New MIT-developed System can make Webpages load 34 per cent Faster in any Browser

Students walk across the MIT campus, where the program was developed Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The 'Polaris' system could help counter the browser-slowing effects of complex webpages

Computer scientists at the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a system that can reliably make websites load 34 per cent faster.

As internet speeds have increased, websites have got more complex, leaving some pages sluggish and unresponsive. This is a problem for companies like Amazon, who say that for every one-second delay in loading time, their profits are cut by one per cent.
But a team of researchers, working at the university's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, may have found the solution.



Named Polaris, the system cuts load-times by determining the best way to 'overlap' the downloading of different parts of a webpage.

When you visit a new page, your browser reaches across the internet to fetch 'objects' like pictures, videos, and HTML files. The browser then evaluates the objects and puts them on the page.

However, some objects are dependent on others, and browsers can't see all of these dependencies until they come across them.

Polaris works by tracking all of these relationships and dependencies between objects on the page and turning the information into a 'dependency graph' that can be interpreted by your browser.

Polaris essentially gives the browser a roadmap of the page, with all the details of the best and quickest way to load it.

PhD student Ravi Netravali, who worked on Polaris, explained: "It can take up to 100
milliseconds each time a browser has to cross a mobile network to fetch a piece of data."
"As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up. Our approach minimizes the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page's load-time."



The researchers tested Polaris across a range of network conditions on some of the world's most popular websites, and found it made them load an average of 34 per cent faster when compared to a normal browser.

Polaris could be used on any website and with unmodified browsers, and when tech companies like Google and Amazon are working hard to improve load-times, a similar system might appear on your device soon.

Source: Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Computer Science

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

How humans bond: The Brain Chemistry Revealed

In a new study researches found for the first time that dopamine is involved in human bonding bringing the brain’s reward into understanding of how we form human attachments.

In new research published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Northeastern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett found, for the first time, that the neurotransmitter dopamine is involved in human bonding, bringing the brain's reward system into our understanding of how we form human attachments. The results, based on a study with 19 mother-infant pairs, have important implications for therapies addressing postpartum depression as well as disorders of the dopamine system such as Parkinson's disease, addiction, and social dysfunction.



"The infant brain is very different from the mature adult brain -- it is not fully formed," says Barrett, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology and author of the forthcoming book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. "Infants are completely dependent on their caregivers. Whether they get enough to eat, the right kind of nutrients, whether they're kept warm or cool enough, whether they're hugged enough and get enough social attention, all these things are important to normal brain development. Our study shows clearly that a biological process in one person's brain, the mother's, is linked to behavior that gives the child the social input that will help wire his or her brain normally. That means parents' ability to keep their infants cared for leads to optimal brain development, which over the years results in better adult health and greater productivity."

To conduct the study, the researchers turned to a novel technology: a machine capable of performing two types of brain scans simultaneously -- functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and positron emission tomography, or PET.

fMRI looks at the brain in slices, front to back, like a loaf of bread, and tracks blood flow to its various parts. It is especially useful in revealing which neurons are firing frequently as well as how different brain regions connect in networks. PET uses a small amount of radioactive chemical plus dye (called a tracer) injected into the bloodstream along with a camera and a computer to produce multidimensional images to show the distribution of a specific neurotransmitter, such as dopamine or opioids.



Barrett's team focused on the neurotransmitter dopamine, a chemical that acts in various brain systems to spark the motivation necessary to work for a reward. They tied the mothers' level of dopamine to her degree of synchrony with her infant as well as to the strength of the connection within a brain network called the medial amygdala network that, within the social realm, supports social affiliation.

"We found that social affiliation is a potent stimulator of dopamine," says Barrett. "This link implies that strong social relationships have the potential to improve your outcome if you have a disease, such as depression, where dopamine is compromised. We already know that people deal with illness better when they have a strong social network. What our study suggests is that caring for others, not just receiving caring, may have the ability to increase your dopamine levels."



Before performing the scans, the researchers videotaped the mothers at home interacting with their babies and applied measurements to the behaviors of both to ascertain their degree of synchrony. They also videotaped the infants playing on their own.

Once in the brain scanner, each mother viewed footage of her own baby at solitary play as well as an unfamiliar baby at play while the researchers measured dopamine levels, with PET, and tracked the strength of the medial amygdala network, with fMRI.

The mothers who were more synchronous with their own infants showed both an increased dopamine response when viewing their child at play and stronger connectivity within the medial amygdala network. "Animal studies have shown the role of dopamine in bonding but this was the first scientific evidence that it is involved in human bonding," says Barrett. "That suggests that other animal research in this area could be directly applied to humans as well."

The findings, says Barrett, are "cautionary." "They have the potential to reveal how the social environment impacts the developing brain," she says. "People's future health, mental and physical, is affected by the kind of care they receive when they are babies. If we want to invest wisely in the health of our country, we should concentrate on infants and children, eradicating the adverse conditions that interfere with brain development."
Source: Materials provided by Northeastern University, original written by Thea Singer.

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Sweat Sensors

By: Alexandria Addesso

Science and technology seems to steadily progress and the health field is one of the main industries that is reaping the benefits of the new innovations. As our health statuses and test results seem to be at our fingertips, people become more and more health conscious. Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have recently designed a biosensor that is capable of checking glucose levels of the person who wears it.

"We've been developing various thin, soft and flexible skin-mounted devices as a next-generation platform for wearable technologies for a few years now," said Dr. John Rogers, the senior author of the study as well as a materials scientist and director of Northwestern University's Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics in Evanston, Illinois. "Now, we've developed such a device to capture and analyze sweat."



The sensor sticks to the skin and is around the size of a quarter, which is a drastic upgrade in comparison to the handheld glucose reading devices that are currently being used. Such devices needed to pluck the user’s finger to draw a small amount of blood in order to read glucose levels, a task most people suffering with diabetes found daunting.

"Fitness trackers that monitor heart rate and step count are very popular, but wearable, non-invasive biosensors would be extremely beneficial for managing diseases," said Dr. Shalini Prasad, a professor of bioengineering at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

"We used known properties of textiles and weaves in our design," said Prasad. "What was innovative was the way we incorporated and positioned the electrodes onto this textile in such a way that allows a very small volume of sweat to spread effectively through the surface."



Sweat and blood are not the only bodily secretions that have been tested to see if they can get glucose readings. Google Laboratories is currently working on a contact lense that can read glucose levels from tears. While none of these new sensors have hit the market or even yet been licensed, there is no doubt that they will soon make invasive blood collecting glucose readers obsolete.

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

We can see the future of Quantum Systems

Scientists at the University of Sydney have demonstrated the ability to "see" the future of quantum systems, and used that knowledge to preempt their demise, in a major achievement that could help bring the strange and powerful world of quantum technology closer to reality.

The applications of quantum-enabled technologies are compelling, and already demonstrating significant impacts - especially in the realm of sensing and metrology. And the potential to build exceptionally powerful quantum computers using quantum bits, or qubits, is driving investment from the world's largest companies.

However a significant obstacle to building reliable quantum technologies has been the randomization of quantum systems by their environments, or de-coherence, which effectively destroys the useful quantum character.

The physicists have taken a technical quantum leap in addressing this, using techniques from big data to predict how quantum systems will change and then, preventing the system's breakdown from occurring.



The research is published today in Nature Communications.
"Much the way the individual components in mobile phones will eventually fail, so too do quantum systems," said the paper's senior author Professor Michael J. Biercuk.
"But in quantum Technology the lifetime is generally measured in fractions of a second, rather than years."

Professor Biercuk, from the University of Sydney's School of Physics and a chief investigator at the Australian Research Council's Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, said his group had demonstrated it was possible to suppress de-coherence in a preventive manner. The key was to develop a technique to predict how the system would disintegrate.

Professor Biercuk highlighted the challenges of making predictions in a quantum world: "Humans routinely employ predictive techniques in our daily experience; for instance, when we play tennis we predict where the ball will end up based on observations of the airborne ball," he said.

This works because the rules that govern how the ball will move, like gravity, are regular and known. But what if the rules changed randomly while the ball was on its way to you? In that case it's next to impossible to predict the future behavior of that ball.
"And yet this situation is exactly what we had to deal with because the disintegration of quantum systems is random. Moreover, in the quantum realm observation erases ‘quantumness’, so our team needed to be able to guess how and when the system would randomly break.

"We effectively needed to swing at the randomly moving tennis ball while blindfolded."

The team turned to machine learning for help in keeping their quantum systems - qubits realized in trapped atoms - from breaking.



What might look like random behavior actually contained enough information for a computer program to guess how the system would change in the future. It could then predict the future without direct observation, which would otherwise erase the system's useful characteristics.

The predictions were remarkably accurate, allowing the team to use their guesses preemptively to compensate for the anticipated changes.

Doing this in real time allowed the team to prevent the disintegration of the quantum character, extending the useful lifetime of the qubits.
"We know that building real quantum technologies will require major advances in our ability to control and stabilize qubits - to make them useful in applications," Professor Biercuk said.

Our techniques apply to any qubit, built in any technology, including the special superconducting circuits being used by major corporations.
"We're excited to be developing new capabilities that turn quantum systems from novelties into useful technologies. The quantum future is looking better all the time," Professor Biercuk said.

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Meditation in virtual reality: When Philosophy and the Business of Synthetic Technology meet

There’s no paradox in finding your true self via virtual reality because everyday reality is a simulation, says self-help guru Deepak Chopra of his latest venture

The cosmos swirls, wisps of purple, yellow and orange light flickering across the darkness of space, then across the visage of Buddha. An otherworldly plain fills the horizon, framed by the branches of a tree – the tree of enlightenment.

A familiar voice intrudes. “What or who is having this experience right this moment, right now?” Pause. “It is your own being. It is your innermost being that is having the experience, your true self.”

The voice continues. “Live here, with no regrets, no anticipation, no resistance, and you will be free. Freedom is always now. Being is now.”



Even if you enjoy psychedelic animation graphics you may struggle to live here, however, because visits last just 20 minutes and they are not real, not free and not quite now.
Welcome – if you have the headset or appropriate app – to Deepak Chopra’s latest venture: virtual reality (VR) meditation.

The new age entrepreneur and self-help guru unveiled the simulation, titled “Finding your true self”, this week at the headquarters of Wevr, a VR firm in Silicon Beach, Los Angeles’ tech hub.

Chopra, who narrates the simulation, hopes to sell the experience via booths at airports, hospitals and other locations, and via phones and laptops enabled with VR platforms.
“In 20 minutes you get a journey to enlightenment. The goal is to feel grounded and understand yourself a little better,” he told the Guardian. The technology, he said, facilitated an understanding of consciousness which eluded even René Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher. “He was good for his time but didn’t have VR to take it to the next level.”
A bold claim for a nascent technology more associated with gaming and pornography than reflection and contemplation. But Chopra, 68, has not built a lucrative brand and sold millions of books such as The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success through timidity.



Meditation’s benefits – improved focus, lower stress, inner peace – require investments of time, effort and discipline which frustrate many would-be practitioners. A vast market, Chopra hopes for a simulation which mixes “insights, contemplation and entertainment”.

Meditation purists may wonder if that is cheating. Those who simply wonder if it works will be able to find out when the product launches, perhaps in a few weeks. “Soon, very soon,” said Anthony Batt, Wevr’s co-founder. The app will cost $10, he said.

For that, according to a three-minute trailer shown to the Guardian and others at the company’s headquarters, you get trippy graphics, heavy on purple, with otherworldly sound effects laid over statements which, depending on perspective, are insightful, gnomic or nonsense.

There was no paradox between finding your true self via virtual reality because everyday reality is itself a simulation, said Chopra. An insect with 100 eyes, for instance, views the world differently than a human.

“For 30 years people have been coming to my lectures saying they don’t get it. Well now they can.”

Asked if the simulation tried to cross Descartes, who coined the maxim “I think, thefore I am,” with the science fiction film The Matrix, Chopra beamed. “Absolutely!”



The simulation features the Bodhi tree under which Buddha is said to have sat.
The project is the brainchild of Chopra’s son, Gotham, a Los Angeles film-maker. “I’ve been hearing my father talk about simulation for 30 years. I realized this would be a tool for him.”

Earlier versions featuring water were discarded for an impressionistic interpretation of the Bodhi tree in eastern India under which Buddha is said to have sat around 500 BC, seeking and eventually finding enlightenment. “We wanted to replicate that,” said Gotham.

Designers worked on the project at Wevr’s headquarters, a Frank Gehry-designed house where Dennis Hopper lived, partied and encountered his own virtual reality through alcohol and drugs.

Strapping on a headset or peering at a computer screen, were not inimical to contemplation, said Chopra. “I’ve never been too attached to tradition. We’re an evolving species. If you don’t keep up with technology you’re not in touch with the zeitgeist and you may as well pack it in.”
Source Rory Carroll, Los Angeles

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.