AM signals: Optogenetics, Planck biography, Apple for business
Apple is targeting business users with its new iPad Pro, which went on sale yesterday. The Wall Street Journal reports that business users accounted for 11% of Apple’s total sales for the year leading up to Apple’s last quarterly earnings report.
Intel is performing processor research in the UK at the Alan Turing Institute, a joint venture involving several universities and with £42 million in government funding, according to ElectronicsWeekly.com. In addition, Intel is helping to train data scientists.
Experimental physicist Brandon Brown, who has worked in areas ranging from high-temperature semiconductors to biophysics, has recently completed a biography of Max Planck, titled Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War. In an interview with Physics Today, Brown comments on the science and politics of Planck’s time.
Edward Boyden, who leads the MIT Media Lab’s synthetic neurobiology research group, helped develop a tool that uses light to turn neurons on and off a decade ago at Stanford. The Boston Globe reports that on Sunday, Boyden and Stanford neuroscientist Dr. Karl Deisseroth, each received $3 million Breakthrough Prizes for their work on optogenetics.
The Globe also has a story on Plamen Ivanov, a physicist at Boston University, who is a founder of a filed called “network physiology,” which applies statistics, physics, and signal processing to medical research. The Gobe quotes him as saying, “The complexity behind the anatomics of individual organ systems and the dynamic coupling between systems is such that it requires a special preparation that physicists and computational scientist have, not necessarily biologists, physiologists, and clinicians.”
And finally, Will Oremus at Slate describes letting Tesla’s autopilot take him for a ride.
