Strong Earth Quake Hit Italy

A powerful earthquake has struck central Italy, collapsing buildings in the same area where nearly 300 people died in a quake two months ago.

The quake is larger than August 24's deadly quake nearby, but many people had since fled the region, helping avoid a devastating death toll on Sunday.

The quake caused shaking in the capital Rome, where there were reports of cracks being seen in St Paul's basilica.

Authorities were checking for casualties among the fallen buildings in Norcia, famed for its Benedictine monastery and its cured meats. 

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The transition from daylight saving time to standard time leads to depressions

The number of people diagnosed with depression at psychiatric hospitals increases immediately after the transition from daylight saving time to standard time, concludes new research.

"The year has 16 months: November, December, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, November, November, November," writes the Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt in a disheartening comment on the month we are about to enter.

And Nordbrandt is not the only one suffering in November. A recently published study documents that the number of people who are diagnosed with depression at psychiatric hospitals in Denmark increases immediately after the transition from daylight saving time to standard time. More specifically, the number of depression diagnoses during the month after the transition from daylight saving time is approximately eight per cent higher than expected based on the development in the number of diagnoses up to the transition.

The study is based on analysis of 185,419 depression diagnoses registered in The Central Psychiatric Research Register between 1995 and 2012.

According to Associate Professor Søren D. Østergaard from Aarhus University Hospital in Risskov, which is part of The Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University, the increase in depression rates is too pronounced to be coincidental.

Søren D. Østergaard is one of the five researchers behind the study, which is the result of a collaboration between departments of psychiatry and political science at the universities of Aarhus, Copenhagen and Stanford.

"We are relatively certain that it is the transition from daylight saving time to standard time that causes the increase in the number of depression diagnoses and not, for example, the change in the length of the day or bad weather. In fact, we take these phenomena into account in our analyses," says Søren D. Østergaard.

He also points out that even though the study is based on analysis of relatively severe depressions diagnosed at psychiatric hospitals, there is no reason to believe that the time transition only affects the propensity to develop more severe forms of depression.

"We expect that the entire spectrum of severity is affected by the transition from daylight saving time to standard time, and since depression is a highly prevalent illness, an increase of eight per cent corresponds to many cases," says Søren D. Østergaard.

The study does not identify the underlying mechanism triggering the marked increase, but the researchers point to some possible causes. In Denmark, the transition from daylight saving time to standard time 'moves' one hour of daylight from the afternoon between 5:00 pm -- 6:00 pm to the morning between 7:00 am -- 8:00 am.

"We probably benefit less from the daylight in the morning between seven and eight, because many of us are either in the shower, eating breakfast or sitting in a car or bus on the way to work or school. When we get home and have spare time in the afternoon, it is already dark," explains Søren D. Østergaard.

"Furthermore, the transition to standard time is likely to be associated with a negative psychological effect as it very clearly marks the coming of a period of long, dark and cold days," says Søren D. Østergaard.

Why are the results of the study important? The researcher from Aarhus University is not in doubt:

"Our results should give rise to increased awareness of depression in the weeks following the transition to standard time. This is especially true for people with a tendency towards depression -- as well as their relatives. Furthermore the healthcare professionals who diagnose and treat depression should also take our results into consideration," says Søren D. Østergaard.

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Brain surface stimulation provides 'touch' feedback to direct movement

Grasping a cup or brushing hair or cooking a meal requires feedback that has been lost in amputees and individuals with paralysis -- a sense of touch. Researchers have now used direct stimulation of the human brain surface to provide this basic sensory feedback through artificial electrical signals, enabling a person to control movement while performing a simple task: opening and closing his hand.

For the first time in humans, researchers use brain surface stimulation to provide 'touch' feedback to direct movement

In the quest to restore movement to people with spinal cord injuries, researchers have focused on getting brain signals to disconnected nerves and muscles that no longer receive messages that would spur them to move.

But grasping a cup or brushing hair or cooking a meal requires other feedback that has been lost in amputees and individuals with paralysis -- a sense of touch. The brain needs information from a fingertip or limb or external device to understand how firmly a person is gripping or how much pressure is needed to perform everyday tasks.

Now, University of Washington researchers at the National Science Foundation Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE) have used direct stimulation of the human brain surface to provide basic sensory feedback through artificial electrical signals, enabling a patient to control movement while performing a simple task: opening and closing his hand.

It's a first step towards developing "closed loop," bi-directional brain-computer interfaces (BBCIs) that enable two-way communication between parts of the nervous system. They would also allow the brain to directly control external prosthetics or other devices that can enhance movement -- or even reanimate a paralyzed limb -- while getting sensory feedback.

The results of this research will be published in the Oct.-Dec. 2016 issue of IEEE Transactions on Haptics.

"We were able to provide a baseline degree of sensory feedback by direct cortical stimulation of the brain," said lead author and UW bioengineering doctoral student Jeneva Cronin. "To our knowledge this is the first time it's been done in a human patient who was awake and performing a motor task that depended on that feedback."

The team of bioengineers, computer scientists and medical researchers from the CSNE and UW's GRIDLab used electrical signals of different current intensities, dictated by the position of the patient's hand measured by a glove he wore, to stimulate the patient's brain that had been implanted with electrocorticographic (ECoG) electrodes. The patient then used those artificial signals delivered to the brain to "sense" how the researchers wanted him to move his hand.

"The question is: Can humans use novel electrical sensations that they've never felt before, perceive them at different levels and use this to do a task? And the answer seems to be yes," said co-author and UW bioengineering doctoral student James Wu. "Whether this type of sensation can be as diverse as the textures and feelings that we can sense tactilely is an open question."

It's difficult for a person to mimic natural movements -- whether using a prosthetic device or a limb that has become disconnected from the brain by neurological injury -- without sensation. Though there are devices to assist patients with paralysis or who have undergone amputations with basic function, being able to feel again ranks highly on their priorities, researchers said.

Restoring this sensory feedback requires developing an "artificial" language of electrical signals that the brain can interpret as sensation and incorporate as useful feedback when performing a task.

The UW CSNE team frequently works with patients about to undergo epilepsy surgery who have recently had an ECoG electrode grid implanted on the surface of their brain. For several days or weeks, doctors constantly monitor their brain activity to pinpoint the origin of their seizures before operating.

By consenting to participate in research studies during this period when their brain is "wired," these patients enable researchers to answer basic neurological questions. They can test which parts of the brain are activated during different behaviors, what happens when a certain region of the brain's cortex is stimulated and even how to induce brain plasticity to promote rehabilitation and healing across damaged areas.

The potential to use ECoG electrodes implanted on the surface of the brain in future prosthetic or rehabilitative applications offers several advantages -- the signals are stronger and more accurate than sensors placed on the scalp, but less invasive than ones that penetrate the brain, as in a recent study by University of Pittsburgh researchers.

In the UW study, three patients wore a glove embedded with sensors that provided data about where their fingers and joints were positioned. They were asked to stay within a target position somewhere between having their hands open and closed without being able to see what that target position was. The only feedback they received about the target hand position was artificial electrical data delivered by the research team.

When their hands opened too far, they received no electrical stimulus to the brain. When their hand was too closed -- similar to squeezing something too hard -- the electrical stimuli was provided at a higher intensity.

One patient was able to achieve accuracies in reaching the target position well above chance when receiving the electrical feedback. Performance dropped when the patient received random signals regardless of hand position, suggesting that the subject had been using the artificial sensory feedback to control hand movement.

Providing that artificial sensory feedback in a way that the brain can understand is key to developing prosthetics, implants or other neural devices that could restore a sense of position, touch or feeling in patients where that connection has been severed.

"Right now we're using very primitive kinds of codes where we're changing only frequency or intensity of the stimulation, but eventually it might be more like a symphony," said co-author Rajesh Rao, CSNE director and UW professor of computer science & engineering.

"That's what you'd need to do to have a very natural grip for tasks such as preparing a dish in the kitchen. When you want to pick up the salt shaker and all your ingredients, you need to exert just the right amount of pressure. Any day-to-day task like opening a cupboard or lifting a plate or breaking an egg requires this complex sensory feedback."

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Restoring the sense of touch in amputees using natural signals of nervous system

Scientists have found a way to produce realistic sensations of touch in two human amputees by directly stimulating the nervous system.

Scientists at the University of Chicago and Case Western Reserve University have found a way to produce realistic sensations of touch in two human amputees by directly stimulating the nervous system.

The study, published Oct. 26 in Science Translational Medicine(STM), confirms earlier research on how the nervous system encodes the intensity, or magnitude, of sensations. It is the second of two groundbreaking publications this month by University of Chicago neuroscientist Sliman Bensmaia, PhD, using neuroprosthetic devices to recreate the sense of touch for amputee or quadriplegic patients with a "biomimetic" approach that approximates the natural, intact nervous system.

On Oct. 13, in a separate publication from STM, Bensmaia and a team led by Robert Gaunt, PhD, from the University of Pittsburgh, announced that for the first time, a paralyzed human patient was able to experience the sense of touch through a robotic arm that he controls with his brain. In that study, researchers interfaced directly with the patient's brain, through an electrode array implanted in the areas of the brain responsible for hand movements and for touch, which allowed the man to both move the robotic arm and feel objects through it.

The new study takes a similar approach in amputees, working with two male subjects who each lost an arm after traumatic injuries. In this case, both subjects were implanted with neural interfaces, devices embedded with electrodes that were attached to the median, ulnar and radial nerves of the arm. Those are the same nerves that would carry signals from the hand were it still intact.

"If you want to create a dexterous hand for use in an amputee or a quadriplegic patient, you need to not only be able to move it, but have sensory feedback from it," said Bensmaia, who is an associate professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago. "To do this, we first need to look at how the intact hand and the intact nervous system encodes this information, and then, to the extent that we can, try to mimic that in a neuroprosthesis."

Recreating different sensations of intensity

The latest research is a joint effort by Bensmaia and Dustin Tyler, PhD, the Kent H. Smith Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, who works with a large team trying to make bionic hands clinically viable. Tyler's team, led by doctoral student Emily Graczyk, systematically tested the subjects' ability to distinguish the magnitude of the sensations evoked when their nerves were stimulated through the interface. They varied aspects of the signals, such as frequency and intensity of each electrical pulse. The goal was to understand if there was a systematic way to manipulate the sensory magnitude.

Earlier research from Bensmaia's lab predicted how the nervous system discerns intensity of touch, for example, how hard an object is pressing against the skin. That work suggested that the number of times certain nerve fibers fire in response to a given stimulus, known as the population spike rate, determines the perceived intensity of a given stimulus.

Results from the new study verify this hypothesis: A single feature of electrical stimulation -- dubbed the activation charge rate -- was found to determine the strength of the sensation. By changing the activation charge rate, the team could change sensory magnitude in a highly predictable way. The team then showed that the activation charge rate was also closely related to the evoked population spike rate.

Building neuroprosthetics that approximate the natural nervous system

While the new study furthers the development of neural interfaces for neuroprosthetics, artificial touch will only be as good as the devices providing input. In a separate paper published earlier this year in IEEE Transactions on Haptics, Bensmaia and his team tested the sensory abilities of a robotic fingertip equipped with touch sensors.

Using the same behavioral techniques that are used to test human sensory abilities, Bensmaia's team, led by Benoit Delhaye and Erik Schluter, tested the finger's ability to distinguish different touch locations, different pressure levels, the direction and speed of surfaces moving across it and the identity of textures scanned across it. The robotic finger (with the help of machine learning algorithms) proved to be almost as good as a human at most of these sensory tasks. By combining such high-quality input with the algorithms and data Bensmaia and Tyler produced in the other study, researchers can begin building neuroprosthetics that approximate natural sensations of touch.

Without realistic, natural-feeling sensations, neuroprosthetics will never come close to achieving the dexterity of our native hands. To illustrate the importance of touch, Bensmaia referred to a piano. Playing the piano requires a delicate touch, and an accomplished pianist knows how softly or forcefully to strike the keys based on sensory signals from the fingertips. Without these signals, the sounds the piano would make would not be very musical.

"The idea is that if we can reproduce those signals exactly, the amputee won't have to think about it, he can just interact with objects naturally and automatically. Results from this study constitute a first step towards conveying finely graded information about contact pressure," Bensmaia said.

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Astrophysicists map the Milky Way

Hydrogen. Atomic number 1. It is the simplest and lightest element on the periodic table, but don't be fooled by its humble appearance. With just a single proton and a single electron, it is the most abundant element in the universe and has fueled star formation for the past 13 billion years. Now scientists have mapped the key ingredient's distribution across the Milky Way, revealing details about our galaxy that have never been seen before.

Now scientists -- including an astrophysicist from West Virginia University -- have mapped the key ingredient's distribution across the Milky Way, revealing details about our galaxy that have never been seen before.

The new map is the result of work by a team of scientists from around the world, including D.J. Pisano, associate professor of physics and astronomy in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. The research was published today in the journalAstronomy and Astrophysics.

The HI4PI survey collected data on clouds of hydrogen gas at full resolution, allowing scientists to learn more about the physics of what is going on in those areas, where the structures are coming from and more.

Pronounced "hi four pie," referring to the astrophysical abbreviation for neutral hydrogen (HI) and the geometrical reference to the whole sky (4*PI), the survey allows scientists to study all directions of the sky.

The team used two of the world's largest fully steerable radio telescopes -- Parkes Observatory in Australia and the Effelsberg 100m Radio Telescope in Germany.

Due to their sheer size and other technical characteristics these scientific instruments are highly sensitive. They can see deep into space, allowing scientists to study parts of the universe that are often invisible or hidden.

The team used the two telescopes to survey from both the northern and southern hemispheres. Because scientists collected the data from two different telescopes, astronomers in Germany did additional data processing to produce a combined, consistent map.

"The scope of the survey -- the entire sky -- couldn't have been done without collaboration with scientists from around the world," said Pisano.

The study required more than a million individual observations and about 10 billion individual data points. Pisano and his collaborators in the Galactic All Sky Survey in Australia spent more than 2,000 hours over two years using the Parkes telescope to map the sky south of the equator.

The previous survey, the Leiden-Argentine-Bonn or LAB, used a smaller telescope and was published 11 years ago. The new study uses modern technology with twice the sensitivity and four times the resolution, revealing a variety of structures -- both large and small -- that had never been seen before.

Imagine the difference between a blurry or pixelated photograph versus a high resolution, detailed picture.

"The result of this research is a much more comprehensive map of our galaxy that will allow scientists to better understand the Milky Way and our galactic neighbors," said Pisano. "This is a landmark for the field of astrophysics that will bring new insights for decades to come."

Pisano's research interests focus on how galaxies form and evolve. He says one of the things that HI4PI shows is how the cold gas in the halo at the edge of the Milky Way interacts with hot gas. He also said that the new survey helps fill in gaps from the previous survey for a more complete and accurate map.

HI4PI data is available to scientists through the Strasbourg astronomical data centre.

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Early humans used innovative heating techniques to make stone blades

Humans living in South Africa in the Middle Stone Age used advanced heating techniques that vastly improved living conditions during the era.

According to a new study published in the open-access journalPLOS ONE, humans living in South Africa in the Middle Stone Age after 65,000 years ago deliberately heated silcrete, a hard, fine-grained, local rock used in stone tool manufacture, so that they could more easily obtain blades from the core material.

A major effect on hunting

These blades were then crescent shaped and glued into arrow heads. This era, known as the Howiesons Poort, has produced the first known evidence for the use of the bow and arrow.

“This is the first time anywhere that bows and arrows were used. This would have had a major effect on hunting practices as both spears and bow and arrow could be used to hunt animals,” says Professor Christopher Henshilwood.

He and Postdoctoral Fellow Karen van Niekerk, from the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway, are among the co-authors of the study.

Creating early transformative technology

The heat treatment enabled early humans to produce tougher, harder tools – the first evidence of a transformative technology. However, the exact role of this important development in the Middle Stone Age technological repertoire was not previously clear.

Novel analytical research approach

Delagnes, Henshilwood, van Niekerk and the rest of the research team, from South Africa and Germany, used a novel non-destructive approach to analyse the heating technique used in the production of silcrete artefacts at the Klipdrift Shelter, a recently discovered Middle Stone Age site located on the southern Cape of South Africa, including unheated and heat-treated comparable silcrete samples from 31 locations around the site. The site was discovered by Henshilwood and van Niekerk and first excavated in 2011.

“Based on the development of a non-destructive method using geological heated and unheated comparative reference samples, we have shown that more than 90 per cent of the silcrete used for the production of blades has been intentionally heated,” says Henshilwood.

“Heating was applied, non-randomly, at an early stage of core exploitation and was sometimes preceded by an initial knapping stage. As a consequence, the whole operational chain, from core preparation to blade production and tool manufacturing, benefited from the advantages of the heating process,” explains van Niekerk.

The hardening, toughening effect of the heating step would therefore have impacted all subsequent stages of silcrete tool production and use.

Heat treatment: a major asset

The authors suggest that silcrete heat treatment at the Klipdrift Shelter may provide the first direct evidence of the intentional and extensive use of fire applied to a whole lithic chain of production. Along with other fire-based activities, intentional heat treatment was a major asset for Middle Stone Age humans in southern Africa, and has no known contemporaneous equivalent elsewhere.

“The advantages of the heating process are multiple: by reducing the material’s fracture toughness and increasing its hardness, less force was needed to detach blades after heat treatment, resulting in better control and precision during percussion,” explains Henshilwood.

“An additional advantage relates to the heat-induced fracturing of the silcrete blocks at an early stage of core exploitation,” adds van Niekerk.

Three main benefits

According to the researchers this resulted in three main benefits:

1 The elimination of internal heterogeneities (iron oxide inclusions), which could have caused the incidental breakage of the core at an advanced stage of reduction.

2 The production of angular fragments with suitable angles and surfaces that can be directly exploited for knapping without further preparation.

3 Fewer constraints on the selection of the volumes to be heat-treated.

“The heat-induced fractures we observed are indicative of a fast heating process using open fires, an hypothesis which is strengthened by the presence of tempering residues, deposited through direct contact of the heated material with glowing embers,” says van Niekerk.

“This heating process marks the emergence of fire engineering as a response to a variety of needs that largely transcend hominin basic subsistence requirements, although it did not require highly specialized technical skills and was likely performed as part of on-site domestic activities,” says Henshilwood.

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Quantum computers: 10-fold boost in stability achieved

Engineers have created a new quantum bit that remains in a stable superposition for 10 times longer than previously achieved, dramatically expanding the number of calculations that could be performed in a future silicon quantum computer.

Engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have created a new quantum bit that remains in a stable superposition for 10 times longer than previously achieved, dramatically expanding the time during which calculations could be performed in a future silicon quantum computer.

The new quantum bit, made up of the spin of a single atom in silicon and merged with an electromagnetic field -- known as 'dressed qubit' -- retains quantum information for much longer that an 'undressed' atom, opening up new avenues to build and operate the superpowerful quantum computers of the future.

The results are published today in the international journal,Nature Nanotechnology.

"We have created a new quantum bit where the spin of a single electron is merged together with a strong electromagnetic field," said Arne Laucht, a Research Fellow at the School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications at UNSW, and lead author of the paper. "This quantum bit is more versatile and more long-lived than the electron alone, and will allow us to build more reliable quantum computers."

Building a quantum computer has been called the 'space race of the 21st century' -- a difficult and ambitious challenge with the potential to deliver revolutionary tools for tackling otherwise impossible calculations, such as the design of complex drugs and advanced materials, or the rapid search of massive, unsorted databases.

Its speed and power lie in the fact that quantum systems can host multiple 'superpositions' of different initial states, which in a computer are treated as inputs which, in turn, all get processed at the same time.

"The greatest hurdle in using quantum objects for computing is to preserve their delicate superpositions long enough to allow us to perform useful calculations," said Andrea Morello, leader of the research team and a Program Manager in the ARC Centre for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology (CQC2T) at UNSW. "Our decade-long research program had already established the most long-lived quantum bit in the solid state, by encoding quantum information in the spin of a single phosphorus atom inside a silicon chip, placed in a static magnetic field."

What Laucht and colleagues did was push this further: "We have now implemented a new way to encode the information: we have subjected the atom to a very strong, continuously oscillating electromagnetic field at microwave frequencies, and thus we have 'redefined' the quantum bit as the orientation of the spin with respect to the microwave field."

The results are striking: since the electromagnetic field steadily oscillates at a very high frequency, any noise or disturbance at a different frequency results in a zero net effect. The researchers achieved an improvement by a factor of 10 in the time span during which a quantum superposition can be preserved.

Specifically, they measured a dephasing time of T2*=2.4 milliseconds -- a result that is 10-fold better than the standard qubit, allowing many more operations to be performed within the time span during which the delicate quantum information is safely preserved.

"This new 'dressed qubit' can be controlled in a variety of ways that would be impractical with an 'undressed qubit'," added Morello. "For example, it can be controlled by simply modulating the frequency of the microwave field, just like in an FM radio. The 'undressed qubit' instead requires turning the amplitude of the control fields on and off, like an AM radio.

"In some sense, this is why the dressed qubit is more immune to noise: the quantum information is controlled by the frequency, which is rock-solid, whereas the amplitude can be more easily affected by external noise."

Since the device is built upon standard silicon technology, this result paves the way to the construction of powerful and reliable quantum processors based upon the same fabrication process already used for today's computers.

The UNSW team has taken the first step in building the world's first quantum computer in silicon.

"Quantum computing is one of the great challenges of the 21st century, manipulating nature at a subatomic level and pushing into the very edge of what is possible," said Mark Hoffman, UNSW's Dean of Engineering. "To have a team that leads the world in this field, and consistently delivers firsts, is a testament to the extraordinary talent we have assembled in Australia at UNSW."

A functional quantum computer would allow massive increases in speed and efficiency for certain computing tasks -- even when compared with today's fastest silicon-based 'classical' computers. In a number of key areas -- such as searching large databases, solving complicated sets of equations, and modelling atomic systems such as biological molecules and drugs -- they would far surpass today's computers. They would also be enormously useful in the finance and healthcare industries, and for government, security and defence organisations.

Quantum computers could identify and develop new medicines by greatly accelerating the computer-aided design of pharmaceutical compounds (and minimising lengthy trial and error testing), and develop new, lighter and stronger materials spanning consumer electronics to aircraft. They would also make possible new types of computational applications and solutions that are beyond our ability to foresee.

Other researchers who contributed to the work include members of Morello's CQC2T team at UNSW -- Rachpon Kalra, Stephanie Simmons, Juan Dehollain, Juha Muhonen, Fahd Mohiyaddin and Solomon Freer; Andrew Dzurak and Fay Hudson at the Australian National Fabrication Facility; David Jamieson and Jeffrey McCallum from the CQC2T University of Melbourne team; and Kohei Itoh of Japan's Keio University.

Watch Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YftwdSss9b8

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