99. Disney’s Larger Holograms, Leap in Hydrogen Fuel, Space-Based Surgery Fellowship
Summary: News Disney's "Holobricks" could stack up for larger holograms | New Atlas (01:03) Scientists at Cambridge and Disney Research may be closer to making holograms “less disappointing.”They’ve created new “holobricks” that can stack and tile together to produce large 3D images that can be viewed from multiple angles. Holograms are three-dimensional virtual images that appear to exist within the real world instead of on a screen. Produced in multiple ways:Reflective Screens Projections onto fog Then you have the classic “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion. Started in the 1860sA brightly lit figure out of the audience's sight below the stage is reflected in a pane of glass placed between the performer and the audience. To the audience, it appears as if the ghost is on stage. Old ways are low in resolution, while the new system, from Cambridge and Disney, is designed to boost the picture quality with scalable, modular holographic blocks, or holobricks as the team calls them.Each holobrick is made up of a spatial light modulator, a scanner, and coarse integrated optics. The system combines three images of the same object from slightly different angles, which creates a sense of depth.Then light is then sent through a series of lenses that separates the images, so that when it appears on the 2D display on the surface of the holobrick, but from different angles. Has a resolution of 1024 x 768, a 40-degree field of view and at a cinematic frame rate of 24 frames per second. Essentially, that means that as you walk around the screen, your view of the virtual object or scene changes with you.Additionally it is modular, allowing the size of the holograms to be increased. There is still more work to do, but the researchers say that the holobricks could open up possibilities like holographic video walls or interactive kiosks. Obesity alters molecular architecture of liver cells; repairing structure reverses metabolic disease | Harvard News (06:23) According to Harvard researchers, cells use their molecular architecture to regulate their metabolic functions, and repairing diseased cells’ architecture to a healthier state can also repair metabolism.This could have implications on reversing obesity, and reversing the damage it causes to the body. Gökhan Hotamışlıgi, a Harvard public health professor, mentions the regulatory mechanism they discovered:“The fundamental regulatory mechanism that we discovered can be used to evaluate the susceptibility—or resistance—of individuals to a disease state like obesity, and determine what steps, such as diet, nutrients, or fasting, will reduce, eliminate, or exacerbate these states. We can imagine a whole new array of therapeutic strategies targeting molecular architecture, similar to the restoration of an ailing building or preventing its deterioration.” The study compared liver samples from healthy, lean mice with samples from obese mice with fatty liver disease. Using machine learning & AI, along with high-resolution imaging the researchers generated three-dimensional reconstructions of specialized structures, called organelles, inside cells. Organelles are the components of the cell. Then compared the architecture/structure of the organelles between the lean & obese mice. The images produced from this research are the most detailed visualization to date of subcellular structures while the cells are still intact in their tissue environment. Through these analyses, the team determined that obesity leads to dramatic alterations in subcellular molecular architecture, particularly in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), an organelle involved in the creation and shaping of proteins and lipids. The team then partially restored the ER’s structure using technologies that can repair molecules and proteins that can reshape cellular membranes to see what would happen. “The outcome was really striking—when structure is repaired, so is the cell’s metabolism,” said Ana Paula Arruda, co-lead on the resear
