Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: engineering

Bing Brunton on Connecting the Connectome to the Body | Mindscape 352

Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/.…

The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an important step to understanding how brains work, but a long way from the final answer. A big next step is understanding how neuronal circuits connect to and guide bodily behavior. Very recent work on mapping the fruit-fly connectome has brought us closer to that goal. I talk with neuroscientist Bing Brunton about the connectome, how we can study it to understand bodily motion in flies and other creatures, and where it’s all taking us.

Bing Wen Brunton received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Princeton University… She is currently a Professor of Biology and the Richard & Joan Komen University Chair at the University of Washington, with affiliations at the eScience Institute for Data Science, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and the Department of Applied Mathematics.

Mindscape Podcast playlist: • Mindscape Podcast
Sean Carroll channel: / seancarroll.

Hydraulic brain: Body motion linked to fluid movement in the brain

The brain is more mechanically connected to the body than previously appreciated, scientists report in Nature Neuroscience. Through a study using mice and simulations, the team found a potential biological mechanism underlying why exercise is thought to benefit brain health: abdominal contractions compress blood vessels connected to the spinal cord and the brain, enabling the organ to gently move within the skull. This swaying facilitates the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid to flow over the brain, potentially washing away neural waste that could cause problems for brain function.

According to Patrick Drew, professor of engineering science and mechanics, of neurosurgery, of biology and of biomedical engineering at Penn State, the work builds on previous studies detailing how sleep and neuron loss can influence how and when cerebrospinal fluid flushes through the brain.

“Our research explains how just moving around might serve as an important physiological mechanism promoting brain health,” said Drew, corresponding author on the paper. “In this study, we found that when the abdominal muscles contract, they push blood from the abdomen into the spinal cord, just like in a hydraulic system, applying pressure to the brain and making it move.

Light-powered spaceships could get to our nearest star in 20 years. Fiction? Scientists say it could become fact

That would mean generations upon generations of human lifetimes, all lived out on board a rocket ship travelling across space, in the hope of a comfortable utopia waiting for us when we arrive.

Now, a team of researchers say they’ve demonstrated a form of light-driven propulsion that could one day get us to Alpha Centauri in 20 years.

A team of researchers at the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University say they’ve demonstrated lasers can be used to lift and steer objects without physical contact.

How electron structure affects light responses in moiré materials

In materials science, if you can understand the “texture” of a material—how its internal patterns form and shift—you can begin to design how it behaves. That’s the focus of the work of Zhenglu Li, assistant professor in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Li’s recently published paper in PNAS, titled “Moiré excitons in generalized Wigner crystals,” demonstrates that the way electrons organize themselves inside a material determines how that material responds to light—and how this organization can be engineered.

“Moiré” is a word that will be familiar to anyone who follows fashion. In the context of textiles, it refers to a larger-scale interference pattern that appears when two repeating patterns are slightly misaligned. Imagine brushing a swatch of velvet in different directions; the material reveals different properties depending on how it is ruffled.

Likewise, in the context of nanoscale materials science, an independent, shimmering or wavelike pattern is formed when two overlapping atomically thin layers are overlaid at an acute angle. The new pattern, moiré superlattice, changes how electrons move, which can give the material unusual properties.

Moon dust could stop being a nuisance and start reshaping how humans may build beyond Earth

As space agencies and private companies look toward a sustained human presence on the moon, a fundamental challenge centers on how to build strong, durable infrastructure without hauling every material from Earth. New research from Rice University points to an unexpected solution—transforming one of the moon’s most stubborn obstacles, its abrasive dust, into a valuable building resource. The study demonstrates that lunar regolith simulant, a terrestrial stand-in for the moon’s fine, abrasive dust, can be used to strengthen advanced composite materials. The work, published in Advanced Engineering Materials, was also selected for the cover of the journal’s latest issue.

The research was led by Denizhan Yavas, assistant teaching professor of mechanical engineering at Rice, in collaboration with Ashraf Bastawros of Iowa State University.

“This work started with a simple but powerful question,” Yavas said. “Lunar dust is typically viewed as a major obstacle to exploration because of how abrasive and pervasive it is. We asked whether that same material could instead be used as a resource—something that could actually improve the performance of structural materials.”

Light-powered propulsion expands space exploration possibilities

Reaching the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, would take hundreds of thousands of years using current rocket propulsion technology. Researchers in the J. Mike Walker ‘66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University have demonstrated a new approach to light-driven motion, showing that lasers can be used to lift and steer objects in multiple directions without physical contact. This breakthrough may one day enable travel to Alpha Centauri within roughly 20 years.

Dr. Shoufeng Lan, assistant professor and director of the Lab for Advanced Nanophotonics, and his team published the work, “Optical propulsion and levitation of metajets,” in Newton. The study introduces micron-scale devices, termed “metajets,” that generate controlled motion when illuminated by laser light.

These metajets are composed of metasurfaces —ultrathin materials engineered with tiny patterns that enable scientists to control how light behaves, much like shaping a lens, but on a much smaller and more precise scale. By carefully designing these structures, the research team controlled how light transfers momentum to an object, enabling it to move.

Microfluidic chip reveals how living glioblastoma slices resist chemotherapy

Combining microchip engineering techniques with cutting-edge gene profiling, scientists at Columbia University have developed a new way to study drug responses in living slices of human brain tumor cells. The system, using a type of chip called a microfluidic device, has already revealed new details about how these aggressive tumors resist chemotherapy drugs and could help researchers develop more effective treatments.

The work grew from earlier efforts to study glioblastoma tumors removed from patients during surgery. “These samples that we’re getting from our colleagues who resect these tumors clinically, they’re alive, and we can actually do experiments directly on those surgical samples,” says Peter Sims, Ph.D., associate professor of systems biology at Columbia and senior author on the new study, which appears in the journal Lab on a Chip.

New memory chip survives temperatures hotter than lava

The electronics inside your phone, your car, and every satellite currently orbiting Earth share one critical weakness: heat. Push them past about 200 degrees Celsius and they start to fail. For decades, that thermal ceiling has been one of the hardest walls in engineering. Now a team at the University of Southern California may have just found a way around it.

In a study published in Science, researchers led by Joshua Yang, Arthur B. Freeman Chair Professor at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC School of Advanced Computing, report a new type of electronic memory device that kept working reliably at 700 degrees Celsius, hotter than molten lava and far beyond anything previously achieved in its class. The device showed no signs of reaching its limit. Seven hundred degrees was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go.

“You may call it a revolution,” Yang said. “It is the best high-temperature memory ever demonstrated.”

‘Liquid droplet mops’ clean solar panels with 99.9% efficiency, cutting water use by 80%

With the rapid expansion of the global solar energy industry, the number of solar panels has surged in recent years. However, pollutants accumulating on panel surfaces can significantly reduce energy conversion efficiency while traditional cleaning methods are highly water-intensive.

In response to this challenge, an international research team led by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has successfully developed a breakthrough technology, called “liquid droplet mops,” that uses only a minimal amount of water to effectively remove dust and pollutants from solar panel surfaces, significantly enhancing cleaning efficiency while conserving water.

The study was led by Professor Steven Wang, Associate Vice President (Resources Planning) and Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Energy and Environment. The project was conducted in collaboration with Professor Omar Matar from the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Imperial College London. The findings are published in Nature Sustainability.

The Impossible Engineering of the Borg Cube

What if perfection came at the cost of individuality? The Borg Cube isn’t just a ship — it’s one of the most terrifying feats of engineering ever imagined. A massive, city-sized structure drifting through space with no visible weapons, no clear command center… and yet, it conquers entire civilizations with terrifying efficiency.

In this deep dive, we break down the impossible engineering behind the Borg Cube — from its decentralized architecture and self-repairing systems to its adaptive shielding and near-infinite scalability. How can a cube survive in the harsh vacuum of space? Why abandon traditional ship design? And what makes it almost unstoppable in battle?

We’ll explore the science, the theory, and the terrifying plausibility behind one of sci-fi’s most iconic creations. Because the real question isn’t how the Borg Cube works… it’s whether something like it could ever exist.

Resistance… might not be as futile as you think.

🔥 If you enjoy deep, dark explorations of futuristic technology and sci-fi realism, hit LIKE and SUBSCRIBE for more.

💬 Comment below: Could humanity ever build something like the Borg Cube?

Continue reading “The Impossible Engineering of the Borg Cube” | >
/* */