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Doctors wanted to ensure they didn’t compromise parts of the brain necessary for playing the violin, so they asked their musician patient to play for them mid-operation.
Hart’s demonstrations are entertainment for sure. But his message runs deeper: rhythm and vibration heal the brain. Dementia, he says, is the “loss of rhythm.” And he, along with notables who collaborated on the event — University of California at San Francisco neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and opera singer Renée Fleming (who lent her soprano to the event’s musical track) — are all at work searching for pathways that can bypass obstacles to function and cognition. Hart has also worked with Dr. Connie Tomaino, who runs the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, on music as a therapeutic tool for brain function.
Gazzaley is currently conducting clinical trials with healthy older adults to show how a regular regimen of digital rhythm can enhance attention and memory in people with cognitive impairment. Hart has been working with Gazzaley on what will be a downloadable app, their goal to develop a game that challenges one’s rhythmic ability, with the hope of building new neuropathways in the brain. “What we’re talking about here is a deeper and longer immersive experience which can actually harness the brain’s plasticity to change the way it functions,” says Gazzaley.
Taking up an instrument as a child, and playing through adulthood is one proven way to protect one’s brain. But learning later in life is helpful, too. Hart shares the story of his unlikely best friend, Walter Cronkite, who was 73 when he became a Deadhead, and also started playing the drums. In July of 2009, as Cronkite lay dying from complications of cerebrovascular disease, Hart handed him a hand drum. “He could no longer speak, but he could play,” Hart says, tears in his eyes. “He used to ask, ‘When we do we know we have found our groove?’ Well, he found it.”
The conductor on the podium has no baton, no tailcoat, and no musical score, but Android Alter 3 is kicking up a storm as it guides a symphony orchestra’s players through their paces. Robot playing orchestra.
The news: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted the first test of a new type of drone that can be launched from a plane in a swarm and recovered in mid-air when it’s done its job.
How it works: A military transport or bomber plane releases a series of drones in rapid succession. They carry out the task designated to them (surveillance, for example) and then return to the plane, docking on a line before being winched in. It looks a bit like the airborne refueling process.
Continue reading “DARPA is testing drones it can launch from a plane—then collect mid-air” »
Interesting. And, for those who swear AI will never take the creative jobs.
The image, and resulting data, has helped astronomers learn more about black holes in general, and this one in particular, making that two-year wait more than worthwhile. Part of the reason for the delay was simply the logistics of gathering so many observations. Each observatory collects data over a narrow range of wavelengths, resulting in massive amounts of information — the equivalent of up to 5,000 years of mp3 music files. That’s too much to just email someone. Researchers instead had to find ways to physically move that data around. For instance, to transport the information out of the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, scientists had to wait until spring, when planes finally started flying out again.
Only then could researchers begin the complicated process of stitching together data from the eight observatories, a technique known as interferometry. The team had their work cut out for them: Raw files from each of the observing sites came in with different angles on the sky, in different wavelengths and at different observation times.
“The calibrating and working with it took many months,” Özel says. “And at the end we synthesize it into a single image.” But that’s still not the end of the work, she says. “[You] spend another six months worrying about all the things you might have done wrong, and ask yourself more and more questions, until finally you can be certain that what you have is real.”
It’s no secret that the average smart phone today packs an abundance of gadgets fitting in your pocket, which could have easily filled a car trunk a few decades ago. We like to think about video cameras, music playing equipment, and maybe even telephones here, but let’s not ignore the amount of measurement equipment we also carry around in form of tiny sensors nowadays. How to use those sensors for educational purposes to teach physics is presented in [Sebastian Staacks]’ talk at 36C3 about the phyphox mobile lab app.
While accessing a mobile device’s sensor data is usually quite straightforwardly done through some API calls, the phyphox app is not only a shortcut to nicely graph all the available sensor data on the screen, it also exports the data for additional visualization and processing later on. An accompanying experiment editor allows to define custom experiments from data capture to analysis that are stored in an XML-based file format and possible to share through QR codes.
Continue reading “36C3: Phyphox – Using Smartphone Sensors For Physics Experiments” »
Can A.I. make music? Can it feel excitement and fear? Is it alive? Will.i.am and Mark Sagar push the limits of what a machine can do. How far is too far, and how much further can we go?
The Age of A.I. is a 8 part documentary series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. covering the ways Artifial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neural Networks will change the world.
