A discovery of how to control and transfer spinning electrons paves the way for novel hybrid devices that could outperform existing semiconductor electronics. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers at Linkoping University in Sweden demonstrate how to combine a commonly used semiconductor with a topological insulator, a recently discovered state of matter with unique electrical properties.

Just as the Earth spins around its own axis, so does an electron, in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. "Spintronics" is the name used to describe technologies that exploit both the spin and the charge of the electron. Current applications are limited, and the technology is mainly used in computer hard drives. Spintronics promises great advantages over conventional electronics, including lower power consumption and higher speed.

In terms of electrical conduction, natural materials are classified into three categories: conductors, semiconductors and insulators. Researchers have recently discovered an exotic phase of matter known as "topological insulators," which is an insulator inside, but a conductor on the surface. One of the most striking properties of topological insulators is that an electron must travel in a specific direction along the surface of the material, determined by its spin direction. This property is known as "spin-momentum locking."

"The surface of a topological insulator is like a well-organised divided highway for electrons, where electrons having one spin direction travel in one direction, while electrons with the opposite spin direction travel in the opposite direction. They can travel fast in their designated directions without colliding and without losing energy," says Yuqing Huang, Ph D student at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM) at Linkoping University.

These properties make topological insulators promising for spintronic applications. However, one key question is how to generate and manipulate the surface spin current in topological insulators.

The research team behind the current study has now taken the first step towards transferring spin-oriented electrons between a topological insulator and a conventional semiconductor. They generated electrons with the same spin in gallium arsenide, GaAs, a semiconductor commonly used in electronics. To achieve this, they used circularly polarised light, in which the electric field rotates either clockwise or counter-clockwise when seen in the direction of travel of the light. The spin-polarised electrons could then be transferred from GaAs to a topological insulator, to generate a directional electric current on the surface. The researchers could control the orientation of spin of the electrons, and the direction and the strength of the electric current in the topological insulator bismuth telluride, Bi2Te3. This flexibility has according to the researchers not been available before. All of this was accomplished without applying an external electric voltage, demonstrating the potential of efficient conversion from light energy to electricity. The findings are significant for the design of novel spintronic devices that exploit the interaction of matter with light, a technology known as "opto-spintronics."

"We combine the superior optical properties of GaAs with the unique electrical properties of a topological insulator. This has given us new ideas for designing opto-spintronic devices that can be used for efficient and robust information storage, exchange, processing and read-out in future information technology," says Professor Weimin Chen, who has led the study.

No detectable limit to how long people can live

Emma Morano passed away last April. At 117 years old, the Italian woman was the oldest known living human being.

Super- centenarians, such as Morano and Jeanne Calment of France, who famously lived to be 122 years old, continue to fascinate scientists and have led them to wonder just how long humans can live. A study published in Nature last October concluded that the upper limit of human age is peaking at around 115 years.

Now, however, a new study in Nature by McGill University biologists Bryan G. Hughes and Siegfried Hekimi comes to a starkly different conclusion. By analyzing the lifespan of the longest-living individuals from the USA, the UK, France and Japan for each year since 1968, Hekimi and Hughes found no evidence for such a limit, and if such a maximum exists, it has yet to be reached or identified, Hekimi says.

Far into the foreseeable future

"We just don't know what the age limit might be. In fact, by extending trend lines, we can show that maximum and average lifespans, could continue to increase far into the foreseeable future," Hekimi says. Many people are aware of what has happened with average lifespans. In 1920, for example, the average newborn Canadian could expect to live 60 years; a Canadian born in 1980 could expect 76 years, and today, life expectancy has jumped to 82 years. Maximum lifespan seems to follow the same trend.

It's impossible to predict what future lifespans in humans might look like, Hekimi says. Some scientists argue that technology, medical interventions, and improvements in living conditions could all push back the upper limit.

"It's hard to guess," Hekimi adds. "Three hundred years ago, many people lived only short lives. If we would have told them that one day most humans might live up to 100, they would have said we were crazy."

Haptik opens up AI assistant technology that powers its chatbots

Haptik, an artificial intelligence-based personal assistant service, has open sourced its proprietary Named Entity Recognition system that powers the chatbots behind Haptik Android and iOS apps at Chatbot Summit in Berlin.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a widely used technology component by any product that uses machine learning to understand the textual datasets it is built on.

While NER technology is a common feature in many social media, news apps, ad-tech, search engines and analytics platforms, it has been largely unexplored in the chatbots domain. Haptik has now given it a shot.

“Developer tools and open source technology play a key part in the evolution of any platform,“ said Aakrit Vaish, CEO of Haptik. “The Haptik Chatbot NER is our way of contributing to the growth of chatbot development and advancing the overall paradigm shift,“ Vaish said during his productUX keynote at the summit.

Developers can use the chatbot NER to build and enhance the intelligence of chatbots targeted at domains like personal assistance, e-commerce, insurance, healthcare and fitness, and can therefore skip the years of data mining.

There are predefined entities like restaurant names, cuisine, city list, time and date, which can be used out of the box in the Haptik chat bot NER after in stallation. One can create custom entities or edit the current ones by just adding data using a given template. Haptik raised $11.2 million last year from Times Internet, part of Times Group, which publishes The Economic Times.

Boeing set to start testing self-flying planes

It says it wants to develop autonomous aircraft, which would be capable of navigating themselves without any input from a human pilot.

Planes can already take off, cruise and land with minimal human assistance, but Boeing wants to go a step further.

It wants artificial intelligence to start making some of the decisions pilots are trusted to make.

"When I look at the future I see a need for you know 41,000 commercial jet airplanes over the course of the next 20 years,” said Mike Sinnett, Boeing’s vice president of product development, according to Reuters.

“And that means we're going to need something like six hundred and seventeen thousand more pilots. That's a lot of pilots.

“So one of the ways that may be solved is by having some type of autonomous behaviour and that could be anything from taking instead of five pilots on a long haul flight down to three or two, taking two pilots down to one in a freight situation, or in some cases going from one to none.”

The company plans to test self-flying technology in a cockpit simulator this summer, before using it on a real plane next year.

Airbus is currently working on autonomous flying cars, and will test prototype single-seater flying taxis before the end of the year, ahead of a wider rollout in 2021.

However, while it envisages that its cars would form part of a wider ride-hailing system, like Uber, Boeing appears to be aiming to carry lots of passengers at once.

Promising new therapeutic approach for debilitating bone disease

An Australian-led research team has demonstrated a new therapeutic approach that can re-build and strengthen bone, offering hope for individuals with the debilitating bone cancer, multiple myeloma.

The findings were published in the medical journal Blood, and were presented at an international meeting of bone biology experts in Brisbane earlier this month.

The researchers tested a new type of treatment that specifically targets a protein called sclerostin, which in healthy bones is an important regulator of bone formation. Sclerostin halts bone formation, and the researchers speculated that if they could inhibit the action of sclerostin, they could reverse the devastating bone disease that occurs with multiple myeloma.

Dr Michelle McDonald and Professor Peter Croucher, of the Bone Biology Division of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, led the study.

"Multiple myeloma is a cancer that grows in bone, and in most patients it is associated with widespread bone loss, and recurrent bone fractures, which can be extremely painful and debilitating," says Dr McDonald.

"The current treatment for myeloma-associated bone disease with bisphosphonate drugs prevents further bone loss, but it doesn't fix damaged bones, so patients continue to fracture. We wanted to re-stimulate bone formation, and increase bone strength and resistance to fracture."

The new therapeutic approach is an antibody that targets and neutralises sclerostin, and in previous clinical studies of osteoporosis, such antibodies have been shown to increase bone mass and reduce fracture incidence in patients.

The researchers tested the anti-sclerostin antibody in mouse models of multiple myeloma, and found that not only did it prevent further bone loss, it doubled bone volume in some of the mice.

Dr McDonald says, "When we looked at the bones before and after treatment, the difference was remarkable -- we saw less lesions or 'holes' in the bones after anti-sclerostin treatment.

"These lesions are the primary cause of bone pain, so this is an extremely important result."

The researchers have a biomechanical method to test bone strength and resistance to fracture, and found that the treatment also made the bones substantially stronger, with more than double the resistance to fracture observed in many of the tests.

They then combined the new antibody with zoledronic acid, a type of bisphosphonate drug, the current standard therapy for myeloma bone disease.

"Bisphosphonates work by preventing bone breakdown, so we combined zoledronic acid with the new anti-sclerostin antibody, that re-builds bone. Together, the impact on bone thickness, strength and resistance to fracture was greater than either treatment alone," says Dr McDonald.

The findings provide a potential new clinical strategy for myeloma. While this disease is relatively rare, with approximately 1700 Australians diagnosed every year, the prognosis is extremely poor, with less than half of those diagnosed expected to survive for more than five years.

Prof Croucher, Head of the Bone Biology Division at Garvan, says that preventing the devastating bone disease of myeloma is critical to improve the prognosis for these people.

"Importantly, myelomas, like other cancers, vary from individual to individual and can therefore be difficult to target. By targeting sclerostin, we are blocking a protein that is active in every person's bones, and not something unique to a person's cancer. Therefore, in the future, when we test this antibody in humans, we are hopeful to see a response in most, if not all, patients," Prof Croucher says.

"We are now looking towards clinical trials for this antibody, and in the future, development of this type of therapy for the clinical treatment of multiple myeloma.

"This therapeutic approach has the potential to transform the prognosis for myeloma patients, enhancing quality of life, and ultimately reducing mortality.

"It also has clinical implications for the treatment of other cancers that develop in the skeleton."

This company has built one home energy sensor to control them all

The plethora of electronic devices in your home may plug into the same walls and draw electricity from the same source, but each has a unique signature or fingerprint that helps distinguish it from the rest. To a sophisticated sensor, the refrigerator, the curling iron and the TV look quite different.

Those fingerprints can also unlock energy information about the entire home, one company claims.

Earth Networks, a weather data analytics company in Germantown, Md., has created a smartphone-size sensor that adheres to the front of your home's breaker box and plugs into a nearby wall socket. After that simple installation, chief executive Robert Marshall said, the sensor can track the energy consumption and usage patterns of each appliance and device in the home.

The homeowner can then use that information to determine where energy could be conserved, whether devices have been left on unintentionally, or whether an appliance appears on the verge of failure. Action is up to the homeowner, however. Once the sensor has detected the dryer vent is clogged or the coffee maker was left on, it's up to you to remedy the situation the old fashioned way.

But as connected home technology becomes more popular, Marshall expects that will change.

“This unlocks the connected home. The connected home is going to continue to progress, but slowly. Once you know that you've left your curling iron on, you should then get a smart [power] switch and it will automatically turn off,” he said.

The concept of a completely automated home - one that brews your coffee in the morning and powers off your lights at night - has yet to be fully realized for most American households. Despite the attention these technologies have received, these tasks are still part of a very manual routine for most homeowners.

That's beginning to change, albeit gradually. Consumers have begun flocking to individual smart home technologies, with voice-activated assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home becoming especially popular in a short period of time, according to ABI Research. The market research firm estimates that 600 million smart home devices will ship in 2021, up from 40 million devices just six years prior.

But having even a few smart devices does not a smart home make. Marshall predicts most household appliances will remain disconnected for the foreseeable future, and his company's sensor could start to bridge the gap between those dumb devices and a smart home, he said.

“Everything is so disjointed right now,” Marshall said. “There's not any one platform that understands the home in detail.”

The Earth Networks sensor was developed in tandem with Oakland, Calif.-based Whisker Labs, a start-up that Earth Networks has now acquired for an undisclosed sum. Marshall expects the sensor will be available to business partners, such as utility and insurance companies, early next year, and will go on sale to homeowners toward the end of 2017. A retail price has not been set.

While relatively few consumers may know the name Earth Networks, millions have interacted with the weather forecasting app WeatherBug that the company operated until last month. Earth Networks sold the brand for an undisclosed sum to add money to its coffers and focus more intently on its data business, Marshall said.

Earth Networks runs the largest private network of weather sensors in the world, providing key climate and atmospheric information to governments, businesses and other large institutions. That means processing large volumes of data in real time, and delivering it in a way that's easy for its customers to understand and act on. In that way, the new home energy sensor isn't a stretch for the company, he said.

“We're now monitoring the energy in your home using that same core competency,” Marshall said.

Apple Watch 2: New wearable to have bigger battery and smaller body, report claims

Apple is about to release its second Apple Watch – with a bigger battery and a smaller body.

The new watch isn’t set to bring many new features, and instead be more of a refinement of the existing watch than a whole re-design of the phone. But it will fix some of the biggest complaints that people have about the existing model – that it’s too big and the battery dies too quickly.

Various reports have said that the battery life will receive a huge upgrade. One rumour suggested that the second version of the watch will see a 35 per cent battery boost, and an electronics shop that claims to have got hold of the watch says that the capacity has been increased to 1.28 WH from 0.98 WH.

It’s not clear whether that extra capacity will actually lead to a longer battery life. The new version of the Watch operating system, which is expected to come out at the same time as the hardware, borrows more computing power from the watch and so might use up more battery – meaning that the extra battery could actually keep the same time between charges, rather than adding extra battery life.

The same report from Byte – which claims to have seen leaked components – also said that the new Watch will have a “noticeably thinner” panel than the existing watch. The display itself is unchanged, but being less deep the watch could be smaller and flatter on the arm, the report says.

In all, the Apple Watch has seen far fewer leaks than the iPhone 7 that it will be introduced alongside. It is reported that it will focus far more on health than other features, and that some long rumoured additions including technology to allow it to work independently of the phone might actually be left out of the model revealed next week.