (known as Bravo1) who worked with researchers to create a 50-word vocabulary that the team could decipher using advanced computer algorithms. That included words like "water," "family" and "good," enough to allow the patient to create hundreds of sentences applicable to their daily life. The team also used an "auto-correct" function similar to those found on consumer speech recognition apps.
To test the system, the team asked patient Bravo1 to reply to questions like "How are you today?" and "Would you like some water?" The patient's attempted speech then appeared on the screen as "I am very good," and "No, I am not thirsty."
The system was able to decode their speech at up to 18 words per minute with 93 percent accuracy, with a 75 percent median accuracy. That might not sound great compared to the 200 words per minute possible with normal speech, but it's much better than the speeds seen on previous neuroprosthetic systems.
“To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is paralyzed and cannot speak,” said Edward Chang, MD, Chair of Neurological Surgery at UCSF and senior author on the study. “It shows strong promise to restore communication by tapping into the brain's natural speech machinery.”
The team said the trial represents a proof of principal for this new type of "speech neuroprosthesis." Next up, they plan to expand the trial to include more participants, while also working to increase the number of words in the vocabulary and improve the rate of speech.
The FAA has approved Blue Origin's maiden crewed rocket voyage set for July 20th with the company's chief executive Jeff Bezos aboard. The flight aboard the New Shepard will take Bezos, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk and three other passengers to Kármán line, just beyond the edge of space.
To get the certification, Blue Origin had to verify New Shepard's hardware and software operation during its NS-15 test flight conducted on April 14th, 2021. If all goes to plan, the New Shepard booster and capsule with astronauts aboard will blast off to an altitude beyond 100 kilometers (62 miles). The booster will eventually separate from the capsule and attempt to land Earth, while the capsule with passengers aboard will descend to the ground carried by a triple parachute system.
Rival Richard Branson beat Bezos to be the first billionaire in space aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. However, Blue Origin claimed that Virgin Galactic didn't truly go to space as it "only" went 57 miles up and didn't cross the Kármán line considered by many to be the edge of space.
In any case, neither company will be taking passengers into orbit, unlike SpaceX, which is set to do a true orbital flight with passengers aboard later this year. The prices for the different systems are also vastly different: Virgin Galactic's customers pay $250,000 for a ticket to the edge of space, Blue Origin space tourists are expected to pay around $500,000 and SpaceX clients will pay $55 million for a 10-day mission to the ISS.
However, a seat to fly with Jeff Bezos on the maiden Blue Horizon flight sold at auction for $28 million to a buyer expected to be named soon. That's a lot for a flight expected to last about 10 minutes, but it should be quite a ride.
The concept of space travel was so new to us that when President Kennedy issued his famous moonshot speech, not even NASA's top scientists were completely sure we could actually land on the lunar surface. Some thought any craft that set down there would simply sink into the moon's regolith like it was a massive, airless pit of quicksand! In his latest book, Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, journalist and former Fulbright fellow, Earl Swift, examines the oft ignored Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions, our last trips to the Moon's surface (at least until the Artemis project takes place). In the excerpt below, Swift takes the reader on a tour of the JPL's hyper-rigorous, tread-shredding lunar test course and the battle for rover supremacy waged there between GM and Bendix.
All through 1962 and into 1963, both GM and Bendix kept an eye on the Surveyor program. Sure enough, come summer, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory laid out its requirements for a hundred-pound, remote-controlled rover that it wanted to stash aboard the landers. The vehicle would explore the lurrain up to a mile from the Surveyors, while its drivers back on Earth steered it with television eyes. The laboratory alerted companies planning to bid on the phase 1 design study—the normal first stage of any new hardware program—that they’d be expected to supply engineering models of their concepts. Proposals were due in seven weeks.
The short deadline weeded out the dilettantes. In October the two companies left standing—GM and Bendix—started work under contract. GM was ready with its six-wheeled design. Its Surveyor lunar roving vehicle was six feet long on eighteen-inch wheels and weighed ninety pounds—half the size and half again as heavy as its test bed, with a sure-footedness that was no less jaw-dropping. On Pavlics’s “lunarium” of rocks, craters, and slopes outside the Santa Barbara lab, it climbed forty-five-degree inclines, leapt twenty-inch crevasses, and bent its way up and over thirty-inch steps.
Bekker and Pavlics had been working on the idea for more than three years by then. Their main advancement this time: the wheels. Again, they were made of wire, but it was knotted into a wide mesh that resembled chain-link, and shaped into fat doughnuts. Like the team’s earlier wire tires, they deflected when they hit an obstacle and absorbed some of the bumps of cross-country travel. They worked with or without a fabric covering.
“We had a big program to try to come up with the wire material that would survive the vacuum environment on the moon,” John Calandro recalled. “Frank had devised a testing device that created the vacuum environment we needed.”
When fully geared up for a mission, the rover would be an electronic wonder, with subsystems supplied by RCA Astro-Electronics and by AC Electronics, a GM division in Milwaukee: it would have a stereo TV imaging rig, sophisticated navigation and control, and silver-zinc batteries recharged by solar panel. But Santa Barbara’s part of the job, the vehicle itself, was a study in doing more with less. The hardware was constantly “assessed to see if something simpler might be able to do the same job,” designer Norman J. James would remember. “‘The part that’s left off never breaks’ was an often-repeated phrase.”
Bendix took a radically different approach. Its SLRV was a squarish, two-part, articulated robot, with curving, shock-absorbing legs at its corners that ended in small caterpillar track assemblies. The tracks pitched independently to follow uneven ground. Its handlers steered it with commands to slow, speed up, or reverse the tracks on one side or the other, and the pivot linking the two halves did the rest. On the moon, it would be powered by a radioisotope thermal generator—a small nuclear device—hanging off the back, and bristle with scientific instruments and antennas. It weighed one hundred pounds.
Side by side with the GM model, the Bendix machine looked bulky and awkward, and those tiny tracks didn’t seem much of a match for Pavlics’s nearly spherical wire wheels. But Bendix was bullish on its design right up to the day in May 1964 when a panel from the U.S. Geological Survey, Caltech, and NASA took the two models to a volcanic field north of Flagstaff, Arizona, and turned them loose on the rugged Bonito Lava Flow. “We had one little section where they could really get into some pretty rough stuff,” the Geological Survey’s Jack McCauley recalled years later. “The GM vehicle was perfect. It got from point A to point B without any mishaps or turning over.
“The poor Bendix vehicle had tanklike treads that were made of some kind of rubber-type thing,” McCauley said. “The vehicle just started shredding the treads. In fact, when they finished halfway down the course, it had no treads left. So, the GM thing obviously got our blessing.”
General Motors had scored a decisive victory. Unfortunately, it didn’t add up to a rover on the moon. The “Rover Boys,” as that panel of testers came to be known, were mightily impressed with the six-wheeler, but its capabilities didn’t square with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s requirements: namely, to “go around and take pictures every ten meters, and also to use a penetrometer to see what the strength of the lunar soil was—and to do it in a preordained manner,” McCauley said. “Basically, just do a grid survey.” Bendix had produced too little rover for the mission; GM had produced too much. The Rover Boys reluctantly reported that neither rover matched the Surveyor program’s stated needs, and that was among the reasons that NASA scrubbed the rover component not long after.
By that time, JPL’s Ranger program had finally given NASA its first close looks at the moon. By design, they were fleeting glimpses: Ranger probes crashed into the lunar surface while taking high-resolution photos right up to the moment of impact. Conceived in 1959, the program had, at times, seemed another exercise in frustration. After Rangers 1 and 2 made two development test voyages in 1961, along came Rangers 3 through 6, all of which were busts. It wasn’t until July 1964, and Ranger 7, that the program literally hit pay dirt. As the spacecraft fell toward the moon, its cameras kicked on, and, for some seventeen minutes, it took and transmitted photographs of the approaching surface—4,316 images in all, some of them at a resolution hundreds of times greater than the best taken from Earth. The photos didn’t put to rest the fears inspired by Thomas Gold’s writings and lectures, but they did establish that the maria were smooth enough for a landing.
On July 11th, Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, could fly to space aboard the SpaceShipTwo to assess the company's private astronaut experience. If you ask rival company Blue Origin, though, Branson won't really be reaching space when he does. In a couple of tweets, the Jeff Bezos-owned space corporation compared what its own New Shepard suborbital vehicle can do with SpaceShipTwo's capabilities. First in the list? The company says New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line, whereas its competitor's vehicle was not.
The Kármán line is the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space as set by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. It's defined as 100 kilometers or 62 miles above sea level, and according to Blue Origin, it's what "96 percent of the world's population" recognizes as the beginning of outer space. Blue Origin plans to offer customers 10 minutes of flight with an altitude that reaches the Kármán line. Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic's website says its flights will soar at "nearly" 300,000 feet (57 miles) in altitude. That doesn't quite reach the Kármán line, though that's still higher than what NASA and the US government defines as the beginning of space (50 miles above sea level).
Only 4% of the world recognizes a lower limit of 80 km or 50 miles as the beginning of space. New Shepard flies above both boundaries. One of the many benefits of flying with Blue Origin. pic.twitter.com/4EAzMfCmYT
Aside from comparing their vehicles' maximum altitudes, Blue Origin also made it a point to mention that the New Shepard has the largest windows in space. Also, the New Shepard is a rocket, but SpaceShipTwo, according to Blue Origin, is just a high-altitude plane. The company published the comparison after Virgin Galactic scheduled Branson's trip to space before Jeff Bezos' — the multi-billionaire and his brother will join Blue Origin's first suborbital tourist flight that's scheduled for a July 20th launch.
On early Sunday morning, two Chinese astronauts completed work outside of their country’s Tiangong space station. The event was the second-ever spacewalk in China’s history. As The Guardian points out, it’s also the first time its astronauts have completed a tandem extravehicular activity (EVA).
Shenzhou-12 astronaut Boming Liu left the station at 8:11 PM ET on July 3rd and was later joined by crewmate Hongbo Tang. Meanwhile, Haisheng Nie, the mission’s commander, stayed inside the Tianhe “Harmony of the Heavens” crew module to support them.
The two astronauts went out to do work on the module’s robotic arm while wearing China’s next-generation Feitian EVA suits. The entire time they were about 380 kilometers (236 miles) above the surface of Earth. The components they installed will assist future missions as China looks to complete its new space station sometime in 2022. Liu and Tang went back into Tianhe at approximately 2:57 AM ET, making the entire spacewalk around seven hours.
“The safe return of astronauts Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo to the Tianhe core module marks the complete success of the first spacewalk in our country’s space station construction,” China’s Manned Space Agency said in a statement.
The last time a Chinese astronaut left their craft was back in 2008 when Zhigang Zhai put China in the history books as the third-ever country to complete a spacewalk. In the past year, the country successfuly landed its first-ever rover on Mars and retrieved rock and soil samples from the Moon. The country’s space agency plans a second spacewalk before the Shenzhou-12 crew returns to Earth later this year.
There's a limit to what you can learn about cells from 2D pictures, but creating 3D images is a time-intensive process. Now, scientists from UT Southwestern have developed a new "simple and cost-effective" device capable of capturing multi-angle photos that can be retrofitted onto existing lab microscopes. The team say their solution — which involves inserting a unit of two rotating mirrors in front of a microscope's camera — is 100 times faster than converting images from 2D to 3D.
Currently, this process involves collecting hundreds of photos of a specimen that can be uploaded as an image stack into a graphics software program, which then performs computations in order to provide multiple viewing perspectives. Even with a powerful computer, those two steps can be time-consuming. But, using their optical device, the team found they could bypass that method altogether.
What's more, they claim their approach is even faster as it requires only one camera exposure instead of the hundreds of camera frames used for entire 3D image stacks. They discovered the technique while de-skewing the images captured by two common light-sheet microscopes. While experimenting with their optical method, they realized that when they used an incorrect amount of de-skew the projected image seemed to rotate.
"This was the aha! moment," said Reto Fiolka, assistant professor at the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern. "We realized that this could be bigger than just an optical de-skewing method; that the system could work for other kinds of microscopes as well.”
Using their modified microscope, the team imaged calcium ions carrying signals between nerve cells in a culture dish and looked at the circulatory system of a zebrafish embryo. They also rapidly imaged cancer cells in motion and a beating zebrafish heart. They also applied the optical unit to additional microscopes, including light-sheet and spinning disk confocal microscopy.
Korean scientists claim a new desalination technique makes sea water fit to drink in minutes. The researchers used a membrane distillation process that resulted in 99.9 percent salt rejection for one month. If commercialized, they say the solution could help alleviate the drinking water crisis exacerbated by climate change. More than 3 billion people worldwide are affected by water shortages, with the amount of fresh water available for each person plunging by a fifth over two decades, according to the UN.
The new study details a way to purify sea water using a a nanofiber membrane as a salt filter. While scientists have used membrane distillation in the past, they kept encountering a massive obstacle that slowed down the process. If the membrane became too wet, or flooded, it could no longer reject the salt. Needless to say, this was a time-draining process that forced scientists to either wait for the membrane to dry or come up with additional solutions, like using pressurized air to release trapped water from its pores.
To overcome this challenge, the Korean team turned to a nano technology known as electrospinning to create their three-dimensional membrane. In scientific terms, they used poly vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene as the core and silica aerogel mixed with a low concentration of the polymer as the sheath to produce a composite membrane with a superhydrophobic surface. In essence, this created a filter that had a higher surface roughness and lower thermal conductivity, allowing it to desalinate water for up to 30 days. The full report was published in the Journal of Membrane Science.
“The co-axial electrospun nanofibre membrane has strong potential for the treatment of seawater solutions without suffering from wetting issues and may be appropriate for real-scale membrane distillation applications,” Dr Yunchul Woo, a materials scientist at the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology, said. He added that the membrane may be appropriate for "pilot-scale and real-scale membrane distillation applications.”
Currently, the main method of purifying sea water is through reverse osmosis at the roughly 20,000 desalination plants around the world. But these facilities require vast amounts of electricity to operate and also create concentrated brine as a waste product, which is typically dumped back in the sea. Therefore, it's no wonder scientists are exploring new solutions that aren't as counter-productive.
CRISPR gene editing is no longer confined to Earth. Astronaut Christina Koch and scientists have successfully demonstrated CRISPR-Cas9 in space for the first time, using it as part of a new technique to damage DNA and study how it repairs in microgravity. "Technical and safety concerns" had prevented earlier studies like this, according to the researchers.
The experiment produced a particularly damaging double-strand DNA break in a yeast cell culture aboard the International Space Station. Koch completed the test well before this (most of the supplies reached the ISS in May 2019), but the findings weren't available until this past week.
The new approach clears the way for other research around DNA repair in space. With enough work, the scientists hope they can replicate the genetic damage from ionizing radiation, not to mention other effects from long-term spaceflight. That, in turn, could help NASA and other agencies develop technology that shields astronauts and makes deep space exploration practical. There's a chance CRISPR might play an important role in getting humans to Mars and beyond.
Sixty years after excelling in the Mercury 13 program, Wally Funk is finally going to space. Amazon CEO and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos announced on Instagram that Funk will be on New Shepard's first crewed flight, which is scheduled for July 20th.
Funk will join Bezos, his brother Mark and an unidentified winner of an auction as passengers on Blue Origin's maiden space tourism flight. Bezos says the quartet will experience zero gravity for four minutes when they travel to the edge of space and that Funk is Blue Origin's "honored guest."
The 82-year-old Funk will become the oldest person to fly to space. The current record holder is John Glenn, who flew on Space Shuttle Discovery's STS-95 mission in 1998 at the age of 77. Glenn was one of the Mercury Seven, the astronauts who were selected for the United States' first spaceflight program.
Thirteen women went through the same tests as the Mercury Seven as part of the privately funded Women in Space Program. Although all of the Mercury Seven traveled to space, none of Mercury 13 have until now. Funk was the youngest participant in the program and rated third among the candidates.
Funk was the first female inspector in the Federal Aviation Administration and the first woman to become an air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board. She has logged more than 19,600 flying hours and has taught more than 3,000 people to fly. Funk applied three times to join NASA's astronaut program after the agency opened it to women in the late 1970s to no avail. Six decades after Funk's first attempts to venture to space, she'll finally get her chance.
Now that Virgin Orbit is comfortable carrying satellites into space, it's ready for you to tune in. The orbital delivery company is livestreaming a rocket launch for the first time, with an expected takeoff time around 9:50AM Eastern. The "Tubular Bells: Part One" mission will see the Cosmic Girl host aircraft deploy the LauncherOne rocket roughly an hour after lifting into the sky.
LauncherOne will have plenty to do during the flight, as Space.comnoted. It's carrying seven satellites for three countries, including the US (four cubesats for the Department of Defense Space Test Program), Poland (two vehicles for SatRevolution) and the Netherlands (a cubesat for the Royal Netherlands Air Force).
As before, Virgin Orbit's appeal is its flexibility and cost — organizations can put payloads into space more on their own terms, and potentially for less money than needed for a conventional launch. The company has had just two launches before now, though. In that light, a lot is riding on this mission — it should help prove that Virgin is ready to pick up the pace and compete against private spaceflight rivals like Rocket Lab and SpaceX.
