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Tag Archives: Science

NUCLEAR FUSION POWER: TOKAMAK REACTOR AT MIT

13 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by ingenuityguru in Creativity, Innovation, SCIENCE, THING

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Department of Energy, EngineeriSchool, Fusion, MIT, National Science Foundation, Nuclear, physics, Plasma, research, Science

  

It’s an old joke that many fusion scientists have grown tired of hearing: Practical nuclear fusion power plants are just 30 years away — and always will be.

But now, finally, the joke may no longer be true: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor — and it’s one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. The era of practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource, may be coming near.

Using these new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils “just ripples through the whole design,” says Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “It changes the whole thing.”

The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned. The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design. The proposed reactor, using a tokamak (donut-shaped) geometry that is widely studied, is described in a paper in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, co-authored by Whyte, PhD candidate Brandon Sorbom, and 11 others at MIT. The paper started as a design class taught by Whyte and became a student-led project after the class ended.

Power plant prototype

The new reactor is designed for basic research on fusion and also as a potential prototype power plant that could produce significant power. The basic reactor concept and its associated elements are based on well-tested and proven principles developed over decades of research at MIT and around the world, the team says.

“The much higher magnetic field,” Sorbom says, “allows you to achieve much higher performance.”

Fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun, involves fusing pairs of hydrogen atoms together to form helium, accompanied by enormous releases of energy. The hard part has been confining the superhot plasma — a form of electrically charged gas — while heating it to temperatures hotter than the cores of stars. This is where the magnetic fields are so important—they effectively trap the heat and particles in the hot center of the device.

While most characteristics of a system tend to vary in proportion to changes in dimensions, the effect of changes in the magnetic field on fusion reactions is much more extreme: The achievable fusion power increases according to the fourth power of the increase in the magnetic field. Thus, doubling the field would produce a 16-fold increase in the fusion power. “Any increase in the magnetic field gives you a huge win,” Sorbom says.

Tenfold boost in power

While the new superconductors do not produce quite a doubling of the field strength, they are strong enough to increase fusion power by about a factor of 10 compared to standard superconducting technology, Sorbom says. This dramatic improvement leads to a cascade of potential improvements in reactor design.

The world’s most powerful planned fusion reactor, a huge device called ITER that is under construction in France, is expected to cost around $40 billion. Sorbom and the MIT team estimate that the new design, about half the diameter of ITER (which was designed before the new superconductors became available), would produce about the same power at a fraction of the cost and in a shorter construction time.

But despite the difference in size and magnetic field strength, the proposed reactor, called ARC, is based on “exactly the same physics” as ITER, Whyte says. “We’re not extrapolating to some brand-new regime,” he adds.

Another key advance in the new design is a method for removing the the fusion power core from the donut-shaped reactor without having to dismantle the entire device. That makes it especially well-suited for research aimed at further improving the system by using different materials or designs to fine-tune the performance.

In addition, as with ITER, the new superconducting magnets would enable the reactor to operate in a sustained way, producing a steady power output, unlike today’s experimental reactors that can only operate for a few seconds at a time without overheating of copper coils.

Liquid protection

Another key advantage is that most of the solid blanket materials used to surround the fusion chamber in such reactors are replaced by a liquid material that can easily be circulated and replaced, eliminating the need for costly replacement procedures as the materials degrade over time.

“It’s an extremely harsh environment for [solid] materials,” Whyte says, so replacing those materials with a liquid could be a major advantage.

Right now, as designed, the reactor should be capable of producing about three times as much electricity as is needed to keep it running, but the design could probably be improved to increase that proportion to about five or six times, Sorbom says. So far, no fusion reactor has produced as much energy as it consumes, so this kind of net energy production would be a major breakthrough in fusion technology, the team says.

The design could produce a reactor that would provide electricity to about 100,000 people, they say. Devices of a similar complexity and size have been built within about five years, they say.

“Fusion energy is certain to be the most important source of electricity on earth in the 22nd century, but we need it much sooner than that to avoid catastrophic global warming,” says David Kingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy Ltd. in the UK, who was not connected with this research. “This paper shows a good way to make quicker progress,” he says.

The MIT research, Kingham says, “shows that going to higher magnetic fields, an MIT speciality, can lead to much smaller (and hence cheaper and quicker-to-build) devices.” The work is of “exceptional quality,” he says; “the next step … would be to refine the design and work out more of the engineering details, but already the work should be catching the attention of policy makers, philanthropists and private investors.”

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

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Thought for the Day

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by ingenuityguru in Creativity, Imagination, Ingenuity, Innovation, PEOPLE

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Advertising, Business, innovation, Leadership, marketing, PR, Science, technology

Human nature insulates or unites, extinguishes or ignites, disrupts or delights by choice, not chance or circumstance.

SCIENCE & ENGINEERING TEACHING (ULTIMATE WEB RESOURCE)

07 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by ingenuityguru in Education, Imagination, Innovation, SCIENCE

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kids, school, Science, STEAM, STEM, Students, Teaching

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Parents, students, teachers, and entrepreneurs looking for ways to build the future of technology and innovative progress — look no further. Here is your ultimate guide to web resources and references.

Parents, here are dozens of opportunities to help your children.
Teachers, let your colleagues know about http://www.Ingenuity.Guru.
Entrepreneurs and business leaders: share this website.

Find these resource at the STEM EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE DIRECTORY.

Ingenuity Guru brings some of the best news, articles, and resources on innovation and invention. Take a moment to scan through our archive.

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Douglas Arnold’s upcoming book, “Ingenuity!” will be out later this year. Follow this blog and you may qualify for a free copy upon publication.

Douglas Arnold, The Ingenuity Guru, is a writer, workshop leader, and speaker on ingenuity, imagination, and creativity. His upcoming book “Ingenuity!” focuses on sparking greater innovation in the workplace and community. His weekly tweets, blogposts, and podcasts inform and entertain. You are invited to follow this blog and on Twitter @DouglasArnold.

INGENUITY’S TOP TEN LIST – 2014

20 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by ingenuityguru in Creativity, Imagination, Ingenuity, Innovation, Invention, SCIENCE

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Genius, news, Science, TOP TEN

Don’t be mesmerised by cool apps and flashy new gizmos – the top technology inventions of the year are ones that will have a lasting effect.

Most are advances in fields that are already changing us. Some will have immediate impact; others are portents of transformations that may take decades to complete. In this vein, and in no particular order, here are what I consider to be ten of the best technological innovations from 2014.

1. DNA nanobots injected into cockroaches

Nanotechnology is a growing research field that manipulates materials on a molecular scale. One prospect is to transform medicine by injecting nanobots into the body where they perform functions such as treating disease.

In February, an Israeli team described devices they made from DNA and injected into cockroaches. By performing a kind of origami, the DNA nanobots assembled themselves and were able to control a molecule that targeted specific cells, so demonstrating their potential to carry out medical functions such as attacking cancers.

2. Nanotubes in chloroplasts created super plants

Nanotubes are large carbon molecules that form tubes with unusual thermal and electrical properties. In March, a team from MIT and CalTech published a method for inserting nanotubes into plant chloroplasts. The novel combination boosted photosynthesis and plant growth by several hundred percent.

Applications are still years away, but besides increasing plant growth and production, there are extraordinary possibilities: tapping plants for electrical power, building self-repairing materials and erecting buildings from materials that generate their own power.

3. Scallop-shaped robots swam through blood

Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute developed tiny robots that could swim through the bloodstream, repairing tissue damage or transporting medicine.

The challenge they faced was blood’s viscosity: it not only impeded movement but also varied according to speed. They solved the problem by designing robots in the shape of scallops powered by an external magnetic field. These robots provide a starting point for many kinds of medical devices of the future.

4. A microchip helped a paralysed man regain the use of his arm

Implants are revolutionising the treatment of many medical conditions. In April, researchers at Ohio State University reported success in using a microchip implant to help a paralysed man regain use of his arm.

Ten years in development, the device, known as Neurobridge, stimulates muscles according to brain patterns. The innovation raises hopes for many disabled people. It showed that by plugging into our brainwaves we may one day control all manner of devices by thought alone.

5. Nose cells helped repair a severed spinal cord

Biotechnology is producing new cures for medical conditions long thought to be permanent. A medical team at Wroclaw Medical University cultured nerve cells taken from a patient’s nose and surgically inserted them into his spinal cord.

The transplanted cells stimulated severed nerve fibres to grow and rejoin, thus bridging a damaged section of the spinal column and allowing the patient to walk again. This innovation showed that damage to the nervous system can be reversed.

6. Unmanned drones: the future of delivery services

Unmanned flying drones are taking on a rapidly growing number of roles, especially in surveillance and monitoring. Following Chinese experiments last year to test drones as a delivery system for parcels, 2014 saw rapid expansion of serious business interest.

In August, Google used a drone to deliver chocolates to a farm in Outback Queensland. By year’s end, Amazon, DHL and many others were scrambling to establish unmanned delivery services in several countries.

7. A swarm of self-assembling mini-robots

Robots are already important tools in many industries, but put them into swarms and they can do so much more. In August the journal Science reported work at Harvard in which 1,000 mini-robots, the largest swarm so far, was able to assemble itself into programmed shapes.

There is still a long way to go, but it raised the potential for structures that self-assemble, which would revolutionise construction.

8. 3D printers pushed the boundaries

3D printing is now an established technology, but developments this year expanded its capabilities and applications. At the one extreme a team in Amsterdam began a project to build an entire house using 3D printing.

3D printing at work. Jonathan Juursema/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Meanwhile researchers at Princeton developed a 3D printer that could print with five different materials, incorporating dot-emitting diodes, and demonstrated it by making contact lenses. This raises many possibilities, from wearable video to monitoring the health of pilots.

9. The next frontier in space exploration

Events this year highlighted the international character of solar system exploration in coming decades. Following a ten-year flight, European Space Agency’s probe Rosetta went into orbit around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
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Artist impression of the Rosetta spacecraft with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. ESA/ATG medialab
On November 12, it released the probe Philae which became the first spacecraft to land on a comet.

Meanwhile, Mars exploration moved forward. India’s Mangalyaan spacecraft went into orbit around Mars in September and in December, NASA successfully launched the new Orion spacecraft, a first step in preparing for manned exploration of Mars.

10. Green power and clean water

Necessity is the mother of invention, so the greater the need, the more important the invention. A worldwide need is the 780 million people around the world who lack access to clean water supplies. The challenge for inventors is to meet the World Health Organisation criteria for practical systems: accessible, simple and cheap.

One notable innovation this year was a portable new system called Sunflower developed in Switzerland. Easily transportable, it used sunlight to generate electricity, and at the same time provided heating, refrigeration for food and purified water.

What of next year? We can be sure that growing fields such as automation and nanotechnology will continue to surprise us. The US Patents Office granted more than 300,000 patents during 2013, nearly 30,000 more than 2012. If patents provide a reliable indicator, then new inventions are appearing faster than ever.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE CONVERSATION

THIS WEEK IN INGENUITY

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by ingenuityguru in Creativity, Education, Imagination, Ingenuity, Innovation, Invention, SCIENCE, Uncategorized

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innovation, Science, This Week in Ingenuity

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Douglas Arnold, The Ingenuity Guru, is a writer, workshop leader, and speaker on ingenuity, imagination, and creativity. His upcoming book “Ingenuity!” focuses on sparking greater innovation in the workplace and community. His weekly podcast “Ingenuity180” airs here on this blog every Thursday, You are invited to follow his blog and on Twitter @DouglasArnold

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THIS WEEK IN INGENUITY!

16 Monday Jun 2014

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Discovery, Science, This Week in Ingenuity

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Posted by ingenuityguru | Filed under Ingenuity, SCIENCE

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THIS WEEK IN INGENUITY.

01 Sunday Jun 2014

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news, Science, technology, update

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blockquote>Douglas Arnold, The Ingenuity Guru, is a writer, workshop leader, and speaker on ingenuity, imagination, and creativity. His upcoming book “Ingenuity!” focuses on sparking greater innovation in the individual, workplace teams and the community. Follow him here and on Twitter @DouglasArnold

Posted by ingenuityguru | Filed under Creativity, Imagination, Ingenuity, Innovation, Invention, PEOPLE, PLACE, SCIENCE, THING

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SUNNY ROADS AHEAD

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by ingenuityguru in CONCEPT, Imagination, Ingenuity, Innovation, Invention, SCIENCE, THING

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innovation, progress, roads, Science, Solar

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Solar Roadways is a modular paving system of solar panels that can withstand the heaviest of trucks (250,000 pounds). These Solar Road Panels can be installed on roads, parking lots, driveways, sidewalks, bike paths, playgrounds… literally any surface under the sun. They pay for themselves primarily through the generation of electricity, which can power homes and businesses connected via driveways and parking lots. A nationwide system could produce more clean renewable energy than a country uses on many roads.

They have many other features as well, including: heating elements to stay snow/ice free, LEDs to make road lines and signage, and attached Cable Corridor to store and treat stormwater and provide a “home” for power and data cables. EVs will be able to charge with energy from the sun (instead of fossil fuels) from parking lots and driveways and after a roadway system is in place, mutual induction technology will allow for charging while driving.

Did you know:

Solar Roadways has received two phases of funding from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration for research and development of a paving system that will pay for itself over its lifespan. We are about to wrap up our Phase II contract (to build a prototype parking lot) and now need to raise funding for production.

Our glass surface has been tested for traction, load testing, and impact resistance testing in civil engineering laboratories around the country, and exceeded all requirements.
Solar Roadways is a modular system that will modernize our aging infrastructure with an intelligent system that can become the new Smart Grid. We won the Community Award of $50,000 by getting the most votes in GE’s Ecomagination Challenge for “Powering the Grid” in 2010. We had the most votes again in their 2011 Ecomagination Challenge for “Powering the Home”.
On August 21, 2013, Solar Roadways was selected by their peers as a Finalist in the World Technology Award For Energy, presented in association with TIME, Fortune, CNN, and Science.
Solar Roadways was chosen by Google to be one of their Moonshots in May of 2013.
Solar Roadways was chosen as a finalist in the IEEE Ace Awards in 2009 and 2010.
Solar Roadways has given presentations around the country including: TEDx Sacramento, Google’s Solve for X at Google’s NYC Headquarters, NASA, Keynote Speaker for the International Parking Institute’s Conference and much more…
Solar Roadways is tackling more than solar energy: The FHWA tasked us with addressing the problem of stormwater. Currently, over 50% of the pollution in U.S. waterways comes from stormwater. We have created a section in our Cable Corridors for storing, treating, and moving stormwater.
The implementation of our concept on a grand scale could create thousands of jobs in the U.S. and around the world. It could allow us all the ability to manufacture our way out of our current economic crisis.

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SUFFERING FROM SEMMELWEIS EFFECT?

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by ingenuityguru in CONCEPT, PEOPLE, SCIENCE

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Doubt, Entrepreneur, Fear, innovation, Medicine, research, Science, Semmelweis

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Science and medicine are often entwined in politics and ego, but the most dramatic example was the life of Ignaz Semmelweis, an Austrian physician in the 1840s. His simple observation and analysis saved hundreds of children — but prejudice and tradition overshadowed his discovery and countless thousands died.

Semmelweis was an obstetrician who observed that infant mortality — known in the 19th Century as “childbed fever” — was linked to a lack of doctors washing their hands between deliveries. As absurd and incredible as this seems today, handwashing was not a protocol in hospitals and clinics.

Germ theory of disease had not yet been discovered and science doubted the unseen could be a cause of death. Semmelweis deduced an unknown “cadaverous material” caused childbed fever. The doctor established a policy of using a solution of chlorinated lime (modern calcium hypochlorite, the compound used in today’s common household chlorine bleach solution) for washing hands between autopsy and the patient exams.

The results were dramatic. The number of childbed fever cases dropped significantly when doctors washed their hands thoroughly. Statistics kept over a prolonged period of months clearly provided the outcome was conclusive.

The issue was that the medical leadership throughout Austria and Germany rejected Semmelweis’ speculation that there was unseen agents (germs) carried from cadaver or ill patient to an uninfected patient. Semmelweis did not win over his colleagues and the masters of medicine — to the contrary, he proved annoying and he angered the elder statesmen of science. Even with the statistical evidence, they ignored, denied and challenged his beliefs.

Semmelweis, enraged by the indifference of the medical profession, started penning angry — and very public — letters to prominent doctors and scientists. He accused them of irresponsibility and denounced them as murderers. His fellow Austrian doctors, and his wife, thought he was going mad and in 1865 he was committed to an insane asylum. Ironically, he was severely beaten upon being admitted to the asylum and he died of septic infection within a few weeks of his arrival.

What is the Semmelweis Effect? It is metaphor for a certain type of human behavior characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms — named after Semmelweis, whose perfectly reasonable hand-washing suggestions were ridiculed and rejected by his contemporaries.

I sometime think many executives who refuse to consider social media as a critical and essential 21st Century communications channel are suffering from the Semmelweis Effect.

What do you think?

blockquote>Douglas Arnold, The Ingenuity Guru, is a writer, workshop leader, and speaker on ingenuity, imagination, and creativity. His upcoming book “Ingenuity!” focuses on sparking greater innovation in the individual, workplace teams and the community. Follow him here and on Twitter @DouglasArnold

3D MOVIES IMAGE EVERY NEURON IN BRAIN

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by ingenuityguru in Innovation, SCIENCE

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3D, brain, imaging, MIT, neurology, Science

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Well, MIT did it with worms. But I digress.

Researchers at MIT and the University of Vienna have created an imaging system that can generate 3-D movies of entire brains at the millisecond timescale.

It could help scientists discover how neuronal networks process sensory information and generate behavior.

The team used the new system to simultaneously image the activity of every neuron in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, as well as the entire brain of a zebrafish larva, offering a more complete picture of nervous system activity than has been previously possible.

“Looking at the activity of just one neuron in the brain doesn’t tell you how that information is being computed; for that, you need to know what upstream neurons are doing. And to understand what the activity of a given neuron means, you have to be able to see what downstream neurons are doing,” says Ed Boyden, an associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and one of the leaders of the research team. “In short, if you want to understand how information is being integrated from sensation all the way to action, you have to see the entire brain.”

The new approach, described May 18 in Nature Methods, could also help neuroscientists learn more about the biological basis of brain disorders. “We don’t really know, for any brain disorder, the exact set of cells involved,” Boyden says. “The ability to survey activity throughout a nervous system may help pinpoint the cells or networks that are involved with a brain disorder, leading to new ideas for therapies.”

Boyden’s team developed the brain-mapping method with researchers in the lab of Alipasha Vaziri of the University of Vienna and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna. The paper’s lead authors are Young-Gyu Yoon, a graduate student at MIT, and Robert Prevedel, a postdoc at the University of Vienna.

High-speed 3-D imaging

Neurons encode information — sensory data, motor plans, emotional states, and thoughts — using electrical impulses called action potentials, which provoke calcium ions to stream into each cell as it fires. By engineering fluorescent proteins to glow when they bind calcium, scientists can visualize this electrical firing of neurons. However, until now there has been no way to image this neural activity over a large volume, in three dimensions, and at high speed.

Light-field imaging

Scanning the brain with a laser beam can produce 3-D images of neural activity, but it takes a long time to capture an image because each point must be scanned individually. The MIT team wanted to achieve similar 3-D imaging but accelerate the process so they could see neuronal firing, which takes only milliseconds, as it occurs.

The new method is based on a widely used technology known as light-field imaging, which creates 3-D images by measuring the angles of incoming rays of light. Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and an author of this paper, has worked extensively on developing this type of 3-D imaging. Microscopes that perform light-field imaging have been developed previously by multiple groups. In the new paper, the MIT and Austrian researchers optimized the light-field microscope, and applied it, for the first time, to imaging neural activity.

With this kind of microscope, the light emitted by the sample being imaged is sent through an array of lenses that refracts the light in different directions. Each point of the sample generates about 400 different points of light, which can then be recombined using a computer algorithm to recreate the 3-D structure.

“If you have one light-emitting molecule in your sample, rather than just refocusing it into a single point on the camera the way regular microscopes do, these tiny lenses will project its light onto many points. From that, you can infer the three-dimensional position of where the molecule was,” says Boyden, who is a member of MIT’s Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Prevedel built the microscope, and Yoon devised the computational strategies that reconstruct the 3-D images.

Neurons in action

The researchers used this technique to image neural activity in the worm C. elegans, the only organism for which the entire neural wiring diagram is known. This 1-millimeter worm has 302 neurons, each of which the researchers imaged as the worm performed natural behaviors, such as crawling. They also observed the neuronal response to sensory stimuli, such as smells.

The downside to light field microscopy, Boyden says, is that the resolution is not as good as that of techniques that slowly scan a sample. The current resolution is high enough to see activity of individual neurons, but the researchers are now working on improving it so the microscope could also be used to image parts of neurons, such as the long dendrites that branch out from neurons’ main bodies. They also hope to speed up the computing process, which currently takes a few minutes to analyze one second of imaging data.

The researchers also plan to combine this technique with optogenetics, which enables neuronal firing to be controlled by shining light on cells engineered to express light-sensitive proteins. By stimulating a neuron with light and observing the results elsewhere in the brain, scientists could determine which neurons are participating in particular tasks.

The work at MIT was funded by the Allen Institute for Brain Science; the National Institutes of Health; the MIT Synthetic Intelligence Project; the IET Harvey Prize; the National Science Foundation (NSF); the New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Award; Google; the NSF Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines at MIT; and Jeremy and Joyce Wertheimer.

Researchers at MIT and the University of Vienna have created an imaging system that reveals neural activity throughout the brains of living animals. This technique, the first that can generate 3-D movies of entire brains at the millisecond timescale, could help scientists discover how neuronal networks process sensory information and generate behavior.

The team used the new system to simultaneously image the activity of every neuron in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, as well as the entire brain of a zebrafish larva, offering a more complete picture of nervous system activity than has been previously possible.

The new approach, described May 18 in Nature Methods, could also help neuroscientists learn more about the biological basis of brain disorders. “We don’t really know, for any brain disorder, the exact set of cells involved,” Boyden says. “The ability to survey activity throughout a nervous system may help pinpoint the cells or networks that are involved with a brain disorder, leading to new ideas for therapies.”

Abstract of Nature Methods paper

High-speed, large-scale three-dimensional (3D) imaging of neuronal activity poses a major challenge in neuroscience. Here we demonstrate simultaneous functional imaging of neuronal activity at single-neuron resolution in an entire Caenorhabditis elegans and in larval zebrafish brain. Our technique captures the dynamics of spiking neurons in volumes of ~700 μm × 700 μm × 200 μm at 20 Hz. Its simplicity makes it an attractive tool for high-speed volumetric calcium imaging.

references:
Robert Prevedel et al., Simultaneous whole-animal 3D imaging of neuronal activity using light-field microscopy, Nature Methods, 2014, DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.2964

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Douglas Arnold, The Ingenuity Guru, is a writer, workshop leader, and speaker on ingenuity, imagination, and creativity. His upcoming book “Ingenuity!” focuses on sparking greater innovation in the individual, workplace teams and the community. Follow him here and on Twitter @DouglasArnold

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