Microsoft joins Linux Foundation in another nod to open-source code
IN A basement laboratory at Harvard University, a few strands of thin wire mesh are undulating at the bottom of a cup of water, as if in a minuscule ribbon dance. The meshes – about the length of a pen cap – are able to do something unprecedented: once injected into the brain of a living mouse, they can safely stimulate individual neurons and measure the cells’ behaviour for more than a year.
Electronic brain interfaces like these could someday be crucial for people with neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s. The disease causes a group of neurons in one area of the brain to begin dying off, triggering uncontrollable tremors and shakes. Sending targeted electrical jolts to this area can help whip the living neurons back into shape and stop Parkinson’s symptoms.
Today, people can undergo an electrical treatment called deep brain stimulation. But it has big limitations. It involves implanting rigid, dense electrodes in the brain. That’s far from ideal in such a soft organ: after about four weeks, scar tissue begins to build up. The only way to get the electrodes to work through this tissue is to keep upping the voltage used to excite the neurons. That can be dangerous, and sometimes another surgery is required to replace the implant.
DIFFERENT IDEA
Charles Lieber, a Harvard chemist and nanomaterials pioneer, had a different idea: a conductive brain interface that mirrors the fine details of the brain itself. Just as neurons connect with each other in a network that has open spaces where proteins and fluids pass through, the crosshatches in Lieber’s bendable mesh electronics leave room for neurons to fit in, rather than being pushed to the side by a boxy foreign object. “This device effectively blurs the interface between a living system and a non-living system,” says Guosong Hong, a postdoc in Lieber’s lab.
The extremely flexible mesh, made of gold wires sandwiched between layers of a polymer, easily coils into a needle so it can be injected rather than implanted, avoiding a more extensive surgery. Part of the mesh sticks out though the brain and a hole in the skull so that it can be wired up to a computer that controls the electric jolts and measures the neurons’ activity. But eventually, Lieber says, the controls and power supply could be implanted in the body, as they are in today’s systems for deep brain stimulation.
The researchers foresee the mesh having many uses beyond Parkinson’s. It might help treat depression and schizophrenia more precisely than today’s drugs, which bathe the entire brain in chemicals and cause an array of side effects.
First, though, it needs to be tested in humans. Lieber’s group is partnering with doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital and will soon begin experiments in people with epilepsy. SEATTLE (TNS): MICROSOFT HAS joined the Linux Foundation, the latest sign that the software giant is embracing open-source technologies it formerly treated with hostility.
The foundation helps advise the development of the Linux and other software tools built on open-source terms that allow the public to freely use and modify software. Microsoft last Wednesday said it had joined the foundation on its most expensive tier of corporate membership, alongside the likes of Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Linux, which former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer once called a cancer, was for years one of Microsoft’s biggest rivals. The free-to-use operating system was seen for a time as the primary threat to expensive, proprietary Windows.
Windows won the battle for the personal computer but didn’t fare so well in the broader debate about the value of open-source versus proprietary technology.
Linux-derived Android dominates the smartphone market, and open-source tools are a force in cloud-computing technologies. Many software startups favour open-source software by default.
Microsoft teams plugging away on developer tools and server software, realms heavily influenced by Linux, broke with the company line during the last several years in pushing greater involvement with the open-source community.
TONE SHIFTED
When Satya Nadella, previously Microsoft’s server and tools chief, was named company chief executive in early 2014, the tone shifted companywide. Microsoft, Nadella said at an event in October 2014, loves Linux.
The company, headquartered outside Seattle, has since released elements of its own software under open-source terms and announced a version of its database management software, SQL Server, for Linux, among other steps.
GitHub, an online developer community and repository for software projects, said in September that there were more Microsoft employees contributing to open-source projects than representatives of any other single company.