The MIT startup Pison Technology, founded by Dexter Ang ’05, is using sensors to turn biopotentials on the skin into digital commands for smartphones, robots, IoT equipment, and more. Credit: Pison Pison, founded by Dexter Ang (MIT ’05), enables people to control digital interfaces, such as their phones, through brain signals. Dexter Ang ’05, AF ’16 had been working as a high-frequency trader before he learned his mother had ALS. Over the next year, he watched her slowly lose the ability to walk, feed herself, and even click a mouse to read an e-book, one of her favorite activities. The progression was painful to watch, but what Ang couldn’t accept was that his mother’s physical condition could so negatively affect…

• www.china-kangda.com
• August 7, 2021
• 526

First-of-its-kind mechanical model simulates bending of mammalian whiskers. Researchers have developed a new mechanical model that simulates how whiskers bend within a follicle in response to an external force, paving the way toward better understanding of how whiskers contribute to mammals’ sense of touch. Yifu Luo and Mitra Hartmann of Northwestern University and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology. With the exception of some primates, most mammals use whiskers to explore their environment through the sense of touch. Whiskers have no sensors along their length, but when an external force bends a whisker, that deformation extends into the follicle at the base of the whisker, where the whisker pushes or pulls on sensor cells, triggering…

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• July 27, 2021
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