Brain’s Inner GPS Wins 3 Scientists Nobel Medicine Prize

As reported by Bloomberg: The discovery of cells in the brain that make up an internal global-positioning system won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for three scientists.

John O’Keefe, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London who holds U.S. and U.K. citizenship, and Norwegians May-Britt Moser, 51, and Edvard I. Moser, 52, will share the 8 million-krona ($1.1 million) prize, the Nobel Assembly said today in Stockholm. O’Keefe, 74, will receive half the amount, and the Mosers, the fifth married couple to win a Nobel Prize, will share the rest.

The scientists’ work in finding cells that create a map of the surrounding space and aid navigation may improve understanding of how these abilities deteriorate in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Their research has also illuminated other processes in the brain such as memory, thinking and planning, the Nobel Assembly said in a statement.

“The ability to know where we are and find our way are essential to our existence,” Ole Kiehn, a professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said at a press conference in the Swedish capital. “O’Keefe’s discovery of place cells showed that specialized nerve cells can compute abstract higher brain functions. His finding had a dramatic impact on the study of how the brain creates behavior.”

Place Cells
O’Keefe found in 1971 that a type of nerve cell in the hippocampus area of the brain was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room, the Nobel Assembly said. Other cells were active when the rat was in a different place, he found. He dubbed the cells “place cells,” the assembly said.

The finding was controversial as the prevailing wisdom at the time was to approach spatial perception from receptors like the eyes and progress through to the cells that receive information from them, O’Keefe told reporters in London today.

Colleagues “thought it was an act of sheer hubris to think that you could go to this part of the brain, which was as far away as you could get from the periphery and sensory inputs,” he said. “They were surprised and there was a lot of resistance.”

More than three decades later, after working with O’Keefe in London as visiting scientists, the Mosers discovered another component of the positioning system, nerve cells that generate a coordinate system and make precise positioning possible, according to the statement.

Nobel Shock
Edvard Moser is a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim, Norway. May-Britt Moser is also a professor at the university and director of the Centre for Neural Computation.

“It is such a shock,” May-Britt Moser, the 11th woman to win the medicine prize, said by telephone from Trondheim. When she received the call about the prize, her husband was on a flight to Munich and she couldn’t share the news with him, she said. They’ve been collaborating on research since 1983 and established their laboratory in Trondheim in 1996, she said. “This is a prize for the whole community.”

O’Keefe was working at home revising a grant proposal when he received the news, he said. His “checkered youth” included studying classics in high school and engineering and philosophy as a college student in New York, he said. There, he was seduced by philosophical questions around consciousness and how to solve the mind-body problem, leading him to seek out answers through the field of neuroscience, he said.

Breakfast Meetings
O’Keefe advised the Mosers on how to go about their research in 1995 before they established their lab, May-Britt Moser said in an interview with NobelPrize.org. Asked about the advantages of being a husband-and-wife team, May-Britt said, “we can have breakfast meetings almost every day.” The last married couple to win the same Nobel award were Carl and Gerty Cori, who shared the 1947 medicine prize with Bernardo Houssay.

The scientists’ work is relevant for research in Alzheimer’s as the progress of the disease can be followed and observed in place cells, O’Keefe said. That, in turn, informs how interventions can attack the ailment, he said.

As much of their work has been in rats, O’Keefe expressed concern that regulations on animal research may become too restrictive. The U.S.-born scientist also said immigration rules are posing “large obstacles” to attracting talented scientists to the U.K.

Cell’s Transporters
Last year’s Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to three U.S. scientists -- James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas C. Suedhof -- for detailing how a cell’s transporters navigate and drop off hormones and other molecules, opening avenues of research into treatments for diabetes as well as neurological and immune disorders.

Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and the prizes were first handed out the following year.

An economics prize was created almost seven decades later in memory of Nobel by the Swedish central bank. Only the peace prize is awarded outside Sweden, by the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

The Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced tomorrow.

U.S. Navy Tests Robot Boat Swarm to Overwhelm Enemies

As reported by IEEE Spectrum: A fleet of U.S. Navy boats approached an enemy vessel like sharks circling their prey. The scene might not seem so remarkable compared to any of the Navy's usual patrol activities, but in this case, part of an exercise conducted by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), the boats operated without any direct human control: they acted as a robot boat swarm.

The tests on Virginia's James River this past summer represented the first large-scale military demonstration of a swarm of autonomous boats designed to overwhelm enemies. This capability points to a future where the U.S. Navy and other militaries may deploy underwater, surface, and flying robotic vehicles to defend themselves or attack a hostile force.

"What's new about the James River test was having five USVs [unmanned surface vessels] operating together with no humans on board," said Robert Brizzolara, an ONR program manager.

In the test, five robot boats practiced an escort mission that involved protecting a main ship against possible attackers. To command the boats, the Navy use a system called the Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing (CARACaS). The system not only steered the autonomous boats but also coordinated its actions with other vehicles—a larger group of manned and remotely-controlled vessels.

Brizzolara said the CARACaS system evolved from hardware and software originally used in NASA's Mars rover program starting 11 years ago. Each robot boat transmits its radar views to the others so the group shares the same situational awareness. They're also continually computing their own paths to navigate around obstacles and act in a cooperatively manner.

Navy researchers installed the system on regular 7-foot and 11-foot boats and put them through a series of exercises designed to test behaviors such as escort and swarming attack. The boats escorted a manned Navy ship before breaking off to encircle a vessel acting as a possible intruder. The five autonomous boats then formed a protective line between the intruder and the ship they were protecting.

Photo: John F. Williams/U.S. Navy

An unmanned boat operates autonomously during an Office of Naval Research demonstration of swarm boat technology on the James River in Newport News, Va.

Such robotic swarm technology could transform modern warfare for the U.S. Navy and the rest of the U.S. military by reducing the risk to human personnel. Smart robots and drones that don't require close supervision could also act as a "force multiplier" consisting of relatively cheap and disposable forces—engaging more enemy targets and presenting more targets for enemies to worry about.

"Numbers may once again matter in warfare in a way they have not since World War II, when the U.S. and its allies overwhelmed the Axis powers through greater mass," wrote Paul Scharre, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington, D.C., in an upcoming report titled "Robotics on the Battlefield Part II: The Coming Swarm."

"Qualitative superiority will still be important, but may not be sufficient alone to guarantee victory," Scharre wrote. "Uninhabited systems in particular have the potential to bring mass back to the fight in a significant way by enabling the development of swarms of low-cost platforms."  

The Navy does not have a firm timeline for when such robot swarms could become operational. For now, ONR researchers hope to improve the autonomous system in terms of its ability to "see" its surroundings using different sensing technologies. They also want to improve how the boats navigate autonomously around obstacles, even in the most unexpected situations that human programmers haven't envisioned. But the decision to have such robot boats open fire upon enemy targets will still rest with human sailors.

Future Smartphones Won’t Necessarily Need Cell Towers to Connect

Qualcomm, Facebook, and other tech companies are experimenting
with technology that lets smartphones use their LTE radio to
connect directly to other devices up to 500 meters away. 

As reported by MIT Technology Review: A new feature being added to the LTE protocol that smartphones use to communicate with cellular towers will make it possible to bypass those towers altogether. Phones will be able to “talk” directly to other mobile devices and to beacons located in shops and other businesses.

Known as LTE Direct, the wireless technology has a range of up to 500 meters, far more than either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It is included in update to the LTE standard slated for approval this year, and devices capable of LTE Direct could appear as soon as late 2015.

LTE Direct has been pioneered by Qualcomm, which has been working on the technology for around seven years. At the mobile chip manufacturer’s Uplinq conference in San Francisco this month, it announced that it’s helping partners including Facebook and Yahoo experiment with the technology. 

Researchers are, for example, testing LTE Direct as a way to allow smartphones to automatically discover nearby people, businesses, and other information. Some see the technology as a potential new channel for targeted promotions or advertising.

Despite its long range, LTE Direct uses relatively little power, so a phone could be constantly looking for nearby devices without significantly draining its battery life. A device with LTE Direct active might discover other phones using the technology or communicate with beacons—fixed devices installed in businesses or integrated into the infrastructure of an airport or train station.

“You can think of LTE Direct as a sixth sense that is always aware of the environment around you,” said Mahesh Makhijani, technical marketing director at Qualcomm, at a session on the technology. “The world around you is full of information, and the phone can use that to predict and to help you in your everyday life.”

Beacons using LTE Direct could broadcast useful information as well as special offers. A beacon installed in an airline check-in desk, for instance, might offer information on delays to people nearby who are booked on an affected flight.

Facebook is exploring how the technology could be used with its mobile app. “LTE Direct would allow us to create user experiences around serendipitous interactions with a local business or a friend nearby,” said Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering. “You could find out about events or do impromptu meet-ups.”

LTE Direct can be used much like the iBeacons announced by Apple last year, which retailers including Macy’s are testing as a way to track and connect with shoppers’ mobile devices. However, iBeacon devices use the Bluetooth protocol, which has a much shorter range, and which not everyone leaves switched on.

Yahoo has also begun developing apps that use LTE Direct, says Beverly Harrison, a principal scientist at Yahoo Labs. One is a kind of digital tour guide. If you tell the app how long you have to spare, from 10 minutes to two hours, it will suggest a route past nearby points of interest, drawing on online information about places detected using LTE Direct. Harrison says Yahoo plans to start testing the app in January.

LTE Direct could also help smooth out the network glitches that occur when large numbers of users are trying to connect to the same cell tower. R/GA, an ad agency in New York whose clients include Nike and Beats, is designing a system that would use LTE Direct to serve up to a million people in or around Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Roman Kalantari, a creative director at RG/A, says LTE Direct is the only wireless technology that could keep devices online under such conditions.

RG/A and another ad agency, Control Group, are also interested in using LTE Direct to serve targeted promotions. A smartphone could use LTE Direct to signal to nearby businesses what types of foods or products a customer is interested in so that it can offer customized deals, says Kalantari. “The idea that every retailer could be observing purchase intent is extraordinary valuable,” he says.  

In theory, LTE Direct could be used to create communication apps that route all data from device to device. Some chat apps can already use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to link up nearby phones (see “The Latest Chat App for iPhone Needs No Internet Connection”), but LTE Direct could offer extended range and better performance. However, carriers will control which devices on their networks can use LTE Direct because it uses the same radio spectrum as conventional cellular links. Wireless carriers might even gain a new stream of revenue by charging companies that want to offer services or apps using the technology, Qualcomm says. 

Virtual Repo Men - Miss a Payment? Your Car Could Stop Running

As reported by SlashDot: Auto loans to borrowers considered subprime, those with credit scores at or below 640, have spiked in the last five years with roughly 25 percent of all new auto loans made last year subprime, a volume of $145 billion in the first three months of this year.

Now the NYT reports that before they can drive off the lot, many subprime borrowers must have their car outfitted with a so-called starter interrupt device, which allows lenders to remotely disable the ignition. By simply clicking a mouse or tapping a smartphone, lenders retain the ultimate control. Borrowers must stay current with their payments, or lose access to their vehicle and a leading device maker, PassTime of Littleton, Colo., says its technology has reduced late payments to roughly 7 percent from nearly 29 percent. "The devices are reshaping the dynamics of auto lending by making timely payments as vital to driving a car as gasoline."

Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender remotely activated a device in her car's dashboard that prevented her car from starting. 

Before she could get back on the road, she had to pay more than $389, money she did not have that morning in March. "I felt absolutely helpless," said Bolender, a single mother who stopped working to care for her daughter. Some borrowers say their cars were disabled when they were only a few days behind on their payments, leaving them stranded in dangerous neighborhoods. 

Others said their cars were shut down while idling at stoplights. Some described how they could not take their children to school or to doctor's appointments. One woman in Nevada said her car was shut down while she was driving on the freeway. 

Attorney Robert Swearingen says there's an old common law principle that a lender can't "breach the peace" in a repossession. That means they can't put a person in harm's way. To Swearingen, that would mean "turning off a car in a bad neighborhood, or for a single female at night."

Woman Bound in Trunk Uses Phone, GPS to Summon Rescuers

As reported by the NY Post: A woman bound in the trunk of her car in the Los Angeles area managed to call emergency responders on a cell phone to say she had been kidnapped, and was rescued with the help of a GPS tracker, an official said on Tuesday.

California Highway Patrol officers located the car on an off-ramp from Interstate 10 freeway in Pomona, a short time after the woman made the call on Monday night, said Highway Patrol spokesman Officer Juan Galvan.

The officers opened the trunk and found the woman with her hands and feet tied, Galvan said. No one else was found around the vehicle, and the Highway Patrol turned over the probe to the major crimes bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The woman, whose identity was not made public, was taken to a hospital with minor scrapes, according to the Highway Patrol. Sheriff’s officials said they could not immediately provide information on the case.

A Highway Patrol report on the incident said the woman had reported she was kidnapped when she called emergency responders. She used the GPS setting on her phone to provide dispatchers with her location so officers could find her, the report said.

Los Angeles area television station KNBC reported that police had said the woman knew her attackers, but Galvan could not confirm that or provide any details about how she ended up in the trunk of the car.

Iridium's Next Generation Satellite Network will Search for Missing Planes at No-Charge

As reported by GigaOM: When Iridium’s new satellites will start blasting into orbit next year on top of SpaceX and Dnepr rockets, they’ll be carrying a special payload: an aircraft tracking system that will be able to locate a plane anywhere in the world once Iridium’s 66-satellite constellation is fully operational in 2017.

The service is run by Aireon, a joint venture between Iridium and government aviation agencies in Canada and Europe, and it plans on charging airlines for its core flight monitoring services. But Aireon said it would open the network up gratis to international rescue agencies during emergencies, allowing them to home in on missing aircraft.

In the case of Malaysia Airlines 370, which disappeared in March, the emergency service could have helped in locating and the possible rescue of the still-missing flight by plotting its exact GPS coordinates every few seconds. The technology behind it is called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), and transponders using it are being installed in new and old commercial aircraft.

Iridium birds won’t be the only ones listening for ADS-B signals either, both Inmarsat and Globalstar are putting the locator tech on their aircraft and will be offering competing flight monitoring services. Iridium, however, has the slight advantage of offering pole-to-pole coverage, which given the artic great circle routes taken by many transcontinental flights, would be very handy.

SpaceX Launches Dragon Cargo Ship for NASA

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida with a science-packed Dragon spacecraft on the fourth NASA-contracted resupply mission for the International Space Station, Sept. 21, 2014.

As reported by Discovery.com: The private spaceflight company SpaceX lit up the night sky over Florida early Sunday (Sept. 21) with the spectacular launch of Dragon spacecraft packed with supplies -- including the first 3D printer in space and a troop of 20 mice -- for the International Space Station.

The unmanned Dragon space capsule launched into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 1:52 a.m. EDT (0552 GMT). Ten minutes later, Dragon reached orbit and separated from the Falcon 9. It should reach the space station on Tuesday, Sept. 23.

"Nothing like a good launch -- it's just fantastic," Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX's vice president of mission assurance, said during a post-launch briefing. "Everything was really perfect." 

Dragon is carrying about 2.5 tons of cargo to the space station for NASA. The mission is SpaceX's fourth of 12 delivery missions for the U.S. space agency under a $1.6 billion deal. Sunday's flawless launch occurred one day after rain and thick clouds forced SpaceX to delay the launch on early Saturday (Sept. 20).

But skies were clear and the stars were out during the pre-dawn launch on Sunday morning. Sam Scimemi, NASA's International Space Station director, told reporters that the Falcon 9 appeared to be soaring though the constellation Orion after it took off.

"It was a beautiful night," Scimemi said.

Of Mice and more
Food, care packages and provisions for NASA's astronauts make up more than a third of the cargo onboard Dragon. But the spacecraft also has experiments and equipment that will eventually help scientists complete 255 research projects in total, according to NASA. In Dragon's trunk, there's an instrument dubbed RapidScat, which will be installed outside the space station to measure the speed and direction of ocean winds on Earth. Among the commercially funded experiments onboard Dragon is a materials-science test from the sports company Cobra Puma Golf designed to build a stronger golf club.

Dragon is also hauling the first space-grade 3D printer, built by Made in Space, which will test whether the on-the-spot manufacturing technology is viable without gravity.



Jeff Sheehy, senior technical officer of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, said it is " a certainty" that NASA will eventually rely on 3D-printed tools and replacement parts that are made in space instead of traditional equipment sent up from Earth.

"If we're really going to set up shop on Mars, we have to get there," Sheehy told reports during a briefing Friday morning. "We really can't afford to bring everything we need."

A new X-ray machine called the Bone Densitometer, developed by Techshot, will arrive at the space station aboard Dragon. The system is designed to measure bone density loss, but not in humans. Instead, it will be used to examine mice.

The 20 female mice inside Dragon will live inside NASA's new Rodent Research Hardware System to be installed on the space station. Before the launch, scientists said the mice would be just fine during the 10-minute trip to low-Earth orbit, even without cushy seats.

"They move to the bottom of the cage and they hang tight until the ride is over," said Ruth Globus, a project scientist for the new rodent habitat at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

Reusable Rocket test
After launch, SpaceX performed a reusability test with the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket. After separation, the booster reignited out over the Atlantic Ocean and went through a couple burns to bring it down into the water gently. SpaceX officials said they didn't expect to recover the first stage nor did they anticipate they would be able to see much of the nighttime test.

SpaceX's goal had been to recover a Falcon 9 first stage with a touchdown on land by the end of 2014. But Koenigsmann said that type of demonstration was unlikely to happen during the next mission.

"We're working actively with range safety to make this safe and also reliable in terms of public safety," Koenigsmann told reporters Friday.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has long-term ambitions to develop a fully reusable rocket will lower the cost of launching vehicles into space — and eventually enable travel to Mars.

Four weeks at the space station
If all goes according to plan, Dragon will perform a series of carefully timed thruster firings to catch up to the space station on the morning of Tuesday (Sept. 23). Astronauts will use the space station's robotic arm to grab Dragon and attach it to a docking port.

Dragon will spend about four weeks at the space lab to allow astronauts to unload the new cargo and refill the capsule with about 3,800 lbs. (1,723 kg) experiments and other equipment to be returned to Earth.



Orbital Sciences is the only other private American company besides SpaceX that NASA has hired to fly unmanned resupply missions to the space station. The Dulles, Virginia-based company has a $1.9-billion contract to fly eight missions total using its own Cygnus spacecraft and Antares rockets. Orbital Sciences launched its second official delivery flight to the space station in July, with its next mission set for October.

Unlike Orbital Sciences' disposable spacecraft, which burn up in Earth's atmosphere at the end of their mission, Dragon has a heat shield that protects it from the brutal re-entry. About five and a half hours after Dragon leaves the space station in mid-October, it will deploy its parachutes and splash down off the coast of Baja California. A recovery boat will scoop the capsule out of the Pacific Ocean. Eventually, SpaceX also wants its Dragon capsules to make soft landings on the ground.

Just this week, the Hawthorne, California-based spaceflight company was hired to help keep the space station fully staffed as well.

SpaceX won $2.6 billion of NASA's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability award to launch American astronauts to the space station from U.S. soil by 2017 using a modified, manned version of Dragon. NASA, which announced the deal Tuesday (Sept. 16), gave Boeing a $4.2 billion slice of the award to provide the same space-taxi service with its CST-100 capsule. The United States lost the capability to send its own astronauts into space when NASA retired the space shuttle program in 2011.

"This is kind of a crazy busy week for us here at NASA," Ellen Stofan, NASA's chief scientist, told reporters Friday (Sept. 19).

In addition to the commercial crew announcement and the SpaceX launch, NASA's Mars-bound spacecraft MAVEN entered orbit around the Red Planet late Sunday night.