The brain's GPS: neurons linked to navigation are like a map grid

The entorhinal cortex region of the brain
contains 'grid cell' that help with navigation,
but are also one of the first areas of the brain
affected by Alzheimer's disease.

As reported by EurekAlert: Using direct human brain recordings, a research team from Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA and Thomas Jefferson University has identified a new type of cell in the brain that helps people to keep track of their relative location while navigating an unfamiliar environment.

The "grid cell," which derives its name from the triangular grid pattern in which the cell activates during navigation, is distinct among brain cells because its activation represents multiple spatial locations. This behavior is how grid cells allow the brain to keep track of navigational cues such as how far you are from a starting point or your last turn. This type of navigation is called path integration, which is used as a kind of 'dead reckoning' system.

"It is critical that this grid pattern is so consistent because it shows how people can keep track of their location even in new environments with inconsistent layouts," said Dr. Joshua Jacobs, an assistant professor in Drexel's School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, who is the team's primary investigator.

The researchers, Jacobs, Dr. Michael Kahana, from Penn, and UCLA's Dr. Itzhak Fried were able to discern these cells because they had the rare opportunity to study brain recordings of epilepsy patients with electrodes implanted deep inside their brains as part of their treatment. Their work is being published in the latest edition of Nature Neuroscience.

During brain recording, the 14 study participants played a video game that challenged them to navigate from one point to another to retrieve objects and then recall how to get back to the places where each object was located. The participants used a joystick to ride a virtual bicycle across a wide-open terrain displayed on a laptop by their hospital beds. After participants made trial runs where each of the objects was visible in the distance, they were put back at the center of the map and the objects were made invisible until the bicycle was right in front of them. The researchers then asked the participants to travel to particular objects in different sequences.

The team studied the relation between how the participants navigated in the video game and the activity of individual neurons.

"Each grid cell responds at multiple spatial locations that are arranged in the shape of a grid," Jacobs said. "This triangular grid pattern thus appears to be a brain pattern that plays a fundamental role in navigation. Without grid cells, it is likely that humans would frequently get lost or have to navigate based only on landmarks. Grid cells are thus critical for maintaining a sense of location in an environment."

While these cells are not unique among animals — they have been discovered previously in rats ¬¬— and a prior study in 2010, that used noninvasive brain imaging, suggested the existence of the cells in humans, this is the first positive identification of the human version of these cells.

"The present finding of grid cells in the human brain, together with the earlier discovery of human hippocampal 'place cells,' which fire at single locations, provide compelling evidence for a common mapping and navigational system preserved across humans and lower animals," said Kahana, a neuroscientist who is a senior author and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

The team's findings also suggest that these grid patterns may in fact be more prevalent in humans than rats, because the study found grid cells not only in the entorhinal cortex — where they are observed in rats — but also, in a very different brain area — the cingulate cortex.

"Grid cells are found in a critical location in the human memory system called the entorhinal cortex," said Fried, who is a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "This discovery sheds new light on a region of the brain that is the first to be affected in Alzheimer's Disease with devastating effects on memory"

The entorhinal cortex is part of the brain that has been studied in Alzheimer's disease research and according to Jacobs, understanding grid cells could help researchers understand why people with the disease often become disoriented. It could also help them show how to improve brain function in people suffering from Alzheimer's.

'Third time's a charm' for HOS; Court upholds all but one provision

The US Court of Appeals has largely upheld the new Hours
of Service rules setup by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety
Administration (FMCSA)

As reported by LandLine: The never-ending warfare over the hours of service may very well be coming to a close as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld all but one provision of the regulations in an opinion filed Friday, Aug. 2.

The decision responds to a pair of challenges brought against the regulation. The first challenge was filed by the American Trucking Associations and the second was filed by the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, Public Citizen, and the Truck Safety Coalition.

The 22-page decision written by Judge Janice Rogers Brown concludes with Judge Brown being very clear that the court upholds the lion’s share of the current hours-of-service regulation.

“It is often said the third time’s a charm. That may well be true in this case, the third of its kind to be considered by the circuit. With one small exception, our decision today brings to an end much of the permanent warfare surrounding the HOS rules,” Judge Brown wrote.

However, she did not credit the rule-making processes followed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

“Though FMCSA won the day not on the strengths of its rule-making prowess, but through an artless war of attrition, the controversies of this round are ended.”

New Hours of Service rules currently require a
controversial 34 hour restart
provision for most long haul truck drivers.

The decision vacates one small provision within the regulations.

Short-haul drivers will not be subject to the 30-minute off-duty break requirement.

“In all other respects, the petitions of both the ATA and Public Citizen are denied,” Judge Brown wrote in the decision.

Where it stands
The current hours-of-service regulations, which went into effect July 1, essentially stay as is thanks to the court’s ruling – minus the exemption for short-haul drivers.

FMCSA will have to publish the exemption in the Federal Register defining specifically what "short-haul" operations are and who the exemption will apply to. Until that happens, the exemption is basically just "ordered" by the court and not the rule of the road, yet.

For the rest of the industry (except for livestock haulers and Department of Defense loads that are also exempt) rest breaks are mandated for drivers during the workday if the driver has been on duty for eight consecutive hours. The regulation also mandates that the 34-hour restart provision must include two overnight periods of 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. in the restart. The restart is also restricted in the new regulations to only once per seven days.

The US House of Representatives' Transporation finance bill would have potentially defunded the new HOS regulations - however, the finance bill didn't have the votes to pass - so it was withdrawn.

Is China wiring Africa for surveillance?

Africa represents one of the largest growth markets left
for communications and computing in the world.

As reported by Motherboard:  Some in the US have long expected that China's massive telecom company Huawei is developing tools for the Chinese government to commit cyber-espionage around the world. Now that Huawei's getting serious about its expansion into Africa, eyebrows are being raised again.

In 2012, a House committee labeled Huawei a national security threat, and the US government has accused the firm of nefarious surveillance practices many times in the last several years. That includes accusing it of helping the Iranian government monitor its citizens and quash dissent, and having ties to the Taliban. Each time the company has denied the allegations, and government investigations consistently fail to turn up any hard evidence.

But now Huawei has invested billions of dollars in Africa over the last two decades, providing affordable cell phones, internet access, and telecommunications networks to the continent. Over the last few months Huawei has closed major deals in Africa to get more areas on the grid. The company says it's bridging the digital divide, but others suspect it's wiring the continent for surveillance.

China's Huawei has been restricted from entering into the
US markets for phones and communications infrastructure.

The loudest concerned party is former NSA and CIA head Michael Hayden, who has repeatedly raised warning flags about Huawei's suspected espionage. "The Chinese see themselves in a global economic competition with the United States, and they see real advantages of at least having the possibility of exploiting African networks in the future," he told Foreign Policy in late July.

At this point, Huawei supplies back-end telecommunications equipment—wi-fi routers, mobile networks, communications hardware—to a third of the world. The thinking goes that if you build the infrastructure, you can easily build backdoors to get in and ascertain information. And not only is China laying the brick, so to speak. In many cases it's also running the networks for the African governments. If the allegations are true that Huawei provides a direct line to Beijing, it's about to have a huge peep hole into Africa.

"Even if there aren't any backdoors, which is a large hypothesis, just the Chinese state having access to the architecture of your system is a tremendous advantage for the Chinese should they want to engage in any electronic surveillance, any electronic eavesdropping," Hayden told FT.

Earlier this month, Hayden again accused Huawei of spying at the Chinese government's behest, saying he had the evidence to back it up, but the company fired back, calling the allegations  "tired, unsubstantiated, and defamatory."

Hmm, government backdoor access to data through communications technology. Where would the NSA get an idea like that? It could be tempting to assume that 40 years in the CIA and NSA is making Hayden see spies around every corner, but whether or not Huawei is involved, the Chinese government has been named the world leader in cyber-espionage.

Evidence or no, the suspicions are strong enough that regulators continue to block Huawei from entering the US market, despite the manufacturer's best efforts to break in. 

Light channels bring GPS-like technology indoors

As reported by the Boston Globe - Imagine this: You step into a vast department store to buy a new blender, and your smartphone leads you straight to the right aisle, and then lights up with a coupon for the KitchenAid model to your left.

The one remaining on the shelf has already been opened, so using your phone again, you summon a store clerk who finds a fresh box out back. Then you quickly pay with a wave of your phone over a small, glowing box that serves as a checkout register, which automatically adds points to your rewards account.

Welcome to the future of brick-and-mortar shopping, made possible by a GPS-like technology that works inside buildings and is made by Boston tech start-up ByteLight. But instead of beams from satellites that can’t penetrate walls, ByteLight uses LED light bulbs, now in so many stores, to transmit data via their pulsing light waves to the camera in a smartphone.

“The opportunity for indoor location is enormous,” said ByteLight chief executive Dan Ryan. “Right now, it’s a bit of a Wild West scenario, in that there’s a million different technologies that are trying to figure out a solution for this. Nobody’s quite gotten there yet, but we think there’s going to be an incredible opportunity.”

Indeed, indoor location technology is a huge emerging field with stiff competition and many of the biggest names in the business. Google Inc. has designed its maps application to help Android users navigate through more than 10,000 buildings worldwide — including airports, shopping malls, museums, and college campuses.

Indoor location tracking has too many potential applications to count, Ryan said, but ByteLight is focused for now on the retail industry.

The In-Location Alliance, a collaborative effort by mobile giants Nokia, Samsung, and Sony, and 19 smaller companies, is working on an indoor navigation system that determines a user’s position via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, by triangulating distances between hotspots and mobile handsets.

And Apple joined the fray in March when it bought indoor location start-up WiFiSlam for $20 million.

“What they lack,” Ryan said of ByteLight’s rivals, “is the ability to put a dot on the map that’s accurate, and that’s the piece that ByteLight fills in.”

Google says it can pinpoint a user’s location within several meters. Apple’s newly acquired WiFiSlam is accurate to about 8 feet. ByteLight says its margin of error is less than a meter.

Several large retailers are testing ByteLight’s navigation technology as a tool for improving employee efficiency, but customers are not yet using the system, Ryan said. He declined to name the companies.

Further along is the glowing box — ByteLight’s light field communication device, which is designed to outperform the much-hyped near field communication, which uses radio signals to perform tasks such as contactless payments within stores. But near field communication is unsupported by many mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone, whose aluminum backing blocks radio frequencies.

By contrast the ByteLight box uses light waves for such transactions, and is compatible with every camera-equipped smartphone. The company says its glowing box will make its commercial debut Wednesday at 100 retail locations in Shanghai.

Ryan and cofounder Aaron Ganick began thinking seriously about LED data transmission as undergraduates at Boston University, where they worked at the school’s Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.

“This entire world is shifting over to LEDs,” Ryan said. “So you’re going to have this enormous infrastructure that’s deployed across every single building in the entire world. What can we do with that? What opportunities become enabled?”

The pair figured out a way to manipulate the pulsing light waves emitted by LED bulbs so they send data as they flicker. Using microchips mounted to the bulbs, the ByteLight technology causes the LED bulbs to flicker very fast — too fast for the naked eye to see — and, in doing so, to communicate information to a smartphone through its camera lens. The communication between light bulb and smartphone enables shoppers using a retailer’s mobile application to navigate through a store, receive special offers on the products in front of them, or be located by a sales representative.

Ryan said the duo realized after some experimentation that “LEDs’ digital nature means that you can switch [the lights] on and off so fast that you can transmit a data signal to a user indoors.”

Ryan and Ganick devoted themselves full time to ByteLight in 2011, a year after graduation, when they were accepted by the Summer@Highland accelerator program hosted by Highland Capital Partners in Cambridge. Last year, the company announced $1.25 million in seed funding, led by VantagePoint Capital Partners of San Bruno, Calif.

Indoor location tracking has too many potential applications to count, Ryan said, but ByteLight is focused for now on the retail industry.

“At some level, it allows retail to really return to its roots,” Ryan said. “The origins of retail were general stores. You went down to the local store, the owner knew your name, knew what you liked. That aspect was lost as we transitioned to this big box model of retail. Now, when you combine indoor location with mobile phones, you can customize the shopping experience.”

White House Vetoes Ban on Sale of Some Apple iPhones, iPads

As reported by the Wall Street Journal: The Obama administration on Saturday vetoed a U.S. trade body's ban on the sale of some Apple iPhones and iPads, a rare move that upends a legal victory for smartphone rival Samsung Electronics Co.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman made the decision to veto the ban on the Apple devices, citing concerns about patent holders gaining "undue leverage." He said Samsung could continue to pursue its patent rights through the courts.

The action marked the first time since 1987 that a presidential administration had vetoed a product ban ordered by the U.S. International Trade Commission.

The ITC had ordered the ban on some older-model Apple iPhones and iPads in June after finding the products infringed a Samsung patent.

The ban had raised concerns among U.S. antitrust enforcers as well as some technology companies and lawmakers. They questioned whether companies should be able to use their essential technology patents to block rival products from the marketplace.

Apple on Saturday praised the administration for "standing up for innovation." The company had argued to the trade representative that the ban was inappropriate because Samsung had committed to license its patented technologies that were included in industry wide standards for wireless devices.

Once close business partners, Samsung and Apple have become increasingly intense rivals, sparring over the market for smartphones around the globe, with much of the momentum accruing to Samsung in recent months.

The rivalry has spilled into the courts, where barrages of competing patent claims have been lobbed in both directions. Last year, Apple won a jury trial and $1 billion in damages against Samsung over iPhone patents.

Samsung said Apple was the one that started the global patent wars between the two companies. It said the iPhone maker had sought to avoid paying for licenses of Samsung's patents.

The ITC, which has jurisdiction over certain trade practices, is an appealing legal option for patent holders, particularly tech companies, because the trade body can issue orders banning the importation of products that infringe upon another company's patents. Legal observers say it is easier to win an import ban at the ITC than it is to win a federal court ruling that would block product sales.

The ITC ruled against a key Apple theory across its recent litigation, which seeks to limit plaintiffs from using a broad class of patents to win injunctions against sales of infringing products. Such patents are submitted to industry groups that are setting key technology standards, and are deemed as essential to create products in certain categories—such as creating handsets that can communicate using a particular generation of cellular networks.

Apple has argued that in return for becoming part of an industry standard, companies usually promise those groups to license use of their patented technology under fair and reasonable terms.

But the ITC said Apple's argument wasn't valid, potentially hurting Apple's continuing efforts to change the way standards-based patents are used in legal cases.

The ITC order would have barred the U.S. sale or import of some Apple products still on store shelves, including a version of the iPad 2 made to work on AT&T Inc.'s network, and the iPhone4, which runs on AT&T and T-Mobile USA's airwaves.

Japan's robots eye car industry to take up smartphone slack

An automated pick and place machine used
to populate printed circuit boards.

As reported by Reuters: As the breakneck growth in the global smartphone market eases, the mostly Japanese companies that make the robots that build the phones are looking to automakers to take up the slack.

Robotics remains a strength in a Japanese electronics industry that has been hammered by competition from rivals in South Korea and Taiwan. Panasonic Corp, Hitachi High-Technologies, Yamaha Motor Co, Fuji Machine Manufacturing and JUKI Corp together make eight of every 10 component mounting robots.

The quickest of these can mount more than two dozen parts a second, some thinner than a tenth of a millimeter. A line of 10 connected robots can put together 5,000 smartphones a day.

But, as smartphone sales growth slows, the chip mounters are feeling the squeeze.

Sales at Panasonic's chip mounter business - one of its non-core, but niche market leading divisions at the center of a revival plan - dropped by a tenth in the year to end-March. The business has around a 30 percent global market share.

Katsuhiko Omoto, who heads Panasonic's factory automation unit, sees little prospect for a rebound this year. "We don't really see big growth," he told Reuters at the firm's headquarters outside Tokyo. Around a third of the cabinet-sized machines made there end up in Chinese foundries cranking out Apple Inc iPhones and other mobile devices.

The global market for chip mounters is forecast to grow to $7 billion by 2015, according to industry researcher Technavio, from $4-$5 billion now.

Panasonic, which has bled red ink for years from its struggling television sales, announces its April-June quarterly results later on Wednesday. Operating profit is expected to increase nearly 30 percent to almost 50 billion yen ($510 million), according to StarMine's SmartEstimates, which uses top analysts' forecasts based on accuracy and timeliness.

Panasonic's component mounting robots business brings in around 1.4 percent of sales, but earns 6 percent of operating profit.

SMARTPHONE SALES ARE SLOWING

Smartphone sales are still growing, and market tracker IDC predicts annual shipments will top 1.5 billion by 2017, up from 917 million this year - but the blistering growth of the past five years is slowing.

IDC sees sales increasing by around 15 percent this year in mature markets such as the United States, down from 20.6 percent last year, and this will slow further to just 4.6 percent by 2017. In emerging markets - China accounts for around a third of global demand - growth will slow to 12 percent this year from more than 35 percent.

Omoto reckons Panasonic could boost its share of the chip mounting market by wooing the many smaller Chinese mobile phone makers that are gaining ground on Apple. The U.S. firm's Greater China sales slumped 43 percent in April-June from the previous quarter. Beyond that, Omoto, whose operating margins have slipped to 8 percent from 10 percent, is looking to reduce his smartphone related business to a quarter from 30 percent by selling more of his robots to the automaking industry.

DRIVING CHANGE

Automatic parking, collision warning systems, cameras, and complex engine and suspension management computers add up to an under-the-hood boom in auto electronics. Drivers are also shifting to hybrids and electric cars, which tend to have more electronics than traditional gasoline models.

"The amount of electronics in a car is only going to increase," said Naoki Kobayashi, deputy chief engineer at Toyota Motor Corp's luxury Lexus brand, noting the recently launched IS model has one fifth more electronic control units than its predecessor.

Hitachi High Technologies, a majority-owned subsidiary of conglomerate Hitachi Ltd, is also eyeing opportunities among auto manufacturers and their supply chains.

"It looks as though the smartphone and tablet markets have peaked," said Masatoshi Kurosawa, a general manager at the Hitachi firm, adding he doesn't yet see any new consumer gadget to make up for the slowing smartphone momentum. His company and other chip mounters typically have around 10 months advance notice of new product launches when manufacturers begin shopping around for new production equipment.

MAKING THE SWITCH

Switching to supplying the autos industry requires chip mounters to focus less on speed and miniaturization and more on component traceability, said Hiroshi Nakamura, a managing officer at JUKI.

"For the past several years the market has focused on smartphones, and that has meant everyone focused on making fast machines," he said. "Automakers have stricter safety concerns which means they avoid cutting edge components."

In JUKI's showroom basement, Nakamura showed off one robot that snaps six photographs every time a component is mounted on a circuit board. That data is stored on a database allowing automakers to quickly trace any production faults.

Yamaha Motors, a long-time chip mounter supplier to the autos industry, has noted increased competition from rivals that have until now been more focused on smartphones. Its response has been to seek business at Chinese smartphone foundries which are buying fewer of Panasonic's high-speed mounters by offering to automate work, such as fitting connectors, that is still done by hand.

That kind of offer is going down well in Taiwan where annual wage increases of over 10 percent are pushing up labor costs.

"Wages in China, Thailand and Vietnam are rising and that's increasing the appeal of automation," said Hiroaki Fujita, who heads Yamaha Motor's Hamamatsu-based chip mounter business.

JUKI, which last month agreed to take over Sony Corp's chip mounter business, is also interested. "If it's faster than by hand then that's enough," said Nakamura.

U.S. Air Force Squeezing Extra Life from GPS Satellites

As reported by SpaceNews: The U.S. Air Force’s intensifying scramble to do more with less in difficult fiscal circumstances has produced a brewing success story on the GPS program, where engineers are implementing a plan to extend the life of up to 60 percent of the satellites in the positioning, navigation and timing constellation.

The plan involves a new charging method that reduces the rate of satellite battery degradation, thereby extending the satellites’ lives. The scheme is being successfully tested on orbit, and Air Force officials say that if all continues to go well, the project could add a combined 20 years to the life of the GPS 2R- and 2R(M)-series satellites, which together comprise the backbone of the constellation.

The life extension is expected to save the Air Force tens of millions of dollars, and that carries a premium as the combined pressures of declining defense spending and sequestration put the squeeze on all Air Force programs, space being no exception.

USAF Capt. Jacob Hempen

Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, cited the effort during a Senate hearing in April, and credited Capt. Jacob Hempen, who serves with the Air Force’s 2nd Space Operations Squadron, with making it happen.

An electrical engineer by training, Hempen’s introduction to military space came on a different program. While serving in Afghanistan as a flight test engineer, Hempen, who comes from a military family and graduated from the US Air Force Academy, was tasked with fixing a satellite connectivity problem that was hampering critical unmanned aerial vehicle operations.

The stakes were high: Because of the problem, certain military activities were facing a suspension of a month or more.

Hempen had virtually no experience in the space arena — he had never collaborated with the Joint Space Operations Center, which coordinates command and control of U.S. military satellites and never worked with the Air Force space community.

His superiors gave him two to three days.

The fix worked. Operations continued.

In an interview, Hempen said the experience taught him the importance of military space. It also landed him in a position with the Air Force’s space program.

It was there that Hempen was presented with a new challenge: implementing a plan to extend the lives of the existing GPS satellites. The Air Force is always looks for ways to stretch the lives of its operational satellites, but implementing solutions across large constellations presents obvious challenges.

“The key is identifying a large group of satellites where a single improvement solution can be applied,” Hempen said. “In this case, 60 percent of on-orbit GPS satellites have a common bus with common components that wear out, one of which is batteries. By extending the use of these batteries, constellation sustainment can be improved across GPS.”

Managing battery life for satellites requires a tricky calculus.

Satellites charge when their solar arrays are directly exposed to the sun’s rays. During this time, the arrays simultaneously charge the batteries and power the space vehicle. While the satellite is on the dark side of the orbit, the vehicle runs on batteries.

Unlike a cell phone or electric toothbrush that reaches a full charge over a predetermined amount of time, satellite batteries can be charged at different rates. The energy can be pushed into the battery at a high rate quickly, or it can be stored more gradually at a slower pace, according to industry sources.

Air Force officials discovered that when some of the GPS satellite batteries are powered over a certain rate threshold, they can overheat, accelerating their natural rate of decay.

And since batteries in space today are virtually impossible to replace, longer-lasting batteries represent one of the keys to longer-lasting satellites.

The current GPS constellation consists of 31 operational satellites of different generations made by two different manufacturers. The Air Force focused its effort on the GPS 2R and 2R( M )spacecraft built by Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems. The first of these satellites was successfully launched in 1997 and 19 -- representing 60 percent of the constellation -- are operational, according to GPS.gov, a government-managed GPS information website.

Hempen credited Warren Hwang, who works in the energy technology department at Aerospace Corp., with coming up with the idea of lowering the charging rate of the GPS 2R and 2R (M) batteries. Based in El Segundo, Calif., Aerospace is a federally funded not-for-profit research center that provides engineering advice on Air Force space programs.

According to Hempen, Hwang suggested that the battery charging rates could be lowered to a level that enabled the satellites to perform reasonably well while minimizing the rate of degradation. Hwang declined to be interviewed for this article.

“My role was to lead the project from theory to start of execution,” Hempen said. This entailed devising and conducting a series of tests, first in laboratory-based simulations and later on the satellites themselves.

The group needed to act quickly: The more time spent developing and implementing the test plan, the more degradation incurred by the satellite batteries, reducing the return on investment of resources.

The test program, which is ongoing, has since been taken over by the Air Force GPS operators and is running smoothly, Hempen said. “We knew our approach was sound,” he said.

If the project is successfully implemented, GPS experts at the Air Force and Aerospace Corp. estimate that it will help the service wring an additional 20 years of operation across 2R and 2R(M) satellites. Given that each satellite was designed to operate for eight years, that is the equivalent of more than two additional spacecraft that likely would cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch.

Perhaps equally important is the possibility that the same life-extending technique can be used on other Air Force satellite programs, according to Hempen. “Both the new battery method and GPS methodology used to determine how to improve constellation sustainment can be applied to other satellite constellations,” he said.