Claude Shannon Father of Information theory

From fire trumpets to supercomputers

Claude Shannon

 Claude Shannon enjoyed building remote controlled model planes and boats. And, his passion paved the way for the advent of the internet, modern computers and cell phones which controls the ways of the world today. Claude Shannon, the Father of Information Theory, an American engineer, mathematician and inventor was born on April 30, 1916. He would have turned 100 on Saturday. As the world remembers him and Google dedicates a Doodle to Shannon on his 100th birth anniversary, here's a glance at Shannon's life that was. Shannon’s father was a businessman, one of New Jersey’s early settlers. His mother was a language school teacher.
A child prodigy, Shannon was keen on studying science and mathematics at school. He graduated from high school in 1932 and enrolled at the University Of Michigan (MIT). By the time he graduated in 1936, he had a master’s degree each in electrical engineering and mathematics. Soon after, he joined the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to continue his studies in the two fields. He later joined the faculty at MIT but quit soon after as he was more interested in maths and science than students and lectures. In 1937, he published a paper as part of his master’s thesis: A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits. This paper was critically acclaimed and was also published the next year in an electrical engineering magazine. The article was so widely regarded that in 1939, Claude was awarded the Alfred Noble American Institute of American Engineers Award. Howard Gardner even said that the paper was “the most important master’s thesis of the century.” In 1942, he invented signal-flow graphs, after joining Bell Jar labs. This was part of his war time research. He is credited with digital data research, as well as coining the term “bytes” or "bits" for calculating computer data. It was Claude who first visualized a computer made with electrical components instead of motors.
It was at Bell Jar that he met his wife Betty who worked there as a numerical analyst, whom he married in 1949. Google has dedicated a Doodle to Shannon by depicting him as juggling balls in the air. Shannon was famous for cycling around the lab campus while juggling balls at the same time, which is where the idea for the Doodle comes from.
Soon after, though, Shannon took refuge in the basement of his home in Boston where he carried out research work and indulged in hobbies. He invented a host of gadgets such as a flame-throwing trumpet, a device which could solve the Rubik’s Cube, a Roman numeric computer THROBAC and a digital computer called the Minivac 601, among many others. He also designed a box called the ‘Ultimate Machine’, which had a switch on the outside. When the switch was flipped on, a hand from inside the box would emerge and flip the switch back.
Among his other notable inventions was a wearable computer, by which one could beat the odds at a roulette table. His fascination with mathematical theory behind gambling resulted in him making regular trips to Las Vegas, America’s play ground. These trips were accompanied by Shannon’s MIT colleague Edward O Thorp, a mathematician himself, who later published a book called ‘Beat the Dealer’ in 1962. The book was almost a manual on how card counting can help one win over the house at Blackjack. With increasing age, though, Shannon became more of a recluse. He started to publish less and less papers. Rumours, from mental illness to ruining his career by wiling away his time working on frivolous inventions and indulging in fantasies began to do the rounds. He wrote only one paper after 1974.
In 1978, Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. His health deteriorated more and more just as technology and data innovations gathered steam and the internet boom was beginning to take place. In 1993, he was admitted to a nursing home. He passed away in 2001, leaving behind a legacy that changed the way the world used technology forever. His contributions to the world of science are indispensable. Shannon revolutionized the way humanity used computers and electrical components in hardware. He is credited with being the facilitator for much of the gadgets and comforts of modern life.


Source :www.thestatesman.com

Invention Convention

Young tinkerers show their stuff at Invention Convention 

Matthew Murad, a second-grader from Olmsted School 64, works with his invention called Lightskis at the 14th annual Invention Convention at the Central Library on Sunday. from OFrederick Law Olmstead school works with his invention, Lightskis, during an invention competition at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library in Buffalo Sunday. second grader at Olmsted School 64 Mark Mulville/Buffalo News

 Old skis and a pair of headlamps for the bindings and 7-year-old Matthew Murad had the ingredients for his entry to the 14th annual Invention Convention and a better way to downhill ski near the woods at night: “Lightskis.”

“That will definitely come in handy for me,” he said standing by his display Sunday afternoon at the Central Library. “Too bad I invented after the snow melted.” The second grader at Olmsted School 64 was surrounded by competitors’ cardboard signs, sketches and protoypes that were windows into other kid dilemmas. Jeans embedded with lights at the hem to better see at night and have hands free to carry wood into the house. Rubber gloves fixed with toothbrush bristles at the fingertips for scrubbing the toilet. A backpack that opened into a jacket. A piano bench that glides for a young player with short arms to move and reach all the keys. Dog bowls on two levels so that a short and a tall dog could eat at the same time. “It’s creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking,” said Miriam Kelley, a former Fisher-Price toy design executive, creative studies adjunct professor at SUNY Buffalo State College and board member at the Invention Convention, a nonprofit run by a team of volunteer professionals. “It’s the four C’s of the 21st century.” The competition began earlier this year with an invitation to local students to submit ideas based on materials they found at Goodwill Industries. This year, 82 inventions by 94 students at 11 area schools made it to the Sunday finale at the library. Inventors manned displays and answered questions and proud parents quietly looked on until mid-afternoon, when everyone went downstairs to the auditorium where winners were announced, like Gianna Cicco’s “Toasty Clothes” in the “Home/Garden” category. Together with friend Aryona Nablo, she refinished a small dresser from Goodwill, painted it purple and slipped heating pads in the drawers so clothes could be warm and ready in the winter. “We were cold when we got dressed in the morning and at night when we got out of the shower,” said Gianna, 10, a fifth-grader who wore a headband decorated with a small, askew pink hat. ”I used it once for my pajamas and it felt really good.” Once she put it together, teachers at Colonial Village Elementary School in Sanborn told her they wanted one. She was surprised by how well it turned out. “I didn’t know a 10-year-old could do all this,” she said. For the kids showing off their inventions, creating something cool seemed like a bigger deal than winning. Fifth-graders Annabella Cullinan and Emma Unger beamed as they explained they were inspired by rambunctious younger children in their lives – a brother and neighbor, respectively – when they made the “Toddler Tag Bag.” It was a nylon briefcase with a book about trucks, a tic tac toe game, a lock and a giant toy TV remote. The assortment of $16 worth of Goodwill finds and $5 in store-bought velcro and whiteboard was intended to keep kids entertained so everyone else with them can enjoy dinner at a restaurant. “So parents aren’t frustrated and people around aren’t mad at the kid,” said Emma, 10, who goes to Williamsville’s Nativity of Mary School with Annabella. Emma’s parents stood nearby, impressed by the girl’s diligence and creativity. “I’m like, Oh my gosh, look at her go. She could be in sales one day,” said Christina Unger. Her husband, Jeff, agreed. “They’re excited about it. That was the best part – just getting themselves out there and volunteering for this.” Meesha Henderson was equally impressed by her 5-year-old Maja Laghorne’s interest in making a purse from a shirt at Goodwill, picking out a belt for a strap that matched the gray plaid and fixing a red barrett bow on the pocket for decoration. To help Maja do everything herself, they used iron-on adhesives instead of a sewing machine. “I wanted her to do it all,” said Henderson, who had to keep Maja from wearing the purse until the competition was over. “She has really good taste to be so young.” Maja, who had pink beads in her braids and a shiny “Miss Kitty” purse, was known at home for making sure recyclables, like egg cartons, were rescued from the trash. The kindergartner at School 79 pointed to her favorite part, a pink iron-on skull and crossbones patch she’d picked out at Walmart. She also used parts of the shirt to make a wallet and put in a fabric covered piece of cardboard to make the bottom flat. Now that her purse invention had made it this far, she liked the idea of selling it, suggesting a series of steep prices, $100, $2,000 and $100,000 before her brother leaned over to whisper a more reasonable $12 in her ear. Her mother smiled at the fun she was having being silly. “I let her do her thing,” said Henderson.

source: www.buffalonews.com

Student invention grows hundreds of ‘mini-brains’ at once

Student invention grows hundreds of ‘mini-brains’ at once.

 

Derailing development: A Zika virus infection (right) destroyed the layers (left) of a cultured ‘mini-brain’.

Hongjun Song ignored the first email from Christopher Hadiono, a high school student hoping to spend the summer of 2013 in Song’s lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The payoff didn’t seem worth the paperwork, not to mention the hassle of helping the 16-year-old New Yorker find housing for three months. “My thought was, okay, let’s just wait. If he is serious, he’s going to ask me again,” says Song, professor of neurology. Two emails, a letter and a phone call later, Song knew Hadiono was serious. He filled out the paperwork and arranged for Hadiono to stay in the school’s dormitory. He thought the high school student would help with the odd experiment. What happened next was a complete surprise. “I thought I would be working with stem cells and pipettes,” Hadiono says. “I ended up doing something completely different.”

Within weeks, he had mastered computer software for making machine parts using a three-dimensional (3D) printer. By the summer’s end, he had built a device that could grow hundreds of brain organoids, or ‘mini-brains’ — spheres of cells that mimic the layers of neurons in a human brain. Less than four months later, those mini-brains were ready for analysis. “I was shocked,” Song says, recalling the moment he saw the machine whirring on top of a workbench.

Baby bioreactor: 

The machine functions like a miniature bioreactor, a device that delivers nutrients to cells and keeps them at an ideal temperature for growth. The custom-made contraption, which costs roughly $400, can accommodate more than twice as many mini-brains as $2,000 commercially available versions — and its small size and low cost allows researchers to run many of the devices in parallel. The new machine can also expose organoids to about twice as many different experimental conditions — different drugs or small molecules, for example — as are allowed by traditional bioreactors. “We did not think that even a biotechnology graduate student could make this into a reality,” Song says. But unencumbered by the constraints of a doctoral thesis, high school students have the time and energy to innovate, he says. “Once you have a good idea, that changes everything.” So far, Song and his team have used the mini-bioreactors to reveal how the Zika virus tampers with the developing fetal forebrain1. They showed that the virus causes a small head size, known as microcephaly, by killing neural stem cells and thinning brain structures during the second trimester. These findings, along with blueprints for the bioreactor, dubbed SpinΩ, are outlined in a paper published 21 April in Cell1. The team has also filed for a provisional patent. 

Mass production: 

The mass production of mini-brains could be a boon for drug development, enabling the simultaneous testing of different drugs to assess their effects on brain function. “The great advantage to this protocol is that it will allow much more rapid screening and assays to better study neurodevelopment in various neurodevelopmental disorders and to screen for drug targets,” says Erik Ullian, associate professor of ophthalmology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the work.
But some researchers say the new tool needs additional testing before it replaces conventional bioreactors in the lab. “I am very enthusiastic about this approach,” says Flora Vaccarino, professor of neuroscience at Yale University, who was not involved in the study. “Having said that, I would have hoped that they had shown the results in a more rigorous fashion.” It’s been about five years since scientists first created mini-brains. The process involves coaxing cells from a person’s skin or other tissue to form induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then transforming the stem cells into neurons. Researchers grow the neurons in liquid, where the cells naturally clump together as they grow. The researchers then add growth factors needed for the development of tissue layers in the human forebrain. Mini-brains offer a convenient platform to test new drugs for neurological conditions as well as hypotheses about the origins of autism. But these ‘brains’ are difficult to grow. Researchers have refined mini-brain production using protein-rich gels and various chemical soups that lead to more realistic renditions of the brain. SpinΩ is an attempt to scale up studies of these organoids. One secret of SpinΩ is the tiny amounts of reagents it needs. The device requires just 2 milliliters of nutrient-rich broth in each well of a standard 12-well cell-culture plate — compared with about 120 milliliters in each glass flask of a commercial bioreactor. Small spinning pegs (one in each well) replace the large magnetic stir bar used to stir the broth. Researchers can simultaneously steep as many as 20 balls of brain tissue per well in oxygen and nutrients as they grow and mature.

Major advance:

 

These devices — the pegs, gears and culture plate — are small enough to stack three high and still fit inside a mini-fridge-sized incubator, enabling close to a thousand mini-brains to grow at once. Only the size of the incubator limits the number of plates that could be stacked, Song says. By contrast, a commercial bioreactor can accommodate up to five glass flasks and can reliably grow a total of 100 mini-brains. The SpinΩ mini-brains grow for about 100 days and survive twice that long, which is similar to cell survival in a conventional bioreactor. Song currently has about 13 mini-bioreactors humming away in his lab, many of them home to iPS cells from people with autism. He plans to use the organoids they produce to uncover how autism-linked mutations affect brain development. Do neurons travel to the wrong brain layers in people with autism? Do the neurons make faulty connections? The student-made machine has piqued the interest of prominent stem cell scientists. Thomas Südhof, professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University in California, calls it “a major advance.” Another mini-brain maverick, Sergiu Pasca, echoes Südhof’s sentiment. “The elegant work is a really important advance in the field of 3D brain cultures,” says Pasca, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. Despite her enthusiasm for the new contraption, Vaccarino would like to see more data showing how realistic the resulting mini-brains are. By day 54, the spheres emerging from SpinΩ contain regions resembling those found in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in cognition, of a 9-week-old fetus. By day 100, they are similar to a 35-week-old fetus. But Vaccarino does not know whether the cellular layers contain neurons in biologically relevant numbers. She would also like to see stronger evidence that the stem cells differentiate into neurons that communicate using the chemical messenger gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which is implicated in autism.

Outrageous thinking: 

  After a successful summer in Song’s lab, Hadiono went back to high school in New York and is now studying engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. But Song quickly sought to fill the void with a new batch of teenage talent. High schoolers, he says, offer skills and perspective that can be hard to find among adults. “They know more than we do about programming and 3D printing, all that cool stuff,” he says. “They can make a design in a very different way than how we were trained.” Song now hosts at least three high school students each summer alongside a steady crew of graduate students, postdocs, technicians and young research faculty. He says each group has a different mindset when it comes to innovation. Graduate students and techs are eager to master existing protocols. Postdocs are even more risk averse, feeling pressure to produce and find a job. But high school students are “fearless,” Song says. “Anything they do is a success, so they are more excited. And that’s the reason the innovation comes early on.” Vaccarino sees that kind of youthful “outrageous” thinking in SpinΩ. She points out that high schoolers who sign up for a summer at the bench instead of the beach tend to be smart, enthusiastic and driven. “They get ideas that post-docs and more senior scientists either don’t have or don’t really push through,” she says. Song says he feels sad every time he has to say goodbye to one of these young prodigies. But one high school scientist will be particularly hard to let go: his son Max, now a senior at River Hill High School in Clarksville, Maryland. Max worked with his dad last summer and part-time during this school year, and is an author on the Cell paper. Max will soon be a freshman at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, but Song’s daughter Maggie will start high school in a couple of years. 

source: www.spectrumnews.org

Scanner identifies what's in your food

TellSpec hand-held scanner identifies what's in your food

TellSpec

Figuring out whether the fries on your plate contain traces of trans-fat, or if those celery sticks are truly pesticide-free can be tricky, if not impossible. That's why Isabel Hoffmann along with mathematician Stephen Watson set out to create TellSpec, a hand-held device that you can simply point at a food item, to identify what's in it. Not only does the device warn you about chemicals, allergens and ingredients you'd rather avoid, it'll also help you figure out food sensitivities and track your vitamin intake. The goal, the company says, is to help people make clean food choices by letting them "check their food as easily as they check their mail." "We want to promote healthier eating, alert those who have allergies and educate consumers by telling them exactly what’s in their food – beyond what the label says," Hoffman tells Gizmag. The device utilizes a small Raman spectrometer, a unique cloud-based algorithm and a simple smartphone app. Scanning a food item on the plate or in a shopping aisle is as simple as aiming TellSpec at it and pushing a button. It beams a low-powered laser at the item and analyzes the reflected light waves to identify the chemical makeup of the food. This data is uploaded to the analysis engine which processes the information, compares it to reference spectra, interprets the results with the help of a database, and downloads the results to the user's smartphone. Hoffman states that the device can successfully identify foods and their ingredients approximately 97.7 percent of the time after scanning the food's surface. "Depending on how transparent the surface of the food is, the more accurate the scan will be," explains Hoffman. "Users must understand that these scans can only go so deep. To scan a Twinkie, the user could do two separate scans for a more accurate reading.

One at the surface and then a second in the center of the Twinkie." The team scanned 3,000 food items to create the initial database, but the device can potentially identify an unlimited number of ingredients, according to Hoffman. Its ability to make identifications is expected to increase exponentially as the number of TellSpec users grow, and add their own scans of different food items. Initially the company plans to direct 82 beta food testers early next spring (Northern Hemisphere) to start TellSpecing as soon as the devices become available, increasing the breadth and depth of the food data. "This is the crowd-sourced element of our clean food revolution," Hoffman tells us. "It is literally in the hands of the people. It is they who will truly participate actively in creating a global footprint of food data.The food database is an evolving number – the more people scan, the more the database grows and the more precise the scans become." We've seen devices like the iTube which turns a smartphone into an allergen sensor, but TellSpec is designed to be a smart device. It will do more than tell you if there's Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) in that soup mix or if those chips are truly gluten-free. It can also give you the background story on little-known ingredients like Tartrazine, a synthetic lemon yellow that's commonly used as food coloring. For the calorie conscious, TellSpec can breakdown the amount of sugars, fats and more per gram of a scanned food item. It can help users ascertain that they stay within recommended limits, when it comes to their intake of toxic substances like mercury. Plans are in the works to have the device calculate the volume of food a person consumes, too. While it doesn't diagnose food sensitivities or allergies, users who are uncertain about food triggers can log in symptoms after they've eaten something (like feeling uncomfortable after drinking a glass of milk) to get TellSpec's suggestions. "It will ask you how you feel," Hoffman explains. "If you tell Tellspec you feel bloated, it will suggest that it may be caused by lactose and that you should check with your doctor about the possibility of an allergy." Hoffman hopes that the device will find use as a holistic health tool, as its food database grows larger and people use it in real time to register any disturbing symptoms. "Eventually, the food data 'bank' will compile across time, peoples' historical food data and individual symptoms at a global level," says Hoffman. "These correlations between how people feel and what they really eat will eventually lead to a 'TellSpecodedia' of food data and personalized health information." All the TellSpec data will be open source, allowing anyone to use the data to create their own health-based apps. For instance, a diabetic app that tracks blood sugar levels could utilize TellSpec data to track what sugars or carbohydrates the user consumes, and identify ingredients in their food that would also convert into sugar. "By sharing our API with the world, we want TellSpec to engage the crowd-sourcing power that a group and population bring to any problem," says Hoffman. "One or two brains on any food issue would not yield the answers that the world could definitely benefit from. We want this to be an open source for new applications and new fields of study that grow from a source of food data that has never been available before." TellSpec is currently under development, after raising three times its funding goal on Indiegogo. Shipping is slated to begin in August 2014. Its US$320 price tag includes one year of free analysis of food scans, with further analyses being made available through subscription plans.

 source:Tellspec

Water Could Help Make Better Batteries

How Water Could Help Make Better Batteries

Water could be the key to producing a cheaper, more environmentally friendly and less dangerous way of making the lithium-ion batteries that power so many everyday gadgets, researchers say. Currently, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are typically found in mobile devices such as cellphones, laptops and tablet computers, and they are increasingly being used to power hybrid and electric vehicles. As their uses grow, scientists would like to manufacture the batteries in a manner that's both less expensive and more environmentally friendly. "The application of lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles is hindered by their high cost," researcher Jianlin Li, a materials scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, told TechNewsDaily. "For example, the cost of the lithium-ion batteries in the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Colt is about $500 per kilowatt-hour, which is almost five times of the target cost — $110 per kilowatt-hour — of an electric vehicle lithium-ion battery set by the president's EV Everywhere Grand Challenge."

Li-ion

Currently, more than 80 percent of the costs of making lithium-ion batteries are due to materials and the processing of those materials. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are now aiming to reduce the price of both of these factors. All batteries generate electricity by flowing electric current between two electrodes — a positively charged cathode and a negatively charged anode. Cathodes make up about 70 percent of the total cost of high-power batteries, and the organic solvent used to make the lithium ion battery cathodes, N-methylpyrrolidone or NMP, is expensive, toxic and generates flammable vapors. Making batteries with this solvent also requires expensive, explosion-proof processing equipment and costly solvent recovery and recycling systems. Instead of using NMP, the researchers say they can replace it with a system that uses water, which is much safer, greener and at least 150 times cheaper than the organic solvent. Replacing NMP with water is tricky because the slurries, or fluids containing the materials used to make the battery's electrodes, behaves in very different ways if water is employed. For instance, water-based slurries are typically not as good at coating the current collector, the material that gathers electric charge from the electrode. "While it seems quite straightforward to substitute expensive and toxic NMP with water in battery manufacturing, it is very complicated and requires extensive knowledge in science and engineering to realize it," Li said. The scientists employed a number of different tricks to get water to work. For instance, treating the current collector with electrified plasma alters its surface in ways that makes water-based slurries coat it better. Additives in the slurries also help prevent the particles from clumping together. Previous work could help scientists manufacture lithium-ion battery anodes using water. However, until now, "no one has been successful with both anodes and cathodes," Li said. Using this method, the researchers have created a battery that features excellent performance comparable to conventional batteries. Replacing NMP with water promises to reduce the overall costs of lithium ion batteries by about one-eighth, and "the whole process is much more environmentally benign," Li said. "This allows the battery manufacturing more sustainable and affordable." The scientists currently have a patent pending on their technology. They detailed their latest findings online May 25 in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science.

Source:livescience