I've had a chance to be involved in the technical setup of the clinical trial. It is truly fascinating to see the system at work. It will be 8 patients in total by mid-2018, so we'll have to wait until then to see if it truly works.
Restoring walking is a first step because it is also easiest to begin with because walking is largely based on reflexes. These reflex networks are typically preserved after spinal cord injury, but the person is no longer able to activate them voluntarily, thus losing the ability to walk. With electrical stimulation and an extensive rehabilitation program, the aim is that the person regains some of this voluntary control.
Restoring arms and hands function will be the next step. Tasks involving these limbs however, require fine motor control and are less reliant on reflexes. This means that remnant reflexes cannot be exploited and relearning tasks will be much harder (if not impossible...).
My hope is still that one day we can have a paralyzed patient compete in the cybathlon exoskeleton race but with the implanted electrical stimulator instead of an actual exoskeleton.
Some years ago, Prof. Courtine gave a TED talk when they were still doing the experiments in rats.
The underlaying mechanism is that the electrical stimulation brings the remaining neural structures in the spinal cord into an active state (i.e. where neurons can transmit electrical information). If you can time the stimulations correctly with the rat's own intention to walk, you facilitate neural plasticity (the ability of neurons to create new connections). This means that after an extensive training, the rat's remaining neural structures rewire and give the animal the ability to walk again by itself, in certain cases even without electrical stimulation.
The monkeys in the current paper have a completely severed spinal cord and so there are no remaining neural structures. The "therapy" paradigm was thus changed and instead relies on a permanently active neurostimulation system, that links the brain directly to the region below the injury in the spinal cord.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had a chance to be involved in the technical setup of the clinical trial. It is truly fascinating to see the system at work. It will be 8 patients in total by mid-2018, so we'll have to wait until then to see if it truly works.
Restoring walking is a first step because it is also easiest to begin with because walking is largely based on reflexes. These reflex networks are typically preserved after spinal cord injury, but the person is no longer able to activate them voluntarily, thus losing the ability to walk. With electrical stimulation and an extensive rehabilitation program, the aim is that the person regains some of this voluntary control.
Restoring arms and hands function will be the next step. Tasks involving these limbs however, require fine motor control and are less reliant on reflexes. This means that remnant reflexes cannot be exploited and relearning tasks will be much harder (if not impossible...).
My hope is still that one day we can have a paralyzed patient compete in the cybathlon exoskeleton race but with the implanted electrical stimulator instead of an actual exoskeleton.
Some years ago, Prof. Courtine gave a TED talk when they were still doing the experiments in rats.
The underlaying mechanism is that the electrical stimulation brings the remaining neural structures in the spinal cord into an active state (i.e. where neurons can transmit electrical information). If you can time the stimulations correctly with the rat's own intention to walk, you facilitate neural plasticity (the ability of neurons to create new connections). This means that after an extensive training, the rat's remaining neural structures rewire and give the animal the ability to walk again by itself, in certain cases even without electrical stimulation.
The monkeys in the current paper have a completely severed spinal cord and so there are no remaining neural structures. The "therapy" paradigm was thus changed and instead relies on a permanently active neurostimulation system, that links the brain directly to the region below the injury in the spinal cord.
In case you're interested in the details, or know someone who would be willing to try.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2...
The trojan roots all Android devices released between 2012 and 2015?
Without needing to unlock the bootloader, install custom recovery, etc.?
Awesome! Where do I sign up!?
I may have misread the title...
If it was the case though, not to worry. You could just buy multiple primes to construct your non-primes.
Version 2.0 available on Mac
brew install htop
or
brew upgrade htop
Or in some cases, like mine, first:
brew remove htop-osx
Honestly, Slashdot, this is is the type of headline that I'd expect to see on my Facebook feed... PS. secretly hoping the use was ironic
Could be worth laying down piezoelectric energy harvesting material instead of, or in addition to, the solar cells.
;)
A recent study shows that up to 80% of the compressive energy can be transformed into electrical energy.
An efficient self-powered synchronous electric charge extraction interface circuit for piezoelectric energy. [Closed-access journal]
What this translates to in absolute numbers from the weight of cars/trucks and frequency of passage, is an exercise left to the reader