As a mage, I just want to pursue the truth

Chapter 304: Everything is difficult at the beginning (asking for monthly tickets!)
"Mr. Zheng, we actually have an idea about how to cause dizziness.

It’s just that we have never come up with a good way to convert electrical signals into brain nerve signals.

Implantable brain-computer connection is inconsistent with our product positioning.

The biggest challenge with existing methods is how to accurately transmit electrical signals into the human brain without causing damage to it.

As the Chinese say, the beginning is always the hardest.

We’ve been exploring how to do this lately.”

After talking with Zheng Li, Li Miaomiao sent an email to Li Wanqing through the internal email system.

Because not only has there been no new research progress at the Lion City R&D center recently, but the number of experimental monkeys consumed in Lion City has shown a significant increase in the past two months.

You should know that after the soul was proven, the price of the experimental monkey increased tenfold compared to before.

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

Due to the surge in clinical trial costs, a large number of small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies have gone bankrupt.

Nowadays, the cost of developing a small molecule drug from R&D to official launch is at least 1 billion US dollars, which is too much for small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies to bear.

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

The market value of China's CRO industry leader has more than doubled.

Another contradictory point is that using other experimental organisms to replace experimental monkeys is not recognized in some countries.

The drug regulatory agencies of these countries require that experiments be conducted on experimental monkeys before allowing pharmaceutical companies to conduct human clinical trials.

Because they believe that drugs are not convincing enough if they have not been tested on living organisms with souls.

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

But there is one exception, and that is American. American is superstitious and hopes to raise the threshold of innovative drug development.

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

Li Wanqing went on to say: “We have conducted various experiments on experimental monkeys, but so far there has been no very good effect.”

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

It’s just that in the domestic context, VR and virtual reality are separated, and it is believed that virtual reality is more advanced than the metaverse, and then the metaverse is more advanced than VR.

In fact, the earliest concept of virtual reality can be traced back to the 1950s.

If people of that era were to use today’s VR technology, they would definitely think that it is more advanced than the virtual reality technology they imagined.

It’s just that the reality is that people’s appetite has been whetted by the ever-increasing iteration of technology.

Previous VR technology was not considered virtual reality.

It was not until the emergence of Ke Chuang Future's brain-computer connected VR that people felt that it had a slight connection with the metaverse.

The research and development task assigned to Li Wanqing by Ke Chuang Bio is to take a big step forward in existing technologies.

First, nerve cells generate electrical signals that transmit information.

Although neurons are not inherently good electrical conductors, they have evolved sophisticated mechanisms due to millions of years of evolution.

By generating electrical signals based on the flow of ions across its plasma membrane.

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

The action potential eliminates the negative resting potential and makes the transmembrane potential transiently positive.

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

The generation of resting potential and action potential 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 conversion of external signals into neural signals, that is, vibrations.

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

In humans, there are approximately 110 of these present in our genome.

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

At the heart of the system is a bundle of tiny hairs deep within the cochlea that are connected by chains of proteins called tip links.

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

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

These links are made up 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 lining the ear, combines with proteins to help increase the strength and rigidity of the tip link.

In the long protocadherin-15 sequence, we even found amino acids that can regularly bind calcium.
This protein link causes the mechanical vibrations, which are sound, to be converted into electrical signals that the brain can understand.

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

He hoped that electrical signals would first be converted into mechanical vibrations and then into neural signals that the brain could recognize.

But he found that the biggest problem with this direction was that mechanical vibration was not just sound that had no effect;

It's like being stuck in the middle, unable to move forward or backward.

You have to know that the brain is a high-incidence area of ​​electrochemical activity.

There are approximately 5 billion neurons firing at a frequency of 50- action potentials per second.

Mild 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 then analyze them to determine an individual's true intentions.

However, how to convert electrical signals into neural signals while affecting human senses is currently an almost unsolvable problem for humans.

This problem is equally difficult for Zheng Li.

Because what he knew was the solution at the biotechnology level.

It is unlikely that he would be able to come up with bio-computer related technologies on Blue Star.

As long as he pulls out the brain-computer connection technology based on biological computers, all countries will know that he is Merlin's.

He is not ready yet.

It actually doesn’t mean much to him that Ke Chuang Biotechnology releases virtual reality products and becomes a larger monopoly enterprise.

Zheng Li has used the resources of Kechuang Biotechnology to build many research facilities to serve him alone.

More money doesn't make things better.

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

However, after being on Blue Star for so long, Zheng Li had already become a master in the field of computers.

After listening to Li Wanqing's explanation, he said:
"In fact, we are able to stimulate neurons through electrical stimulation.

The problem is that biological neurons don't work in a binary way.

Information is encoded during the discharge.

The number of pulses each time, the frequency of the pulses, and the time it takes for the pulses to reach their destination. This does not refer to the duration, but the instantaneous time of arrival.

"And the fine structure of the bursts has no control over the information that is transmitted through the axons."

Zheng ideally wanted to remind Li Wanqing indirectly to see if he could give him some ideas for a solution.

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

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

For example, the single-cell microorganism Saccharomyces cerevisiae directly reads local chemical concentrations and converts them into a dynamic electric field that is evenly distributed throughout the fungal population.

A dual-feedback genetic circuit of chemical excitability precisely regulates the expression of active potassium channels, coordinating the cyclic discharge of the plasma membrane potential (PMP).

This research and development path may give you some ideas.

You can go and look at the research results in this field. I will send you some valuable papers I have read in this sub-field later. "

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

Because of the powerful abilities that Zheng Li had demonstrated before, he felt very pressured.

If the boss is too awesome, will I appear to be too incompetent?

Now Zheng Li was just sharing some ideas, which made Li Wanqing realize that Zheng Li was not omniscient and omnipotent.

However, Li Wanqing was deeply impressed by Zheng Li's ease in handling various papers and sub-fields.

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

Zheng Li has read quite a few papers in this niche field, because Zheng Li asked us to send him some valuable papers.

The research atmosphere of Blue Star has resulted in many contents being very inspiring to Zheng Li.

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

Even the God of Law can hardly afford it.

On the blue planet, scientists are eager to share their latest research results with everyone, and the more citations the better.

However, Blue Star's mechanism also has its drawbacks. Firstly, there is a serious problem of water padding in papers in certain fields.

Secondly, many ideas are actually very good, but research is done for the purpose of publishing articles.

In other words, even if the data does not match the desired conclusion, the data will be processed to force the data and the conclusion to match.

Secondly, the experiment is very difficult to do, and in order to save time, all kinds of data are falsified and pictures are photoshopped.

But in Zheng Li's opinion, even if there are various disadvantages, the merits outweigh the flaws.

Compared with the Mage Alliance, this environment is simply a paradise for mages.

Moreover, after Zheng Li came, all countries increased their investment and policy guidance in the field of scientific research.

Especially in the field of basic disciplines.

"Okay, I have a rough idea now. Thank you Mr. Zheng for your valuable suggestions."

In the blink of an eye, it was already the end of September, and China's lunar base had been basically completed.

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

China has been criticized by overseas media ever since it began building a lunar space station.

It's not just Western media, but also media from India, Japan, Korea and other countries.

The Japanese and Korean media are wailing that the gap between their own country's aerospace industry and that of China is growing larger and larger.

The Indian media said that it would take them another five years to catch up with China in the aerospace field.

Thanks to the successful construction of the lunar base, China has become the only country with territory outside the blue planet.

Overseas media are trying to stir up conflicts in China by finding faults every day.

The issue that is most often brought up to stir up local conflicts is the fact that there have been three trips to the moon, four in total including last year, and not one of them involved female astronauts.

Even the fact that front-line firefighters do not recruit female officers can cause tens of thousands of comments on Weibo.

Some women say that standards should be set rather than prohibiting women from signing up from the outset.

People can argue about this, not to mention the fact that there were no female astronauts landing on the moon.

Female astronauts can go to the space station, so why can’t they go to the moon?
Of course, in the midst of all this chaos, Microsoft launched their brain-computer connected VR device.

Sinovation Biotech also launched its own Pico Verse at the end of September.

“Welcome everyone at the scene and everyone in front of the major live broadcast platforms to watch the 202 Autumn Product Launch Conference of Kechuang Future.

The main purpose of this autumn product launch conference is to release a new brain-computer connected VR.

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

Major digital bloggers have almost exposed our pricing.

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

Kechuang Future has released brain-computer connected VR products for the mid- and low-end markets, and the software manufacturers should be the happiest.

Because it means the expansion of the VR ecosystem.

Over time, brain-computer connection will become a standard feature of VR products.

In the past, there may still be players who would buy ordinary VR products, but in recent years, fewer and fewer players choose to buy ordinary VR products.

Due to the monopoly of Kechuang Bio in the field of brain-computer connection VR, the Europa League and American have imposed huge fines of more than 1 billion Euros on Kechuang Bio more than once.

Players are gradually realizing that the immersive experience of ordinary VR is far inferior to that of brain-computer connected VR.

Instead of buying a regular VR, it’s better to use a computer.

Especially after Pico was merged into Kechuang Future, there were rumors that Kechuang Future was going to make mid- and low-end VR, and players were even less likely to buy ordinary VR.

The Wait Party never gives up.

“Pico Verse I is priced at 5999 RMB, and you can save another 300 RMB if you pre-order today.

This offer is valid for today only.”

Pico is equivalent to directly cutting the price in half.

Under the temptation of an instant discount of 300 yuan, a large number of users placed orders.

This is different from the Redmi press conference where they said that if you order today you will get an immediate discount of 300 yuan, and then the price will drop to 800 yuan two weeks later.

Because Kechuang Future has a substantial monopoly on its products, it has particularly strict price controls.

Even on festivals like Double Eleven or June 18, Ke Chuang Future would rather give out small gifts than lower prices.

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

Even if the price is reduced, it is when clearing inventory.

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)