Brain Mapping A new map, a decade in the works, shows structures of the brain in far greater detail than ever before, providing neuroscientists with a guide to its immense complexity

Neuroscientists have made remarkable progress in recent years toward understanding how the brain works. And in coming years, Europe’s Human Brain Project will attempt to create a computational simulation of the human brain, while the U.S. BRAIN Initiative will try to create a wide-ranging picture of brain activity. These ambitious projects will greatly benefit from a new resource: detailed and comprehensive maps of the brain’s structure and its different regions.

As part of the Human Brain Project, an international team of researchers led by German and Canadian scientists has produced a three-dimensional atlas of the brain that has 50 times the resolution of previous such maps. The atlas, which took a decade to complete, required slicing a brain into thousands of thin sections and digitally stitching them back together with the help of supercomputers. Able to show details as small as 20 micrometers, roughly the size of many human cells, it is a major step forward in understanding the brain’s three-dimensional anatomy.

To guide the brain’s digital reconstruction, researchers led by Katrin Amunts at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany initially used an MRI machine to image the postmortem brain of a 65-year-old woman. The brain was then cut into ultrathin slices. The scientists stained the sections and then imaged them one by one on a flatbed scanner.

Alan Evans and his coworkers at the Montreal Neurological Institute organized the 7,404 resulting images into a data set about a terabyte in size. Slicing had bent, ripped, and torn the tissue, so Evans had to correct these defects in the images. He also aligned each one to its original position in the brain. The result is mesmerizing: a brain model that you can swim through, zooming in or out to see the arrangement of cells and tissues.

Quantum-Dot Technology Ready to Improve LCD TVs

If LCD TVs start getting much more colorful — and energy-efficient — in the next few years, it will probably be thanks to MIT spinout QD Vision, a pioneer of quantum-dot television displays.

Quantum dots are light-emitting semiconductor nanocrystals that can be tuned — by changing their size, nanometer by nanometer — to emit all colors across the visible spectrum. By tuning these dots to red and green, and using a blue backlight to energize them, QD Vision has developed an optical component that can boost the color gamut for LCD televisions by roughly 50 percent, and increase energy-efficiency by around 20 percent.

Last June, Sony used QD Vision’s product, called Color IQ, in millions of its Bravia “Triluminos” televisions, marking the first-ever commercial quantum-dot display. In September, Chinese electronics manufacturer TCL began implementing Color IQ into certain models. These are currently only available in China, “because a lot of growth for the TV market is there,” says Seth Coe-Sullivan PhD ’05, co-founder and chief technology officer of QD Vision, who co-invented the technology at MIT. But within a couple of months, he says, these displays will be “rolling out to the rest of the world.”

Lighting to displays, and back

QD Vision’s technology began at MIT more than a decade ago. Coe-Sullivan, then a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science, was working with Bulovic and students of Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor in Chemistry, on implementing quantum dots into electronic devices.

In a study funded by MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, Coe-Sullivan, QD Vision co-founder Jonathan Steckel PhD ’06, and others developed a pioneering technique for producing quantum-dot LEDs (QLEDs). To do so, they sandwiched a layer of quantum dots, a few nanometers thick, between two organic thin films. When electrically charged, the dots illuminated a light bulb 25 times more efficiently than traditional devices.

The resulting paper, published in Nature in 2002, became a landmark in the quantum-dot-devices field. “Soon venture capitalists were calling Vladimir, asking if we’d spin a company out,” Coe-Sullivan says. Coe-Sullivan started toying around with the idea of starting a company. Then, a chance encounter at a cocktail party at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship — with a former classmate, QD Vision co-founder Greg Moeller MBA ’02 — sped things along. Early in the evening, the two started discussing Coe-Sullivan’s QLED advancements; they soon found themselves up all night in a lab in Building 13, fleshing out a business strategy.

Following that conversation, Coe-Sullivan enrolled in 15.390 (New Ventures) to further develop a business model. “That’s led to the more rigorous formation of a sales and marketing plans, and product creation,” he says. In 2004 Coe-Sullivan, Bulovic, Moeller, Steckel, and mentor Joe Caruso launched QD Vision.

Microsoft cloud service partially down, MSN unavailable

Microsoft Corp's Azure cloud-computing service, which hosts websites and lets customers store and manage data remotely, suffered serious outages on Tuesday taking its popular MSN web portal offline.

 

According to Microsoft's Azure status page, the problems started around 5pm Pacific time and have still not been fully solved. "We are experiencing a connectivity issue across multiple Azure Services," the page said. 

"Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting access to some Microsoft services," said a Microsoft spokesperson. "We are working to restore full access to these services as quickly as possible." Azure outages are a serious problem for Microsoft as the company tries to sell its cloud-computing service as a cost-effective and reliable alternative to Amazon.com Inc's competing service called AWS.

They are also a headache to the many customers relying on Azure to host websites. That includes Microsoft itself, whose MSN.com site was inaccessible on Tuesday.

Windows 10 such a big deal its Kernel will leap from 6.4 to 10.

If skipping 9 when christening the newest Windows OS flavor wasn’t enough to prove Microsoft is unusually bullish about the platform’s evolutionary prospects, the underlying code number should clear up the air once and for all. Redmond sees Windows 10 as the most radical operating system overhaul yet.

Currently, the Win 10 Technical Preview’s kernel is marked with a 6.4 value. Specifically, 6.4.9879, for the latest update seeded to beta testers. But the next pre-release build will go out with a 10.0 designation.

As such, the kernel number and official brand are to line up for the first time in two decades. In the early days of the desktop OS, developers identified Windows 3’s code as 3.0. But then an erratic marketing strategy and minor update policy messed the zen factor all up, and we got to the point Windows 7 was actually 6.1 for program compatibility purposes.

Confusion grew, and so did the gap between the two digits, when Microsoft rolled out Windows 8, aka 6.2, and 8.1, otherwise known as 6.3. The balance shall be restored before long though, at least from a symbolic point of view.

NASA Telescopes Reveal That Sagittarius A* May Be Producing Neutrinos

The giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way may be producing mysterious particles called neutrinos. If confirmed, this would be the first time that scientists have traced neutrinos back to a black hole.

The evidence for this came from three NASA satellites that observe in X-ray light: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Swift gamma-ray mission, and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). Neutrinos are tiny particles that carry no charge and interact very weakly with electrons and protons. Unlike light or charged particles, neutrinos can emerge from deep within their cosmic sources and travel across the universe without being absorbed by intervening matter or, in the case of charged particles, deflected by magnetic fields.

The Earth is constantly bombarded with neutrinos from the sun. However, neutrinos from beyond the solar system can be millions or billions of times more energetic. Scientists have long been searching for the origin of ultra-high energy and very high-energy neutrinos.

“Figuring out where high-energy neutrinos come from is one of the biggest problems in astrophysics today,” said Yang Bai of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who co-authored a study about these results published in Physical Review D.

“We now have the first evidence that an astronomical source – the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole – may be producing these very energetic neutrinos.”

Scientists Synthesize an Entirely New Form of Silicon

Washington, D.C. — Silicon is the second most-abundant element in the earth’s crust. When purified, it takes on a diamond structure, which is essential to modern electronic devices—carbon is to biology as silicon is to technology. A team of Carnegie scientists led by Timothy Strobel has synthesized an entirely new form of silicon, one that promises even greater future applications. Their work is published in Nature Materials. Although silicon is incredibly common in today’s technology, its so-called indirect band gap semiconducting properties prevent it from being considered for next-generation, high-efficiency applications such as light-emitting diodes, higher-performance transistors and certain photovoltaic devices.

Metallic substances conduct electrical current easily, whereas insulating (non-metallic) materials conduct no current at all. Semiconducting materials exhibit mid-range electrical conductivity. When semiconducting materials are subjected to an input of a specific energy, bound electrons can move to higher-energy, conducting states.

The specific energy required to make this jump to the conducting state is defined as the “band gap.” While direct band gap materials can effectively absorb and emit light, indirect band gap materials, like diamond-structured silicon, cannot. In order for silicon to be more attractive for use in new technology, its indirect band gap needed to be altered. Strobel and his team—Carnegie’s Duck Young Kim, Stevce Stefanoski and Oleksandr Kurakevych (now at Sorbonne) —were able to synthesize a new form of silicon with a quasi-direct band gap that falls within the desired range for solar absorption, something that has never before been achieved.

New 2D Materials Exhibit Exotic Quantum Properties

A newly published study from MIT details a theoretical analysis showing that a family of two-dimensional materials exhibits exotic quantum properties that may enable a new type of nanoscale electronics.

These materials are predicted to show a phenomenon called the quantum spin Hall (QSH) effect, and belong to a class of materials known as transition metal dichalcogenides, with layers a few atoms thick. The findings are detailed in a paper appearing this week in the journal Science, co-authored by MIT postdocs Xiaofeng Qian and Junwei Liu; assistant professor of physics Liang Fu; and Ju Li, a professor of nuclear science and engineering and materials science and engineering.

QSH materials have the unusual property of being electrical insulators in the bulk of the material, yet highly conductive on their edges. This could potentially make them a suitable material for new kinds of quantum electronic devices, many researchers believe.

But only two materials with QSH properties have been synthesized, and potential applications of these materials have been hampered by two serious drawbacks: Their bandgap, a property essential for making transistors and other electronic devices, is too small, giving a low signal-to-noise ratio; and they lack the ability to switch rapidly on and off. Now the MIT researchers say they have found ways to potentially circumvent both obstacles using 2-D materials that have been explored for other purposes.

Existing QSH materials only work at very low temperatures and under difficult conditions, Fu says, adding that “the materials we predicted to exhibit this effect are widely accessible. … The effects could be observed at relatively high temperatures.”

“What is discovered here is a true 2-D material that has this [QSH] characteristic,” Li says. “The edges are like perfect quantum wires.”

The MIT researchers say this could lead to new kinds of low-power quantum electronics, as well as spintronics devices — a kind of electronics in which the spin of electrons, rather than their electrical charge, is used to carry information. Graphene, a two-dimensional, one-atom-thick form of carbon with unusual electrical and mechanical properties, has been the subject of much research, which has led to further research on similar 2-D materials. But until now, few researchers have examined these materials for possible QSH effects, the MIT team says. “Two-dimensional materials are a very active field for a lot of potential applications,” Qian says — and this team’s theoretical work now shows that at least six such materials do share these QSH properties.