Chemical Compound Reduces Alcohol Cravings

Nearly 88,000 people die annually from an alcohol-related cause in the U.S., according to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Nationally, alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of death. The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence reports that 17.6 million people in the country suffer from alcohol abuse, or dependence.

“Alcoholism is a major problem in the U.S.,” said V. V. N. Phani Babu Tiruveedhula, of the Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. “Alcohol abuse costs almost $220 billion to the U.S. economy every year. That’s a shocking number. We need…better treatment right now.”

Tiruveedhula is in the midst of developing a new compound to treat alcoholism, and a drug could be available to the market within five to six years. He presented his research at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

“It is very exciting. We found a new way to treat alcoholism, rather than the traditional ways,” he said.

While the underlying causes of alcoholism vary, and can be quite specific to a single person, researchers know alcohol affects the brain’s reward center by releasing dopamine. The neurotransmitter increases in response to pleasurable behavior.

According to Tiruveedhula, current drugs meant to combat alcoholism focus on dopamine, and attempt to dampen the rewards from alcohol-based stimuli. But these opioid antagonists could have adverse side effects. One unintended result is anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure, said Tiruveedhula.

Smooth robot movements reduce energy consumption by 40%

By minimizing the acceleration of industrial robots, energy consumption can be reduced by up to 40%, while retaining the given production time. This is the result of a new optimization algorithm that was developed by researchers at Chalmers Univ. of Technology.

Optimization of the robot's movements reduces acceleration and deceleration, as well as the time the robot is at a standstill since being at a standstill also consumes energy.

"We simply let the robot move slower instead of waiting for other robots and machines to catch up before carrying out the next sequence. The optimization also determines the order in which the various operations are carried out to minimize energy consumption - without reducing the total execution time," says Prof. Bengt Lennartson who initiated the research together with, among others, General Motors.

The optimization never changes the robot's operation path, only the speed and sequence.

"Thus, we can go into an existing robot cell and perform a quick optimization without impacting production or the current cycle," says Bengt Lennartson.

To achieve safe optimization, several robots moving in the same area need to be coordinated. The optimization tool will therefore initially identify where robots may collide, and the entry and exit positions for each collision zone, and for each robot path.

"The first test results have shown a significant improvement, such as a 15 to 40% energy reduction, but the results are still preliminary. In order to estimate the actual energy savings, further testing in industry is required," says Kristofer Bengtsson, who is responsible for the implementation of the new optimization strategy.

Space-Aged Whiskey

In a tweet from NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, the cylindrical HTV-5 “Kounotori” cargo ship floats high above the clouds and green sprawl of Earth below. The next image posted shows the International Space Station (ISS)’s robotic arm, controlled by JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui, grasping the ship, which carries a payload of around 4.5 metric tons, including mice, food and water, a host of devices and whiskey.

Yes, whiskey.

Suntory Global Innovation Center, known for its award-winning whiskey, sent six samples of alcohol to be aged on the space station.

“With the exception of some items like beer, alcoholic beverages are widely known to develop a mellow flavor when aged for a long time,” reads a statement from Suntory. “Although researchers have taken a variety of scientific approaches to elucidating the underlying mechanism, we still do not have a full picture of how this occurs.”

HTV-5 was launched on Aug. 19, and arrived at the ISS Monday morning.

According to Suntory, whiskies in group one will be aged for one year, while whiskies in group two will age for two, or more years.

“Our company has hypothesized the ‘formation of high-dimensional molecular structure consisting of water, ethanol and other ingredients in alcoholic beverages contributes to the development of mellowness,’” the statement reads.

How Industrial CT Scanning Gets You To Production Faster

For complex plastic injection molded parts, mold qualifications can run for weeks if not months. Industrial CT scanning saves hundreds of hours during qualification and has become the most popular choice for companies that want to get their products to production fast.

Once a part is designed and the mold is built, an FOT or first run is done to check that the mechanics and electronics of the mold are working properly and that there are no large defects on any of the parts. Next comes the process development phase, where specific settings are designed to fine tune the molding process. These settings include pack pressure, pack time, melt temperature, mold temperature and cooling time, among others.

Parts from several processes are visually inspected and the best parts chosen to be sent to more formal inspection. These parts are inspected by calipers or optical measurement systems. Traditionally, the data is reviewed and an educated guess is made about the best process. The best parts from the best process go into full first article inspection. Programs are created around the part, fixtures are engineered, built and adjusted to align the part, and physical cross sectioning may be needed to cut sections, inevitably changing the free state of the part.

If a first article inspection does not pass, readjusting the process and fixture adds more time to the schedule. When getting parts to production fast is crucial, finding the best process and qualifying molds must be done quickly and efficiently.

Industrial CT scanning saves time and helps you make better decisions faster during mold qualification.

Before going into a full first article inspection, CT scanning the best processes and creating part-to-CAD overlay comparisons can quickly determine which process yields parts closest to the intended design. Knowing the best process changes the first article inspection from an investigation exercise to a confirmation exercise.

Imaging software could speed breast cancer diagnosis

New software developed by Rice Univ. bioengineers could speed up the diagnosis of breast cancer with 90% accuracy and without the need for a specialist, according to research published in Breast Cancer Research.

Researchers said the software could improve breast cancer management, particularly in developing countries where pathologists are not routinely available.

“To evaluate fresh breast tissue at the point of care could change the current practice of pathology,” said lead researcher Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice’s Malcolm Gillis Univ. Professor and professor of bioengineering and of electrical and computer engineering. “We have developed a faster means to classify benign and malignant human breast tissues using fresh samples and thereby removing the need for time-consuming tissue preparation.”

Today, breast-cancer diagnosis is an intricate process. Tissue first must be obtained, typically by either a core needle biopsy or surgical excision. Next, pathologists must complete a complex process to prepare the tissue for analysis and histological assessment.

When examined under a microscope, cancerous and precancerous cells typically appear different from healthy cells. The study of cellular structures is known as histology, and a histological analysis is typically required for an accurate diagnosis of both the type and stage of a cancerous tumor.

The software developed in Richards-Kortum’s lab allows for an automated histological assessment of breast cancer from tissue samples without the need for complex tissue-sample preparation or assessment by a pathologist. The software uses high-speed optical microscopy of intact breast tissue specimens.

“We performed our analysis without tissue fixation, cutting and staining and achieved comparable classification with current methods,” Richards-Kortum said. “This cuts out the tissue-preparation process and allows for rapid diagnosis. It is also reliant on measurable criteria, which could reduce subjectivity in the evaluation of breast histology.”

Crash-tolerant data storage

In a computer operating system, the file system is the part that writes data to disk and tracks where the data is stored. If the computer crashes while it’s writing data, the file system’s records can become corrupt. Hours of work could be lost, or programs could stop working properly.

At the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers will present the first file system that is mathematically guaranteed not to lose track of data during crashes. Although the file system is slow by today’s standards, the techniques the researchers used to verify its performance can be extended to more sophisticated designs. Ultimately, formal verification could make it much easier to develop reliable, efficient file systems.

“What many people worry about is building these file systems to be reliable, both when they’re operating normally but also in the case of crashes, power failure, software bugs, hardware errors, what have you,” says Nickolai Zeldovich, an associate professor of computer science and engineering and one of three MIT computer science professors on the new paper. “Making sure that the file system can recover from a crash at any point is tricky because there are so many different places that you could crash. You literally have to consider every instruction or every disk operation and think, ‘Well, what if I crash now? What now? What now?’ And so empirically, people have found lots of bugs in file systems that have to do with crash recovery, and they keep finding them, even in very well tested file systems, because it’s just so hard to do.”

New optical chip lights up the race for quantum computer

The microprocessor inside a computer is a single multipurpose chip that has revolutionized people's life, allowing them to use one machine to surf the web, check emails and keep track of finances.

Now, researchers from the Univ. of Bristol and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) have pulled off the same feat for light in the quantum world by developing an optical chip that can process photons in an infinite number of ways.

It's a major step forward in creating a quantum computer to solve problems such as designing new drugs, superfast database searches, and performing otherwise intractable mathematics that aren't possible for super computers.

The fully reprogrammable chip brings together a multitude of existing quantum experiments and can realize a plethora of future protocols that have not even been conceived yet, marking a new era of research for quantum scientists and engineers at the cutting edge of quantum technologies. The work is published in Science.

Since before Newton held a prism to a ray of sunlight and saw a spectrum of color, scientists have understood nature through the behavior of light. In the modern age of research, scientists are striving to understand nature at the quantum level and to engineer and control quantum states of light and matter.

A major barrier in testing new theories for quantum science and quantum computing is the time and resources needed to build new experiments, which are typically extremely demanding due to the notoriously fragile nature of quantum systems.

The Flipside of Machine Learning

Human learning is tricky and incredibly individual. Retaining the knowledge to pass a physics test may come quickly and easily to one student, but may require hours of cramming and consideration for another.

Professors at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison are melding the fields of computer science and psychology to reverse engineer machine learning, with the hope of devising ideal lesson plans to ease the learning process.

Called “machine teaching,” the method inverses the idea of machine learning.

Machine learning “is a mathematical procedure,” explains university computer scientist Jerry Zhu in an interview with R&D Magazine. “The mathematical procedure takes in training data (i.e. lesson) and finds a function that fits the training data. Importantly, the function can ‘generalize’ (i.e. extrapolate) beyond the training data—this gives the machine learning the ability to answer new questions.”

Machine teaching works backwards, as it already knows what knowledge needs to be imparted on the student. The concept “uses sophisticated mathematics to allow researchers to model actual human students and devise the best possible lessons for teaching them. While the definition of ‘best’ in a particular setting is up to the teacher, one example could be identifying the smallest number of exercises for a particular students to grasp a concept,” according to the Univ. of Wisconsin.