#1 New Supercomputer with 1 Million Processors Is World's Fastest Brain-Mimicking Machine
By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | November 5, 2018 07:07am ET
Scientists just activated the world's biggest "brain": a supercomputer with a million processing cores and 1,200 interconnected circuit boards that together operate like a human brain.
Researchers recently activated a computer capable of simulating brain activity more accurately than any other computer in the world can.Credit: Shutterstock
세계 최고속 슈퍼컴 개발
과학자들, 세계에서 가장 큰 "두뇌" 작동시켜
100만 개의 프로세싱 코어를 가진 슈퍼컴퓨터와 1,200개의 상호 연결된 회로 기판이 인간의 뇌처럼 동작한다.
11월 2일에 발표된 이 컴퓨터는 제작에만 10년이 걸린 세계에서 가장 큰 신경 변성형 컴퓨터다. 즉 뉴런의 발사를 모방한 컴퓨터이다.
황기철 콘페이퍼 에디터 큐레이터
Ki Cheol Hwang, conpaper editor, curator
edited by kcontents
Ten years in the making, it is the world's largest neuromorphic computer — a type of computer that mimics the firing of neurons — scientists announced on Nov. 2.
Dubbed Spiking Neural Network Architecture, or SpiNNaker, the computer powerhouse is located at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and it "rethinks the way conventional computers work," project member Steve Furber, a professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, said in a statement. [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]
But SpiNNaker doesn't just "think" like a brain. It creates models of the neurons in human brains, and it simulates more neurons in real time than any other computer on Earth, according to the statement.
"Its primary task is to support partial brain models: for example, models of cortex, of basal ganglia, or multiple regions expressed typically as networks of spiking [or firing] neurons," Furber told Live Science in an email.
Double the processors
Since April 2016, SpiNNaker has been simulating neuron activity using 500,000 core processors, but the upgraded machine has twice that capacity, Furber explained. With the support of the European Union's Human Brain Project — an effort to construct a virtual human brain — SpiNNaker will continue to enable scientists to create detailed brain models. But now it has the capacity to perform 200 quadrillion actions simultaneously, university representatives reported in the statement.
While some other computers may rival SpiNNaker in the number of processors they contain, what sets this platform apart is the infrastructure connecting those processors. In the human brain, 100 billion neurons simultaneously fire and transmit signals to thousands of destinations. SpiNNaker's architecture supports an exceptional level of communication among its processors, behaving much like a brain's neural network does, Furber explained.
"Conventional supercomputers have connectivity mechanisms that are much less wellsuited to realtime brain modeling," he said. "SpiNNaker is, I believe, capable of modeling larger spiking neural networks in biological real time than any other machine."
#2 Scientists Develop Liquid Fuel That Can Store The Sun's Energy For Up to 18 Years
CARLY CASSELLA 6 NOV 2018
No matter how abundant or renewable, solar power has a thorn in its side. There is still no cheap and efficient long-term storage for the energy that it generates.
The solar industry has been snagged on this branch for a while, but in the past year alone, a series of four papers has ushered in an intriguing new solution.
18년 동안 태양 에너지 저장 액체 연료 개발
태양에너지는 아무리 풍부하거나 재생가능하더라도 그것의 측면에 가시가 있다. 그것이 생산하는 에너지를 위한 저렴하고 효율적인 장기 저장장치는 아직 없다.
태양에너지 산업은 한동안 기술개발이 정체됐었지만 지난 1년 동안만 해도 흥미로운 새로운 해결책을 제시해 왔다.
스웨덴의 과학자들이 태양으로부터 에너지를 10년 이상 저장할 수 있는 태양열 연료라고 불리는 특수 용액을 개발했다.
"태양열 연료는 재충전 가능한 배터리와 같습니다. 하지만 전기 대신 햇빛을 받아 필요할 때 열을 방출합니다."라고 MIT의 엔지니어 제프리 그로스맨이 NBC 뉴스에 설명했다.
황기철 콘페이퍼 에디터 큐레이터
Ki Cheol Hwang, conpaper editor, curator
edited by kcontents
Scientists in Sweden have developed a specialised fluid, called a solar thermal fuel, that can store energy from the sun for well over a decade.
"A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity, you put sunlight in and get heat out, triggered on demand," Jeffrey Grossman, an engineer works with these materials at MIT explained to NBC News.
The fluid is actually a molecule in liquid form that scientists from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden have been working on improving for over a year.
This molecule is composed of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, and when it is hit by sunlight, it does something unusual: the bonds between its atoms are rearranged and it turns into an energised new version of itself, called an isomer.
Like prey caught in a trap, energy from the sun is thus captured between the isomer's strong chemical bonds, and it stays there even when the molecule cools down to room temperature.
When the energy is needed - say at nighttime, or during winter - the fluid is simply drawn through a catalyst that returns the molecule to its original form, releasing energy in the form of heat.
#3 Scientists develop a cancer-detecting smartphone add-on that’s up to 99% accurate
By Jessica Hall on November 2, 2016 at 9:27 am 20 Comments
Researchers from Washington State University have come up with a diagnostic rig that can use a smartphone, a prism, and an ELISA plate to detect cancer. In the controlled settings of their lab, with the high-purity reagents they had to work with, the researchers were able to detect the cancer marker interleukin-6 (IL-6) with 99% accuracy.
99% 정확도 암 검출 가능 스마트폰 개발
워싱턴 주립대학의 연구원들은 스마트폰, 프리즘, 그리고 암을 발견하기 위해 엘리스아 판을 사용할 수 있는 진단 기구를 개발했다.
연구진은 연구실의 통제된 환경에서 고품질 시약을 사용하여 암 표지 인터류킨-6(IL-6)을 99%의 정확도로 검출할 수 있었다
황기철 콘페이퍼 에디터 큐레이터
Ki Cheol Hwang, conpaper editor, curator
edited by kcontents
Obviously results in the field will not reflect the near-ideal conditions of lab work. The concepts, though, are solid. The rig consists of a backlit ELISA assaying plate with 96 wells, a “microprism array,” and a 3D printed cradle that holds a smartphone with a camera. The diagnostician using the rig would take samples from a patient, put them in the assay plate, and turn on the backlight. Light would then shine up through the samples in the plate, through the prism, and into the smartphone’s camera — from where the technician can use an app to analyze the light from each individual well in the ELISA plate by its color. Which colors turn up tell the results of the ELISA test.
The whole thing rests on the idea that IL-6 is “closely linked” to a variety of cancers of the lung, liver, breast, and skin. And it is. IL-6 is a protein that the human body produces in response to an alert in the immune system; it induces B cells to make more antibodies, which (when they’re working correctly) glom onto “non-self” invaders and tag them for destruction and disposal. Everyone should have a little IL-6 circulating in their bloodstream. In patients with advanced or metastatic cancers, though, there tends to be a lot. It’s just that IL-6 is also linked to depression and mood disorders, so you can’t rightly look at a patient’s blood, see lots of IL-6, and say with certainty “You have cancer.” But you can look at a patient’s blood, see lots of IL-6, and say “You probably have a condition activating your immune defenses, and you ought to go get a more detailed blood panel done.” For a patient who’s come in worried that their symptoms could be cancer, it would be a useful adjunct to the office visit, just because antibody reactions are fast, so immune assays are relatively quick.
