| | | | | A Study In The Interconnectedness Of Things | | | Scientists grow human serotonin neurons in petri dish For the first time ever, University of Buffalo researchers have created human serotonin: the precious neurotransmitter linked to depression.
 Until now, the inability to obtain live human serotonin to study neurological illnesses has limited serotonin research to lab animals.
According to researchers, these findings may be applied to other previously inaccessible human cell types.
"Our work demonstrates that the precious serotonin neurons hidden deep inside the human brain can now be created in a petri dish," said lead author Jian Feng, PhD, professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Find more information at MedicalXpress.com. | | Google is now Alphabet  It's not often that a company with a market cap of over $400 billion announces a massive operational restructuring plan that will undoubtedly hog the public conversation in tech social circles for months to come. Yet, that's exactly what Google did today.
Under terms of the restructuring plan announced today by Larry Page, Google is rebranding itself as a new company called Alphabet. The core Google products you've come to know and love — YouTube, Android, Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, and Maps — aren't getting the new branding but they will operate as a single unit under the Alphabet umbrella. The move, according to Page, is intended to provide more transparency to the company's quarterly operations while also allowing Alphabet to better focus on other large entities such as Nest, Calico, Google X Incubator, and more.
"Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable," Page wrote, adding that he'll stay on as CEO of Alphabet while fellow cofounder Sergey Brin assumes the role of president. "Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren't very related."
Continue reading at Gigaom.com.
| | The US FDA Approves the World's First 3D Printed Pill The US Food and Drug Administration has authorized the production of a 3D-printed pill created by Aprecia Pharmaceuticals.  The new pill called Spritam was developed to control seizures brought on by epilepsy. The use of 3D-printing allows the layers of medication to be packaged more tightly in precise dosages.
The FDA has previously approved other medical devices to be 3D printed including prosthetics. Aprecia Pharmaceuticals has plans to develop other medications using its 3D platform.
Aprecia Pharmaceuticals also developed a technology called ZipDose that makes it easier to swallow high dosages. Printing the drug allows a single table to hold up to 1,000 milligrams and dissolve similarly to other oral medicines.
Find more information at BBC.com.
| | NASA 3D Prints Space Drone to Explore Mars 
NASA Blog Editor Steven Siceloff announced that Swamp Works engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center are inventing an extreme access flyer tasked with gathering samples from other planets. These drones will be able to access areas on other worlds that are currently inaccessible to rovers.
Siceloff explains, "The vehicles – similar to quad-copters but designed for the thin atmosphere of Mars and the airless voids of asteroids and the moon – would use a lander as a base to replenish batteries and propellants between flights."
According to Swamp Works Senior Technologist Rob Mueller, "This is a prospecting robot..The first step in being able to use resources on Mars or an asteroid is to find out where the resources are. They are most likely in hard-to-access areas where there is permanent shadow. Some of the crater walls are angled 30 degrees or more, and that's far too steep for a traditional rover to navigate and climb."
Continue reading at NASA.gov.
| | The Robots Are Coming The Argus Leader devotes a week to debating the evolution of automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and its impact on the workforce.
 This week Steve Young of The Argus Leader is taking an in-depth look at robotics as it applies to the human workforce.
Young explains, "But just as the evolution of electricity helped to propel the nation through the Second Industrial Revolution more than a century ago, the technological wizardry that has brought Siri to our cell phones and 'recalculating to our highway lexicon promises to be just as transformative."
Based in Souix Falls, The Argus Leader will focus on technology's impact on their largest industries: manufacturing, health care, financial services, and retail services. Young asks, "Could robots do the welding, the assembly line work and the other lower-level repetitive jobs that companies seem to have such a difficult time filling?"
"Some people, like Silicon Valley software developer Martin Ford, are telling me that advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will eventually make a large fraction of our human workforce obsolete."
Continue reading at Argusleader.com. | | Interview with Stephen Wolfram on AI and the Future Stephen Wolfram is a distinguished scientist, technologist and entrepreneur. He has devoted his career to the development and application of computational thinking.
Byron Reese: So when do you first remember hearing the term "artificial intelligence"?
Stephen Wolfram: That is a good question. I don't have any idea. When I was a kid, in the 1960s in England, I think there was a prevailing assumption that it wouldn't be long before there were automatic brains of some kind, and I certainly had books about the future at that time, and I'm sure that they contained things about them, how there would be some electronic brains, and so on. Whether they used the term "artificial intelligence," I'm not quite sure. Good question. I don't know.
Would you agree that AI, up there with space travel, has kind of always been the thing of tomorrow and hasn't advanced at the rate we thought they would?
Oh, yes. But there's a very definite history. People assumed, when computers were first coming around, that pretty soon, we'd automate what brains do just like we've automated what arms and legs do, and so on. Nobody had any real intuition for how hard that might be. It turned out, for reasons that people simply didn't understand in the '40s, and '50s, and '60s, that lots of aspects of it were quite hard, and also, the specific problem of reproducing what human brains choose to do may not be the right problem. Just like if you want to build a transportation system, having it based on legs is not the best engineering solution. There was an assumption that we can automate brains just like you can automate mechanical kinds of things, and it's only a matter of time, and in the early '60s, it seemed like it would be a short time, but that turned out not to be true, at least for some things.
Read the full interview at Gigaom.com. | | | | | | | |
