As a mage, I just want to pursue the truth

Chapter 306 Everything is Difficult at the Beginning (Ask for a Monthly Ticket!)
"Director Zheng, in fact, we have ideas about the generation of dizziness.

It's just that we haven't thought of a good way to convert electrical signals into brain nerve signals.

Implantable brain-computer connections do not match our product positioning.

However, through the existing methods, how to accurately transmit electrical signals into the human brain without causing damage to the human brain is the biggest problem.

In the words of Hua Guo, everything is difficult at the beginning.

Recently we've been exploring how to do this. "

After chatting with Zheng Li, Li Miaomiao specially sent an email through the internal mail system to ask Li Wanqing.

Because not only has there been no new research progress in the Lion City R&D Center recently, but also the consumption curve of the experimental monkeys in the Lion City has risen significantly in the past two months.

You must know that after the soul proof, the price of the experimental monkey has increased ten times compared to before.

Pharmaceutical companies are trying to find substitutes for experimental monkeys, because the cost of using experimental monkeys is too high.

Due to the surge in the cost of clinical trials, a large number of small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies have closed down.

Now, from R&D to official launch of a small-molecule drug, the funds that need to be consumed start at one billion yuan.Small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies simply cannot afford it.

The surge in costs has led to a boom in the CRO industry, and a large number of European and American pharmaceutical companies have outsourced basic research and development to CRO companies in China.

The market value of Huaguo's leading CRO industry more than doubled.

Another point that is more contradictory is that the experimental results of using other experimental creatures to replace the experimental monkeys are not recognized in some countries.

The drug regulatory agencies in these countries require that experimental monkeys must be used for experiments before allowing pharmaceutical companies to conduct human clinical trials.

Because they think that if the medicine has not undergone biological experiments with a soul, it is not convincing enough.

Most of these countries are underdeveloped and developing countries, and they are superstitious.

But there is one exception, and that is American.American came here because of its relatively high level of superstition, and secondly, because they hoped to use this to raise the threshold in the field of innovative drugs.

After Li Wanqing sent a video request to Zheng Li, he got his consent.

Li Wanqing went on to say: "We have carried out various experiments on the experimental monkeys, but so far there are no good results."

The full English name of VR is Virtual Reality, which means virtual reality.

It’s just that VR and virtual reality are separated in the domestic context, and virtual reality is considered to be higher-end than metaverse, and then metaverse is higher-end than VR.

In fact, the earliest concept of virtual reality can be traced back to the 50s.

Let people of that era use the current VR technology, and they must feel that this thing is more advanced than the virtual reality technology they imagined.

It's just that people's appetites are being fed by increasingly iterative technologies.

The previous VR technology was not considered virtual reality.

It wasn't until Kechuang Future's brain-computer connection VR came out that everyone felt that they could barely get in touch with the Metaverse.

The research and development task assigned by Kechuang Bio to Li Wanqing is a big step forward in existing technology.

First nerve cells produce electrical signals that convey information.

Although neurons are not inherently good conductors of electricity, they have evolved elaborate mechanisms over millions of years of evolution.

Electrical signals are generated by based on the flow of ions across its plasma membrane.

Normally, neurons develop a negative potential, known as the resting membrane potential, which can be measured by recording the voltage between the inside and outside of the nerve cell.

The action potential cancels out the negative resting potential and makes the transmembrane potential momentarily positive.

Action potentials travel the length of an axon and are the fundamental signal in the nervous system that carries information from one place to another.

The generation of resting and action potentials can be understood in terms of the selective permeability of nerve cells to different ions and the normal distribution of these ions across the cell membrane.

In fact, people have already realized the transformation of external signals into neural signals, that is vibration.

Vibrations in the air produce sound, which is further transformed into neural signals that the brain can process.

In the human body there are about 110 in our genome.

These proteins are involved in processes such as cell composition and intercellular signaling.

At the heart of the system is a bundle of fine hairs deep in the cochlea, which are connected by chains of proteins called "tip links."

When the cochlea vibrates in response to sound, the hairs move, causing the apical junctions to stretch and open ion channels on the hairs.

When positively charged ions flow in, they create electrical signals that the brain uses to process sound.

These links are composed of two proteins, cadherin 23 and protocadherin 15.

The area where the two proteins meet is more flexible than other areas in the body.

Calcium in the endolymph, the fluid in the body of the ear, binds to proteins and helps increase the strength and stiffness of the tip links.

In the long protocadherin-15 sequence, even amino acids capable of regularly binding calcium were found,
This protein linkage results in the mechanical vibrations that translate sound into electrical signals that the brain can understand.

(The above concept comes from a paper on cell structure and function by Rachelle Gaudet, professor of biology at Harvard University, and Marcos Sotomayor, assistant professor at Ohio State University.)
Li Wanqing tried to study how to convert electrical signals into neural signals through this direction but failed.

He hopes that electrical signals will be converted into mechanical vibrations and then into neural signals that the brain can recognize.

But he found that the biggest problem with this direction is that the mechanical vibration is not that the sound is not effective, but the sound is also ineffective.

Belonging is stuck in the middle, unable to move forward or backward.

It is important to know that the brain is a high-incidence area for electrochemical activities.

There are approximately 1000 billion neurons operating at a rate of 5-50 action potentials per second.

Slight low-frequency vibrations cannot affect the human brain at all.

The reason why so many neural signals can be converted into electrical signals is also due to the improvement of computer performance.

Computers are able to capture electrical impulses in the brain and analyze them to figure out the individual's true intentions.

But how to convert electrical signals into neural signals and at the same time affect human senses is almost an unsolvable problem for humans at present.

This question is equally difficult for Zheng Li.

Because what he knows is a biotechnological solution.

In Blue Star, he is unlikely to take out biological computer-related technologies.

As long as he took out the brain-computer connection technology based on the biological computer, all countries would know that he belonged to Merlin.

He's not ready yet.

Kechuangbio released virtual reality products and became a larger monopoly enterprise, which actually didn't mean much to him.

Zheng Li has built many research facilities to serve him alone with the help of the resources of Kechuang Bio.

More money doesn't get better.

And now that he is the director of CERN, the help that Kechuangbio can bring him is even smaller.

However, after being in Blue Star for so long, Zheng Li has already become a master in the computer field.

After listening to Li Wanqing's explanation, he said:
"Actually, we can stimulate neurons through electrical stimulation.

The problem at hand is that biological neurons don't work in binary.

Information is encoded during discharge.

The number of pulses per pulse, the frequency of pulses, and the time for pulses to reach their destinations.

This does not refer to the duration, but the instantaneous time of arrival.

And the fine structure of the burst has little control over the information transmitted through the axon. "

Ideally, Zheng wanted to remind Li Wanqing by insinuating, to see if he could give him some ideas for a solution.

"We can learn from how microscopic biological communities convert electrical signals into chemical outputs through macroscopic chemical-electrical signal converters.

Nerve cells of microscopic organisms convert electrical signals into chemical outputs to facilitate the active transmission of information throughout the nervous system.

For example, the single-celled microbe Saccharomyces cerevisiae directly reads local chemical concentrations and converts them into dynamic electric fields that are uniformly distributed throughout the fungal population.

A double-feedback gene circuit of chemical excitability precisely regulates the expression of active potassium channels and coordinates the cyclic firing of the plasma membrane potential (PMP).

This research and development path may be able to bring you some ideas.

You can take a look at the research results in this field, and I will send you some of the more valuable papers I have read in this subdivision later. "

Li Wanqing breathed a sigh of relief, it turned out that there were times when Zheng Li didn't know how to solve it.

Because of Zheng Li's powerful ability shown before, he was under a lot of pressure.

The boss is too good, will he appear too incompetent?

Now Zheng Li is just talking about some ideas, making Li Wanqing realize that Zheng Li is not omniscient.

However, Li Wanqing was deeply impressed by Zheng Li's easy handling of various papers and subdivision directions.

You must know that the direction Zheng Li just mentioned is the microbial community, which has nothing to do with brain science.

Even Zheng Li has read many papers in this subdivided field, because what Zheng Li said was to send him some valuable papers.

Blue Star's research atmosphere has led to a lot of content that can also be of great inspiration to Zheng Li.

In the Mage Alliance, it is very expensive to see other people's cutting-edge research results.

Even Fashen can't afford it.

In Blue Star, the latest research results of the scientists are eager for everyone to see, the more citations the better.

However, Blue Star's mechanism also has disadvantages. First, the flooding of papers in certain fields is serious.

The second is that many ideas are actually very good, but they do research for the purpose of publishing articles.

That is to say, even if the data does not match the desired conclusion, the data is processed to force the data to match the conclusion.

The second is that the experiment is difficult to do. In order to hurry up, various forged data and P-maps are made.

But in Zheng Li's view, even if there are various disadvantages, they can't hide the advantages.

Compared with the mage alliance, this environment is simply a paradise for mages.

Moreover, after Zheng Li came, all countries have increased investment in scientific research and policy guidance.

Especially in the field of basic subjects.

"Okay, I have a general idea, thank you Chairman Zheng for your valuable advice."

In the blink of an eye, it came to the end of September, and Huaguo's moon base was basically completed.

In the first nine months of this year alone, the astronauts made three round trips from the blue star to the moon.

Huaguo has been criticized by overseas media since it started building a space station around the moon.

Not only Western media, but also media from countries such as Ah San, Neon, and Korea.

Neon and Korean media are wailing, and the gap between China's aerospace industry and Huaguo is getting wider and wider.

Asan's media is saying that it will take five years for them to catch up with China in the aerospace field.

Due to the successful construction of the moon base in Huaguo, it is currently the only country with territory outside the blue star.

Every day, overseas media try to stir up conflicts in China.

So much so that the most often cited to set off local conflicts is the three moon landings, plus a total of four last year, none of which had female astronauts.

Even if the frontline firefighters do not recruit female officers and soldiers, they can make tens of thousands of quarrels on Weibo.

Some women argued that standards should be set, rather than inherently barring women from signing up.

This can be noisy, not to mention that no female astronauts have landed on the moon.

Female astronauts can go to the space station, why can't they go to the moon?
Of course, in the midst of this turmoil, Microsoft launched their brain-computer connected version of VR devices.

Kechuang Bio also launched its own Pico Verse at the end of September.

"Welcome everyone on the scene and everyone in front of the major live broadcast platforms to watch the 202 autumn product launch conference of Kechuang Future.

This autumn product conference is mainly to release a new brain-computer connection VR.

Presumably everyone knows that the brain-computer connection VR released this time is much friendlier in price than the FutureVerse at the end of last year.

The major digital bloggers have almost exposed our pricing.

Next, I will give you a detailed introduction to the parameters.”

In the future, Kechuang will release brain-computer connected VR products for mid-to-low end, and software manufacturers should be the happiest.

Because it means the expansion of VR ecology.

Over time, brain-computer connectivity has become a standard feature of VR products.

There may have been players who would buy ordinary VR products before, but in recent years, fewer and fewer players have chosen to buy ordinary VR products.

Due to the monopoly of Kechuang Bio in the field of brain-computer connection VR, the Europa Alliance and American have imposed huge fines on Kechuang Future more than one billion meters.

Players have gradually realized that compared with brain-computer connected VR, the immersive experience of ordinary VR is far worse.

Instead of buying regular VR, use a computer instead.

Especially after Pico was merged into Kechuang Future, there are rumors that Kechuang Future will be a mid-to-low-end VR, and players will not buy ordinary VR.

Wait for the party to never say never.

"The price of Pico Verse I is 5999rmb, and if you choose to book today, you can save another 300 yuan on this basis.

The offer is limited to today only. "

Pico is equivalent to directly reducing the price by half.

Under the temptation of an immediate discount of [-], a large number of users placed orders.

It is different from the Redmi press conference saying that the order will be discounted by [-] today, and then the price will be directly reduced by [-] two weeks later.

Because of the substantial monopoly of products, Kechuang Future has particularly strict price control.

Even on festivals such as Double Eleven or June [-], Kechuang would rather give small gifts than reduce prices in the future.

This is the attitude of being a high-end brand.

Even if the price is reduced, it is also when the inventory is cleared.

For example, the first generation of brain-computer connected VR two years ago will no longer be produced in the future, so the price may be reduced.

(End of this chapter)