Aurelia Butler

Combining centuries-old traditional mandala colouring with cutting-edge computing and brain sensing technologies could lead to new ways of helping people achieve mindfulness.
Mandalas are geometric configurations of shapes that have their origins in Buddhist traditions. The colouring of mandala shapes is increasingly popular as a way for people to attempt ‘mindfulness’, a way of being present in the moment, and which has been associated with helping people to improve their mental health and wellbeing.
Human-computer interaction researchers from Lancaster University have developed a new prototype that can monitor people’s brain signals while they are colouring mandalas and produce real-time feedback on a peripheral display to represent levels of mindfulness.
The researchers, who specialise in thinking about how new computing technologies can be designed to help people, believe systems like these could be developed to aid the learning, and training, of focused attention mindfulness techniques and help people deal with stress, depression and other affective health disorders.
In the first part of their study, the researchers interviewed experienced mandala practicioners to find out about the special qualities of mandala colouring, and how they can be used to achieve mindfulness, and based the prototype on their findings.
The prototype, called ‘Anima’, included a tablet device for users to colour mandala shapes, a wearable EEG headset* that reads wearers’ brain signals, and a second display in the shape of an artists’ palette, that is placed in the user’s periphery. More

Empowering small, humanoid-sensing robots to take a patient’s blood pressure — using only a simple touch — is Simon Fraser University researcher Woo Soo Kim’s latest health care technology development.
Based on the intricacies of origami — and inspired by the movements of nature’s leeches — his research is advancing how robots could carry out basic health care tasks in certain conditions, including in remote regions, or where minimal personal contact is needed, such as during pandemics. The research is published in the journal npj Flexible Electronics from Nature Publishing Group.
Together with PhD student Tae-Ho Kim and a team in SFU’s Additive Manufacturing Lab, Kim and researchers have replaced the traditional blood pressure procedure by replicated the folding mechanisms of the leech in their design of 3-D printable origami sensors. The leech-inspired origami (LIO) sensors can be integrated onto the fingertips of a humanoid-sensing robot.
“Our origami-inspired dry electrode has unique characteristics such as suction for grasping and foldability inspired by nature,” says Kim, a professor and associate director of SFU’s School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering. “In keeping with nature, we saw that in addition to the complex mechanisms of a leech’s adhesive feature, these creatures have an expandable posterior sucker and body, while its organs expand and shrink appropriately to maintain better adhesion to its victim. Incorporating this point of view, we found that origami can achieve similar motions and also be customized.”
How It Works
The LIO sensors integrated onto the robot’s fingertips can be positioned on the patient’s chest. Blood pressure is monitored and estimated by combining data from electrocardiogram (ECG)and photoplethysmogram (PPG) readings, as recorded by sensors on the fingers of each hand respectively.
Using predetermined algorithms, the signals from the paired sensors can generate a patient’s systolic and diastolic blood pressure without using the traditional cuff-based digital sphygmomanometer.
Kim’s earlier work involved programming sensing robots to measure other human physiological signals, such as those from an electrocardiogram (which monitors heart rate), temperature and respiration rate.
“Robotics offers a promising method to mitigate risk and improve patient care effectiveness and quality as focused remote healthcare technology,” says Kim. The researchers plan further trials of their new process and are developing the next generation of sensors, which they hope will lead to its biomedically meaningful implementation.
“Blood pressure monitoring is an essential medical diagnostic tool for many chronic diseases and overall good health. The use of sensing robots in medical healthcare systems has substantial advantages because they can assist health care workers in monitoring patient vital signs while creating a friendly environment for those patients who may need to be isolated.”
Kim believes that robotics can provide a future platform or bridge between medical personnel and remote patients with “the potential to play an essential role in the new era of remote healthcare.”
The research is partially supported by a Discovery and Accelerator Supplement Grant, funded by the Natural Sciences and Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
Story Source:
Materials provided by Simon Fraser University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

For more than a century written language was seen by anthropologists and other social scientists as a definitional feature of societal complexity or “advancement” (a term that is tinged with colonialism and racism). But in a new study in the Journal of Social Computing, researchers have found that societies don’t need written languages to be large or have complex governments. In a systematic, comparative survey of precolonial Mesoamerican societies, the study’s authors found that some large population centers had written systems of communication, but others did not. At the same time, the centers that had more elaborate computational and writing systems tended to be more autocratic (top-down ruler-dominated governance) than the ones without.
“The development of writing was thought to be a characteristic of civilizations or large-scale societies,” says Gary Feinman, the MacArthur curator of anthropology at Chicago’s Field Museum and the study’s first author. “Our findings both question and refine that long-entrenched assumption by illustrating that the relationship between the scale of social networks and computation systems also must take into account how people were organized and the resultant networks of communication. This relationship is not simply a matter of efficiency; history and how people were organized and communicated are key.”
The upshot, Feinman says, is that “in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, the overall elaboration of computational systems like writing, mathematics, and calendars are not directly correlated with the scale of societies. They do not necessarily become more elaborate or efficient over time.”
“Many of the dominant paradigms in the study of the human past have a Western or Eurasian bias that does not hold up to close scrutiny with data from other parts of the world. Being primarily Americanists, we know that certain favored models don’t work for the Western Hemisphere,” says co-author David Carballo of Boston University. Some of the largest Indigenous empires in the Americas had no written language, and “these cases, which seem anomalous in a Eurasian context, prompted us to prompted us to probe why people wrote and what sorts of things they wrote about, rather than assuming a close correlation with other forms of social complexity.”
For the study, Feinman and Carballo compared large population centers in what’s now Mexico and Central America from 1250 BCE to 1520 CE, looking at factors like population size, the size of the area governed, and political organization. Even in societies without written records, researchers are able to determine political structure by examining the archaeological remains of buildings and features like palaces. By comparing the remains of residences, public buildings, settlement layout, burial contexts, and monuments, researchers are able to glean information about how a society was governed and how power and wealth were distributed.
Feinman and Carballo then cross-referenced these data points with the computational systems (writing, mathematics, and calendars) used by the populations of these settlements. The relationships they found between writing and societal complexity were, in a word, complex. There wasn’t a clear linear relationship between the size of a society and whether it had writing. But they did find a link between writing and political organization. Writing tended to appear more often in societies with autocratic rulers (think all-powerful leaders) than in societies where power was more evenly shared. More

Toward a new kind of superconductivity: In the past four years scientists have discovered metals whose crystal structure mimics that of a traditional Japanese woven bamboo pattern: kagome metals. The international research activity in this new direction of quantum materials has recently reached a new climax: an international team of physicists has discovered that the underlying kagome lattice structure induces the joint appearance of intricate quantum phenomena which can lead to an unprecedented type of superconductivity.
Atoms form a kagome pattern
A kagome pattern is composed of three shifted regular triangular lattices. As a result, the kagome lattice is a regular pattern composed of stars of David. It is a common Japanese basket pattern which is where its name derives from. In condensed matter physics, materials crystallizing in a kagome lattice have first gained significant attention in the early 90’s. Until 2018, when FeSn as the first kagome metal was found, correlated electronic states in kagome materials had typically been conceived as being generically insulating, and triggered a predominant research focus on magnetic frustrations. That kagome metals could likewise bring about fascinating quantum effects had already been predicted in 2012 by Ronny Thomale, scientific member of the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat — Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter.
“From the moment of their experimental discovery, kagome metals have unleashed a tremendous amount of research activity. In all dedicated research groups worldwide, the search has begun to look out for kagome metals with exotic properties. Among other ambitions, one hope is to realize a new type of superconductor,” explains Thomale who holds the chair for theoretical condensed matter physics at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, JMU.
Baffling results
A research team led by the Paul Scherrer Institute (Schweiz) has now achieved a new discoveryin kagome metals. In the compound KV3Sb5, they observed the simultaneous appearance of several intricate quantum phenomena, culminating in a superconducting phase with broken time reversal symmetry. More

A new machine learning process designed to identify and classify hip fractures has been shown to outperform human clinicians.
Two convolutional neural networks (CNNs) developed at the University of Bath were able to identify and classify hip fractures from X-rays with a 19% greater degree of accuracy and confidence than hospital-based clinicians, in results published this week in Nature Scientific Reports.
The research team, from Bath’s Centre for Therapeutic Innovation and Institute for Mathematical Innovation, as well as colleagues from the Royal United Hospitals Trust Bath, North Bristol NHS Trust, and Bristol Medical School, set about creating the new process to help clinicians make hip fracture care more efficient and to support better patient outcomes.
They used a total of 3,659 hip X-rays, classified by at least two experts, to train and test the neural networks, which achieved an overall accuracy of 92%, and 19% greater accuracy than hospital-based clinicians.
Effective treatment is crucial in managing high costs
Hip fractures are a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the elderly, incurring high costs to health and social care. Classifying a fracture prior to surgery is crucial to help surgeons select the right interventions to treat the fracture and restore mobility and improve patient outcomes. More

Researchers at The University of Manchester may have cleared a significant hurdle on the path to quantum computing, demonstrating step-change improvements in the spin transport characteristics of nanoscale graphene-based electronic devices.
The team — comprising researchers from the National Graphene Institute (NGI) led by Dr Ivan Vera Marun, alongside collaborators from Japan and including students internationally funded by Ecuador and Mexico — used monolayer graphene encapsulated by another 2D material (hexagonal boron nitride) in a so-called van der Waals heterostructure with one-dimensional contacts. This architecture was observed to deliver an extremely high-quality graphene channel, reducing the interference or electronic ‘doping’ by traditional 2D tunnel contacts.
‘Spintronic’ devices, as they are known, may offer higher energy efficiency and lower dissipation compared to conventional electronics, which rely on charge currents. In principle, phones and tablets operating with spin-based transistors and memories could be greatly improved in speed and storage capacity, exceeding Moore’s Law.
As published in Nano Letters, the Manchester team measured electron mobility up to 130,000cm2/Vs at low temperatures (20K or -253oC). For purposes of comparison, the only previously published efforts to fabricate a device with 1D contacts achieved mobility below 30,000cm2/Vs, and the 130k figure measured at the NGI is higher than recorded for any other previous graphene channel where spin transport was demonstrated.
The researchers also recorded spin diffusion lengths approaching 20μm. Where longer is better, most typical conducting materials (metals and semiconductors) have spin diffusion lengths More

Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) have developed a system based on computer vision techniques that allows automatic analysis of biomedical videos captured by microscopy in order to characterise and describe the behaviour of the cells that appear in the images.
These new techniques developed by the UC3M engineering team have been used for measurements on living tissues, in research carried out with scientists from the National Centre for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC in its Spanish acronym). As a result, the team discovered that neutrophils (a type of immune cell) show different behaviours in the blood during inflammatory processes and have identified that one of them, caused by the Fgr molecule, is associated with the development of cardiovascular disease. This work, recently published in the journal Nature, could allow the development of new treatments to minimise the consequences of heart attacks. Researchers from the Vithas Foundation, the University of Castilla-La Mancha, the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (ASTAR) and Harvard University (USA), among other centres, have participated in the study.
“Our contribution consists of the design and development of a fully automatic system, based on computer vision techniques, which allows us to characterise the cells under study by analysing videos captured by biologists using the intravital microscopy technique,” says one of the authors of this work, Professor Fernando Díaz de María, head of the UC3M Multimedia Processing Group. Automatic measurements of the shape, size, movement and position relative to the blood vessel of a few thousand cells have been made, compared to traditional biological studies that are usually supported by analyses of a few hundred manually characterised cells. In this way, it has been possible to carry out a more advanced biological analysis with greater statistical significance.
This new system has several advantages, according to the researchers, in terms of time and precision. Generally speaking, “it is not feasible to keep an expert biologist segmenting and tracking cells on video for months. On the other hand, to provide an approximate idea (because it depends on the number of cells and 3D volume depth), our system only takes 15 minutes to analyse a 5-minute video,” says another of the researchers, Ivan González Díaz, Associate Professor in the Signal Theory and Communications Department at UC3M.
Deep neural networks, the tools these engineers rely on for cell segmentation and detection, are basically algorithms that learn from examples, so in order to deploy the system in a new context, it is necessary to generate sufficient examples to enable their training. These networks are part of machine learning techniques, which in turn is a discipline within the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In addition, the system incorporates other types of statistical techniques and geometric models, all of which are described in another paper, recently published in the Medical Image Analysis journal.
The software that implements the system is versatile and can be adapted to other problems in a few weeks. “In fact, we are already applying it in other different scenarios, studying the immunological behaviour of T cells and dendritic cells in cancerous tissues. And the provisional results are promising,” says another of the researchers from the UC3M team, Miguel Molina Moreno.
In any case, when researching in this field, researchers stress the importance of the work of an interdisciplinary team. “In this context, it is important to recognise the prior communication effort between biologists, mathematicians and engineers, required to understand the basic concepts of other disciplines, before real progress can be made,” concludes Fernando Díaz de María.
YouTube video: https://youtu.be/EiTAvmQkyIo More